This is an absolutely bare-bones feature for HN. It would make the site so much more usable in general. The big case for collapsible comments relative to HN is stories where the top voted comment is only semi-related to the article (usual suspects being security, software freedom, political leaning freedom, ...) but spawns its own megathread and drowns out any hope of other discussions more germane to the original post.
Even if the don't collapse, It might be nice to see first level comments have some kind of distinguishing visual context...to get to another thought... eg, comment number 2,3 etc...is ofetn buried under 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.4 sub comment discusion minutia....when a top comment has 30 or 40 sub comments.
you should be able to scroll a page and pick out the top 5 original comments...even without collapsing...
One of the problems of collapsible threads is that it reduces the amount of people who are prepared to flag and downvote comments that shouldn't be here.
Having the ability to not just collapse threads, but to auto-collapse threads which don't contain any new comments would make it (user scripters: "and does make it") easier^H^H^H^H^H^Hpossible to find new comments on repeat visits, putting more eyes on them.
This is an absolutely bare-bones feature for HN. It would make the site so much more usable in general. The big case for collapsible comments relative to HN is stories where the top voted comment is only semi-related to the article (usual suspects being security, software freedom, political leaning freedom, ...) but spawns its own megathread and drowns out any hope of other discussions more germane to the original post.
Even if the don't collapse, It might be nice to see first level comments have some kind of distinguishing visual context...to get to another thought... eg, comment number 2,3 etc...is ofetn buried under 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.4 sub comment discusion minutia....when a top comment has 30 or 40 sub comments.
you should be able to scroll a page and pick out the top 5 original comments...even without collapsing...
Yes. What do you think of my https://github.com/alain94040/arguably, which is an extreme take on your suggestion?
Interesting. Some of this fits in with my "non-brief moderation thoughts" essay: https://redd.it/28jfk4/
In particular: no content-ranking system is perfect. Some level of random ordering (within a range) is probably actually preferable.
Also, Aon on randomness:
"When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the dark" http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/is-the-most-rational-choi...
Official word is that it'll be the "only major change to the Hacker News UI that we're committed to"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297695
This seems to be the most obvious thing they're missing. I can't stand trying to read through HN comments without a greasemonkey script.
Quite this.
One of the problems of collapsible threads is that it reduces the amount of people who are prepared to flag and downvote comments that shouldn't be here.
Having the ability to not just collapse threads, but to auto-collapse threads which don't contain any new comments would make it (user scripters: "and does make it") easier^H^H^H^H^H^Hpossible to find new comments on repeat visits, putting more eyes on them.