Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated? Is this a new experiment or is it a new permanent thing to reduce load, I don't think many people are going to be looking at the lower end of the spectrum (clicking more) which may detract from interesting comments and conversations. Examples: look on the front page with comment threads >~30 |
I didn't even notice the pages were paginated thanks to the extension (it auto appends page 2... page 3... to the bottom of paginated content)
Ironic that PG's definitive reply is now below the fold:
I went into the feature request thread to see if anyone had requested the ability to turn this off, but gave up on looking after rapid-fire clicking "More" 25+ times. Content more than a page or two back might as well not exist.
I'd say that's partially due to scrolling, but you're correct - that More button is so non-obvious that I didn't even see it until I read this thread. Those comments below More might as well not even exist.
The most common retort to that viewpoint that I saw was "well, so you won't get karma. Bummer. Your opinion is out there anyway," which is missing the point, I think. It's not about the karma, it's about contributing to the conversation. Now, contributing to the conversation is a competition based on time and popularity.
This change will probably do two things: hide a lot of good comments below page flips, and cause people to quickly comment on stories to fill above the fold.
The site's incentives to only comment on the hot threads are probably detrimental.
I've seen this effect on other sites; one gaming site[0] shows two views of the comment list, "recent" and "top-voted" (both with a "more" button that few people seem to click)---the "recent" comments rarely get more than two or three votes before scrolling off, while the difference between the lowest upvote count in the "top-voted" count and the next-highest comment can be in the hundreds or thousands once a game has been up for more than a day or two.
[0]Kongregate.com, if anyone's curious.
And incentivises replying to comments above the fold.
Several times yesterday I found myself opening a seemingly interesting discussion, reading the comments, then wondering why so few people were talking about it.
The link that says "Hey, there's actually more discussion that we're hiding. Click here to see it" is tiny (and unexpected) so I just plain missed it. I even missed it on this thread until I read a comment talking about other comments that had scrolled off the 1st page, thus demonstrating that there must indeed be a 2nd page and that I should look harder for a way to find it.
Had I been able to find (and therefore read) the whole discussion on those topics yesterday, I might have had interesting things to add. So might all the other people who missed them for the same reason. I suspect that the overall quality of discussion has taken a dip since this feature went live.
I don't even hit the "more" button on the homepage to see older stories; there is no way I am going to hit the more comments.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119471
Thus my comment is technically mis-placed, but guaranteed to be on the first page of replies and discussion.
There has to be a better solution to the problem of load. It depends on the cause, of course, but in the absence of profiling information (always the first step) I would investigate more cacheing to make the system less dynamic.
ADDED IN EDIT: I love the way this comment has attracted down-votes - I've been watching it bounce up and down for a bit now. It's clearly alright to discuss the merits and otherwise, but for some people, clearly not alright to demonstrate the effect. On a forum for hackers, I find that delightful!
It's such a better experience on every site when things auto-load as you scroll down.
I agree with OP; the current system is suboptimal, to say the least.
I'd be fine with it, if the More returned the rest of the comments, not the x next comments.
I don't really see the point of this either; it can hardly be that big of a resource hog on either ends.
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[1]: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/igiofjhpmpihnifd...
Maybe because of the community growth. When I began to hang out around here, 6 months before I created an account I believe, 40 upvotes was a huge amount for a post or a comment.
Today it's common to see posts with more than 100 in the front page and comments receiving 60 or so.
EDIT: The number of comments in each posts also exploded, 20 comments in a thread used to make it very active.
EDIT 2: For clarification.
Recently, I've found the HN site has become pretty unresponsive at times - I imagine limiting the number of comments on each page is going to reduce the burden on the server.
Here's a better way to reduce load: make commenting not require a reload. Same for editing comments, deleting them, etc.
I've counted at least four instances. (I'm even a part of one of the branches, as oblivious as I was to the new system and similar discussions.)
I wonder if this comment will show above or below the fold. Flip a coin, I guess.
[1] - http://autopagerize.net/
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Farther in the future: HN's arc webserver uses simple flat files for storage, so moving from one host to two is probably a big context switch as well. I wonder what the current server's specs are, and how long we have until that kinda-sorta-Y2K-like barrier.
Such comment handling would however certainly motivate people to "post without the parent."
I think preventing such "sticky" threads from clobbering the first pages of comments may add some decent value to the discussion. Especially in brining in different aspects and povs, perhaps sometimes yielding a more balanced discussion.
The Scrollbar of Sisyphus breaks the back button (click "Back", browser remembers where you had scrolled to, can't go that far down, lands at the bottom, triggers second "page" of results) jumping to the bottom of the page, occasionally searching, and forces you to jump to the end of the page repeatedly to figure out where you were. It breaks nearly every UI expectation one has about scrolling (especially on a phone) and several that your browser has about caching.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720763So the user being worried about a Chrome plugin sending browsing data seems bizarre.
