Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw7 | Hacker News Reader

Totally aside and ranty: facebook has started (recently?) greeting/forcing outsiders with a login dialog that covers the whole page. You can click "not now", but that just permanently lowers the login dialog box to about the bottom 1/3 of the page.

If you want to publicly make your content available in a free and seamless way stop using facebook. Please.

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Your rant may be justified but I'm getting really tired of clicking on HN threads I'm interested in and finding the top comment plus a screenful or two of replies addressing some nit somebody wants to pick with the implementation of the site in the article instead of addressing the content of the article.

Leave the asides aside please.

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I disagree that we should discourage engaging discussion just because it happens to be meta or only tangentially related. This is a user experience problem, not a content problem. More specifically, this is a use case for comment-thread collapsing where when, as a user, you come across a long thread that doesn't interest you, you can collapse it and immediately be at more content, rather than needing to manually find the end of the uninteresting thread.

This allows both for the community to drive the discussion to what most interests the community, and to allow those with different tastes than the majority to still participate without alienating or frustrating them or those involved in said discussion.

There are many browser extensions for HN, and thread collapse is possibly the most common feature in them.

I'm of the opinion that HN doesn't implement features like this on purpose, because they expect you to find a way to work around the limitations that works best for you, and that will likely result in a more customized and comfortable experience than them forcing their opinion of how the content should be presented on you. HN is somewhat notorious for having these soft limitations (such as not showing reply on very active threads for a few minutes, which also has an easy workaround for those that know).

I completely agree that I should be able to easily collapse any sub thread and also see only the comments that have been made since the last time I viewed comments on an article.

I'm at that point too. I know if I click a link, I'm not going to get to read intelligent discussion until much deeper in the page. Take for example the article about the LinkedIn acquisition, top comment has people arguing over the origin of the word secular...

How about we solve this problem once and for all by turning this thread into a two-page series of complaints about how HN doesn't allow you to collapse comment threads. :P

And now this article's top level comments are a discussion about how another thread's top level comments are out of topic...

Same here! This is now just a place where people gripe about whatever they don't like about web pages.

I think Hacker News should allow tangents, but make them easier to hide. Maybe have a button to collapse everything under the top-level comment somehow. This would also be good data to collect as input into ranking.

I look at the comments to determine whether the article is worth reading. "The article is unreadable" is as useful for me to know as something like "Hm, everyone seems to be talking about a programming language I don't use". So I appreciate complaints about popups and the like being at the top.

(The other very useful comment at the top is "Warning, it autoplays a video")

And I wish there was some filter in HN that let us ignore upvoted posts that complain about gated sites, design, javascript requirements or how slow Atom is. It's an unfair world.

Or, you know, don't link to content that's actively hostile to the reader.

Exactly. It is usually possible to find other links with the same content, and on a site like HN we ought to be able to expect better.

Perhaps there ought to be some feature on the part of HN itself, to automatically recommend the better links, when possible.

Yes, it was annoying enough to make me give up on trying to read the article.

NoScript prevents this dialog box from loading and you're allowed to read the article full-screen.

Another great option is the "Block Element" feature of uBlock Origin which lets you easily create a blocking rule for any element on the page. In Firefox it's found in the right click menu, and you can then visually choose the element to be blocked.

I regularly use it e.g. for the cookie acceptance boxes. They are a major annoyance -- as I don't save cookies, the setting for accepting cookies isn't preserved either and I have to approve them again and again. If I visit any such page for a second time it's easier to just hide the whole question with uBlock.

Thank you, I wasn't aware of Block Element (it works in Chrome too). Great feature.

Yes, annoying. Ended up right-clicking, inspect, and delete element.

Unfortunately he's now a high profile Facebook employee so I'm sure he has strict orders about where his content is to be posted.

Firefox Reader Mode resolves the issue for me. I use it on both Desktop and Android. My only beef with it is that there is no keyboard shortcut.

On the other hand, making a fake facebook account is pretty easy.

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