I'm surprised how many people read the comments first. Should I pull the beginning of the leading comment text up onto the front page with the link, like Gmail does with the beginning of the message body?
Or would that mess up the clean look, and fill up mobile screens too fast? There are other possible solutions short of that. E.g. I could add a button people can click on to say that an article is linkbait, or mistaken, or whatever, and display icons to indicate this.
Please make the "discuss" / "N comments" anchor have a distinguishing property when :visited -- maybe a faint underline or weight change instead of a different color. Currently there's no way to see that I've looked at a story unless I visited the link.
It'd be nice to have the thread anchor target be larger, maybe by having each story encapsulated by something like this:
That's probably incompatible with the WTF way you're using tables (TRs in flat series for the link, byline, and spacer) -- you'd have to switch to having each story be its own table. The result would be that the whole story's "row" (minus the anchors inside it) would be a link to the thread.
One feature I've always liked is when forums set the mouse over text to display the first n lines of the post. Makes it much faster to figure out if you want to read a topic if the title doesn't contain enough information. Also doesn't clutter the display of the page, because visually it's no different. Of course, given that editors can edit the titles of submissions on HN this is less of a problem.
I read from the RSS feed - and I was rather surprised that the main link leads to the other site, and not HN. My main habit with RSS is to go through a feed, opening the interesting links in new tabs, and then read them - I keep forgetting and ending up with a bunch of links rather than the HN comments!
Well, if you show enough of the comments to be useful, then the front page will be really long and cluttered. If you only show the first 100ish chars like gmail does, then it probably won't be enough to be useful, since HN comments tend to be long and well written.
So I guess I'm trying to say I like it the way it is. It would take just as long to read mouseover/preview text as it does to open the comments in a new tab and scan them.
I would argue that people often read the comments because the headline-only format of YC leaves them guessing what the article is actually about.
If you are considering putting the leading comment text up there, please consider getting submitters to include a one sentence summary of the article instead.
At the very least, it would be nice if the "n comments" link were a little bigger and easier to click. I think that would greatly improve the comment-reading, without cluttering up the display too much.
I'd like some (low-key) visual indication for the text of "comments" links that I've already visited, as a reminder that I've already looked at the comments.
Although with the HN page's clean design, I'm not imagining right now what specifically would fit unobtrusively.
With HN, my memory is better as to what I've examined. Actually, I've commented on reddit a time or two on the desirability of this feature. There's so much clutter over there these days, that I'd like a reminder for those links where I examined the comments and decided to go no further.
I'd actually like to try that -- maybe the first paragraph or so included.
The value of the clean look (to me) is only it's service in providing easy access to the information, and I think leading comment blurbs might be a big win in that regard.
From the mobile PoV it saves having to click (and suffer a mobile experience http+render round trip) on each interesting sounding link to get more information (wherein I might decide the thread wasn't worth it, or the title was too vague and I've already read the comments before).
I too check the comments on suspiciously titled stories. I think it would be a worthy experiment to try to label linkbait.
I find I often check the comments for stories first if I think the article might be long (from a magazine site like The Economist), if I can't figure out what it is about from the title, or if a title is designed to be a hook -- i.e. it leaves out information intentionally to make you curious.
That would be interesting, although in addition to clutter it will give the highest-ranked comment even more weight than it has already. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I click comments first because I know what I'm going to get, vs. clicking on a link that might not even finish loading before I get back to work. As far as that goes, having a preview wouldn't change much.
Any time you're surprised at how often people read the comments, go read a few YouTube comments.
I like that I can be wrong or disagreeable here without getting called names. And that folks who know way more than me will show up and say stuff on the topics I'm curious about.
I'd like to see the plus and minus votes (or the total number of votes), not just the sum. There's a huge difference between an article/comment that only 3 people voted on vs an article that 103 people voted on.
You could compromise and just add an expander to each story. If a user is suspicious of the story, they can expand the first couple comments and see what people are saying without going to a new page.
Or would that mess up the clean look, and fill up mobile screens too fast? There are other possible solutions short of that. E.g. I could add a button people can click on to say that an article is linkbait, or mistaken, or whatever, and display icons to indicate this.