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Comment by baddox

12 years ago

To kill conversations which are deemed useful by all participants and have no negative impact other than the negligible cost of hosting them?

13 comments

baddox

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derefr  12 years ago

There's something like a "scrolling cost" -- people are only willing to skim so much of a comments thread, without seeing something interesting to them, before closing it.

This is why HN dislikes humorous fluff-posts: they both easily rise to the top, and encourage humorous fluff-replies, which means the first few screenfuls of comments will be guaranteed to induce the kind of "scroll-pain" that makes people close the tab.

  • baddox  12 years ago

    Fair enough. I would much prefer fixing the long comment thread problem with 5 lines of JavaScript than implementing this bizarre system.

    • thaumaturgy  12 years ago

      If you have a solution to this particular problem, whether in 5 or 500 lines of JS, I think it would be novel.

      I've yet to see any discussion forum solve the problem of long threads with lots of useless fluff floating to the top.

      4 replies →

  • chrismonsanto  12 years ago

    The solution to this is to allow collapsing uninteresting comment threads. I use this all the time on Reddit.

    • derefr  12 years ago

      You have to read a thread enough to know you want to collapse it, which incurs exactly the same "scroll-pain" as actually scrolling. It's not a physical tax from the action required to scroll, but rather a mental stress from making a decision to skip something. Enough of that stress building up at once, and you decide that the comments page itself is probably skippable.

      If uninteresting comment threads could start collapsed, that'd be great. But they won't, because humor-fluff and other such things are superstimuli for upvotes, so you can't use anything about the vote tally to determine collapsed-ness. (If there was a secondary voting system--like, say, if enough people collapsing a thread would make it start collapsed for others--this might work. But then you'd have to take into account the people who collapse everything as they read it, to mark their place...)

      2 replies →

    • tripzilch  12 years ago

      Of course this is the most obvious solution, least intrusive that changes the least things and as far as I can see has only positive side-effects.

      But for some reason or other pg won't do that.

      I know there's some extensions/bookmarklets and I use them, but they can't do the auto-collapsing based on score+amount, the very simple yet elegant algorithm Reddit employs, pretty much the one thing that is absolutely necessary to have a well-usable threaded commenting system.

      Instead, pg "just wrote the simplest thing first", or something.