Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads? I'm trying to read discussion from a thread with 133 comments, on a topic i find interesting, but after a few comments i get overwhelmed. How do you do it? |
Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads? I'm trying to read discussion from a thread with 133 comments, on a topic i find interesting, but after a few comments i get overwhelmed. How do you do it? |
Future me will often un-collapse the thread through curiosity of course, but will quickly realise I was right
Most discussion systems are inferior to 1990 Usenet, 34 years later.
At this point it is traditional to shout about Usenet not having good moderation. In fact, it is possible for either individual news groups or specific news servers (that only carry a limited number of groups) to have good moderation. It is, of course, expensive: you need to get enough trustworthy people to run it to cover the time and volume.
Then someone will sniff about not wanting to use a TUI, which can be rebutted by pointing at all the GUI newsreaders -- having a standard protocol for talking to a server is quite valuable.
"Isn't Usenet a huge space and bandwidth hog?" Yes, Usenet was a huge space and bandwidth hog -- in 1990, and 2000. If you don't carry the warez groups, it can be adequately handled on a high-end server from 2000 -- which today is equivalent to a Raspberry Pi. (1994: 7 x 2 GB SCSI disks, 1.5Mb/s Internet connection)
HN approximates the activity level and content size of 1 very active Usenet newsgroup.
The page-down button is a distant second. I find using a laptop without a scroll-wheel mouse mildly displeasing. A laptop with a screen that can show a quarter of the amount of text that my desktop PC can do is infuriating.
Are you trying to read long threads on a smartphone or tablet, pawing at the touchscreen with your finger?
It really is a more streamlined interface to HN comments, but I was used to it by using 3rd party apps on Reddit 100% of the time.
Don't internalize everything you read here, just a quick dip down for some interesting perspectives, and then you resurface with those endorphins and wait for the next hunt
You can have a tree, but only 1 branch is allowed for efficient discussions. Like every sane forum software does, be it phpbb, vbulletin, xenforo ...
> Trees devolve into a 1on1 discussion, also other branches can have the same discussion, leading to redundant arguments.
1 on 1 is a feature, as it's never truly 1 on 1 - anyone can jump in instead of just listening to the conversation.
As for other branches having the same discussion, the solution is the opposite of what you're proposing: instead of flattening tree structure into a line, embrace the nature of any discussion (or knowledge accumulation effort) and make it a directed graph. I'm yet to see it done in production (outside 4chan maybe), but that's the right way.
Or, you can just ignore the problem and let people having their redundant discussion. It's better than what all those flat forums you mention tend to do: closing topics with aggressive admonition to use a search feature (which is near-universally broken anyway).
No I meant sane. Tree style is insane. You can have different topics or categories but all topics should be linear.
>1 on 1 is a feature, as it's never truly 1 on 1 - anyone can jump in instead of just listening to the conversation.
They could, but rareley do. On Reddit this requires clicking many links.
It doesn't, unless you're using the new UI, at which point it's kind of your fault anyway, because Reddit is entirely unusable as a discussion place with its new UI. You have to click to load more than 3 anything, and half the time it refreshes and loses your position anyway.
If the problem is just the sheer amount of data and not navigation, you can simply bookmark the thread and come back later. The algorithm usually does a good job getting the best comments on top after things have settled down, just read these. Plus, if you forget about the topic and don't come back to it, maybe it wasn't that interesting after all, that's a good filter.
That feature is relatively new, Oct ~28th 2021 apparently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29023087 so it mat not have been you missing it.
Most big threads have many replies and far fewer top comments so 133 can become much smaller this way.
I also have no problem quitting as I scroll down. On big threads that have been up for a while, the insight tends to fall off with the number of votes as you keep scrolling.
When I've had enough of a particular comment thread or source, I click/tap to minimize it and continue with the next one.
I like having all the comments on an article in one place, not just for the convenience factor, but also because it gives me regular glimpses outside of my bubble and shows me how different communities, including ones I don't necessarily agree with, are discussing the same topics.
I've been thinking of offering dedicated instances for a fixed monthly cost if people are interested, but so far I haven't had any takers and I'm happy enough using the global instance for now.
javascript: (() => { const id = window.location.href.match(/\d+$/g)[0]; window.open(`https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=story:${id}&sort=byDate&type=comment`)%20%20%20})();
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
reddit style comment threads: https://hacker-read-it.netlify.app/item/40965892
there is also chan style: https://hnchan.netlify.app/thread/40937119
cleaner hackerdaily tree style: https://hackerdaily.io/40955693/comments
flat style: https://ditzes.com/item/40937119
There is also one I cannot find at the moment which let you click and open each comment thread in the right side of screen, that was very good. edit: found it: https://hzn.jero.zone
here's a slightly shorter version:
javascript:open(`https://hn.algolia.com?dateRange=all&prefix=false&query=story:${location.href.match(/\d+$/)[0]}&sort=byDate&type=comment`)It does a few things to make viewing big threads easier:
- Collapses large threads into a toggle button showing the number of replies in that thread.