I assume this is to prevent this phenomenon. If your comment is significantly worse than the rest of an active thread, it shouldn't be prominently displayed.
I noted more in my later comment responding to your (in my opinion) naive cheapshot on reddit, but the "best" algorithm, that is the default, does not simply rank by the number of votes. And even then, the nature of subreddits and people opting to subscribe to that which they're interested in goes a long way to putting their "upvotes" or "downvotes" into the context of the users in that subreddit.
People then upvote it even though it isn't related because it might be insightful.
I'm not a new user and my comments generally fair well here.
I (was, but am not now) downvoted on HN for saying that my posts on reddit get well received attention even with lots of noise... Seems ironic...
> That's a problem with any site that threads comments and sorts by score.
The parent to my comment pointed out a corner case with scoring that he felt was specific to Reddit, if I recall, and I replied to indicate that such a problem is inherent to sorting/scoring at all and not Reddit itself. Since I made that reply (which actually gives Reddit credit as saying said assertion isn't specific to them), the parent edited to say something else, and I'm not sure how to grok it.
Rather than delete and look extra shady, I decided to leave that there. I'm glad I did, because your edit here in response to that speaks volumes as to why you chose to respond as you have.
First, I'm well aware of how sorting works on Reddit. I've deployed my own copy of Reddit's code and successfully brought it up, and I've manipulated the code and looked around in it (I'm a Python developer by trade).
Second, one of the problems inherent to text is that meaning can be lost, very easily. I wrote the comment to mean "that's inherent to the style of commenting Reddit chose, not Reddit per se". That's a comment regarding a concept far abstract from specifics of Reddit's voting constraints - it's a comment addressing the concepts of threading and scoring themselves.
You took my statement as "Reddit has that problem, and it sucks because". I apologize that I wasn't completely crystal clear about what I meant.
Even after rereading what I wrote, I cannot see how the way you've taken it could be considered what I intended -- you're really reading a meaning that you want to read, because you want to pick a fight over someone disparaging Reddit. I was a regular contributor to Reddit for several months and realize its value. I think it's a great community. You're not being a great representative of it at the moment, but that's your choice, not theirs.
Since you edited out 'slander', I'll put it back:
> naive cheapshot slander on Reddit
Even with the aforementioned misunderstanding, which is somewhat forgiveable, jumping to slander is a bit much. You know this because you edited it out. I'd ask the courtesy in the future of assuming the best in people, and not accusing them of torts when there's any ambiguity to meaning that you might have missed.
Please don't take me as some white knight of reddit, I think that we may agree more than I originally understood. I took your comment as a dismissal of reddit purely on the basis of voting. I apologize as it seems that may not have been your intention. I merely sought to explain the other mechanisms that reddit uses, in addition to the automatic (imo) value of subreddits, to determine the value of content.
>I'd ask the courtesy in the future of assuming the best in people, and not accusing them of torts when there's any ambiguity to meaning that you might have missed.
You're of course correct. As you noted, I editted my comment as I tried to take a more understanding ground. I'm not used to people reading so quickly. I have a tendency to rephrase and uh, un-embelish, after a second or third evaluation of the thread. I do apologize.
Though, I suppose in the end, I still simply don't understand the alternative to voting on content and I feel like the directed subreddits are add relevancy to those votes. The alternative is all moderated or selected content? A community where comments can be killed (ahem)? I guess I like the anarchist communal democracy, even if it ends up that a bunch of Internet kiddies want revenge for a tortured cat. In my mind, at the very least ideologically, it's always superior to the alternative.
What if we, as a community, decided that deliberately trying to float with highly rated comments by posting completely unrelated "responses" is not something we'll tolerate, and downvoted violators, regardless of the insightfulness of the comment? Tangential responses are something more of a gray area, but I'm willing to let them be voted upon on their own merits.
I don't find this to be the case at all... though I do find it to be the assumption made by many who don't actually use reddit. I just checked the top few threads to ensure I don't have confirmation bias (heh, though I understand the futility of such an exercise). Reddit is VERY good about not letting people piggy back on top posts and their "best" algorithm does not sort according to score. It sorts according to how those who voted generally vote, and based on how the majority has voted, both up and down, regardless of overall positive or negative score for the post.
The notion that replies are contextual relevant to their parent comment on reddit is a TESTAMENT to my original claim:: That reddit does a good job of exposing, even new posts, in inundated threads.
(As usual, it surprises me how much if the "our community is better that there" rhetoric goes on here, while simultaneously, we seem to mock that idea of communities making that judgemental statement.)
edit: And even so, is it a bad thing if non-relevant intriguing content is upvoted? Just click the [-] if you don't want to see it... but that's the very nature of discussion. Things go off topic and humanity learns as a result.
Really, I wish Reddit had something closer to Slashdot's moderation categorisation to filter on. Filtering out "funny" comments would be nice. Ignoring votes cast by people who just want to register their agreement or disagreement would be an incredible, impossible goal.