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Comment by kryogen1c

5 years ago

have you considered some kind of presubmission check for this? even just to inform users without actually screening, and then auto appending previous discussions if submitted?

19 comments

kryogen1c

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drewzero1  5 years ago

That would probably be helpful for informational use, but it seems to me like it would be frustrating to dump new comments into an old discussion. Maybe just a way to add a link to reference the prior discussion(s) like helpful people often do?

dang  5 years ago

Yes but it's not clear how to get it right.

  • jedberg  5 years ago

    If you auto merged the comments from the last time, in theory they would quickly fall to the bottom because their time based value would be so much lower than the new stuff.

    Maybe also disable replies to old comments and make them a different color?

    To be fair, we could never figure out how to get this right on reddit either, but HN has a better comment sorting algorithm than reddit so it might actually work here.

    • kryogen1c  5 years ago

      what about automerging all comments +1 layer deeper with the bot comment (in the same form dang does it now) as the universal parent? it prevents the feature creep\bloat of adding a notification system, and maybe be backwards compatible with the web and mobile versions, and if people dont want it they can collapse the whole thread (or maybe it starts collapsed anyway)

      1 reply →

    • Wowfunhappy  5 years ago

      I definitely wouldn't want old comments merged in, even at the bottom—it would get confusing! A story about pandemics, for instance, might have a very different meaning in 2019 vs 2020, and comments should be clearly split to reflect that.

  • kryogen1c  5 years ago

    i take it by your edit you are concerned i was interpreting your "past posts" as some implication the OP should not have submitted - this is not the case.

    honestly, i just feel bad for you. what appears to me to be a repetitive google + copy + paste on your part is anathema to me, and i was trying to help stamp out such work.

    i think this has value, but im worried the amount of work involved grows (at a minimum) greater-than-linearly as HN grows.

SilasX  5 years ago

Well there’s the “past” button but you still have to click first. Maybe the “past” button could also list the number of previous submissions and the max number of comments of any submission (and/or max score)?