- Highlights the OP
- Follow any timestamp link to "focus" on that sub-thread, like this: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/40953431
- The author of the parent comment becomes the highlighted "OP."
I have a bookmarklet that toggles between viewing on HN and my web app.
My app was heavily modified, but original credit goes to https://hackerweb.app/. The original author had an idea to make HN threads more like Reddit threads, which he may have implemented in the mobile app rewrite:
- iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hackerweb-hacker-news-client/i...
- Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cheeaun.hacker...
Sometimes in a particularly large discussion I'll do that even for top-level comments without replies that I've either read (and won't reply to/not interested in replies to) or skimmed/read enough and decided I won't read.
Help others by voting (both directions) and flagging/vouching where necessary.
Other than that, I try to resist the urge to read everything. Its almost always better to absorb the gist of the conversation than to try to absorb it all.
For threads I am interested in but want to comment immediately, I only collapse those comments that I don't find interesting -- and as above, go back a few days later to read the others without constantly having new ones added in real time.
From that, it's like a party. Just go out and talk to someone at random. Past a certain level of discussion, there's going to be repeated conversations on the topic anyway.
Otherwise, I try to keep my own thread when I read the comments. For example, when I read an article about a topic, I try to find an extremely positive point of view from the comments, but also an extremely negative point of view and then link this to my own thoughts.
As already mentioned in the thread, I would like to have an online tool, for example, which reduces comments to a clear point and thus makes reading easier for me.
Otherwise, though, HN itself has a terrible format that's nearly impossible to follow.
Just look at any submission with hundreds of comments and deeply nested replies. It's a total unreadable mess.
Using a non-graphical client I see all comments in a thread in a single page, all at once. Up the maximum that HN will display at one time. Nothing is hidden.
I’m particularly thinking about how to make sense of badly organized threads from Mastodon and similar things.
Semantic scoring to rate quip chains Vs. slower, longer considered interactions?
Ways of highlighting high frequency commenters, perhaps rating frequent flyers by degree of interest in what they have to say and weighting threads by "participant rating".
There are many ways to go in this space.
Seriously, though, reading 133 comments usually takes like two to three minutes total. You need to decide whether you want to spend that much on this site doing that or not. I expect for most people the answer is “no” and I commend them for their self-control.
For topics you actually really care about, you’ll find it a lot easier to read through the comments. You will learn which comments to skip (nobody wants to read a rehash of “does anyone else think all developers are lazy and software is so slow now”) and which ones are actually interesting to read.
Even still, it's not super useful.
If those comments were interesting I read more.
This is a bookmarklet for it. Add it to bookmarks and click on it after opening a HN thread.
There are a couple of angles, straight up representation of forum | subreddit threads after the conversation has moved on, "live" tracking comments as conversations progress, and moderation of live threads (including swatting | detecting trolls, spambots, griefers, etc) (oh, and retro sweeps looking for tail end spammers and their puppet networks eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40800160 (with "ShowDead" on)).
In post analysis there's the whole ball of wax around decrufting chat threads to pull the meat best served to (various) AI, either for training, company | group intelligence, etc. Oh, and fingerprinting across multiple sources looking for common {group | individual} traits
The intrinsic issue with excluding all but those with a current PhD on chat would be the tossing of, say, those with dated PhD in theoretical physics or somesuch.
@dang obviously mods here and likely has a slew of lisp-y scripts | tools for giving various views, @jedberg was about for much of the early evolution of reddit and took part in a lot of discussions about presentation and implemented a few.
There'll also be useful input from any of those who've moderated | admin various largish forums | channels, etc over the years.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/german-navy-still-us...
or the half-baked "threaded discussions" that exist on Twitter, Mastodon and clones that people abuse in various ways. Those forums need it more.
So far as the PhD I brought that up as one specific example. (Funny I have a physics PhD from a while ago, I still remember a lot about Hamiltonian chaos and its quantum manifestations, can understand something looking at the math from string theory, etc.)
My problem is related to the moderation problem but is different because I don't need to be fair to anybody or be perceived to be fair.
In general I am talking with a friend about ways to make the commenting experience online better that include everything from tools for power users to large-scale modifications of "the system" to change the incentives to change people's behavior. I can demo the first one today, the second is a bit harder.
