Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwallace | Hacker News Reader

Wave was cool technology with interesting ideas, but there is no substitute for getting the user interface right, and unfortunately they didn't. It's been a long time and there might be others I'm forgetting, but there were two important design errors:

1. Email lets you type an entire message before sending; IRC at least lets you type a whole paragraph, which is enough. Wave didn't let you type more than one character before sending.

2. The designers correctly realized chronological order isn't enough, you also want logical order, but unfortunately they provided the latter instead of the former, whereas you actually need both. (Gmail provides both: new messages and threads. Git provides both: view changes, and view current code. Google Docs provides both. Either view alone does not suffice.)

I would by all means encourage someone to take another shot at building something like Wave, with those problems fixed.

View on HN

As the article quotes:"I was one of about four people who thought that Wave would have been a good project", and I really loved Google Wave (while at the same time I don't like many of Google's anti-privacy practices). The fact that 2-5-10 people can simultaneously work on the same piece of text, eliminating the risk of forking, enabling tracking/auditing for every key-press.. that was a dream come true. I am saddened by the fact that this went to sleep. I do understand that Google Docs is (somewhat) involving this, and that's something positive.

As far as "collaborative editing environment(s)" go, I would love to see more alternatives with such capabilities.

For anyone interested in working on such a project, I highly recommend checking out the Automerge library, posted on HN ~2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16309533

I viewed design error #1 as the killer feature of wave.

What I found is that it turned IM-like communication into a high-bandwidth medium comparable to what you get in a phone conversation. It managed that while also retaining nearly all of the advantages of an IM client.

I think that you're right #1 is a 'killer feature' in that it killed Wave: think about such feature at work, would you really like to see your boss see when you made a big mistake without having the time to think twice? Even if you can disable this setting, good default matters!

> 2. The designers correctly realized chronological order isn't enough, you also want logical order,

Oh god, please don't, at least not for chat/irc/whatever-you-call-it. I've seen so many attempts to try to somehow add another layer of order on top of chronological order. All the threads and whatever features and it is always a "what the heck is that, where are my messages, why did they get rearranged" disaster.

That sounds like attempts to supply logical order instead of chronological, which is indeed a disaster; it needs to be as well as. (i.e. at any given time you can ignore it and just look at things in chronological order.)

> Oh god, please don't, at least not for chat/irc/whatever-you-call-it. I've seen so many attempts to try to somehow add another layer of order on top of chronological order.

Like threads in e-mail, Usenet, forums on WWW?

IMO those are perfect examples of a combined logic and chronology. I'll speak for myself, but I absolutely prefer threads in the mentioned examples. It makes the content better readable. For me, there's no question about that. Although that isn't any proof; it'd be best to have usability studies about it.

Threads is Gmail aren't perfect. Some threads aren't nice neat linear threads and I find I can lose track of branches. But, overall, that's been one of the big wins of switching to Gmail for professional stuff. Now some long but uninteresting thread in a mailing list or whatever is one line rather than overwhelming my inbox.

> Threads is Gmail aren't perfect.

If you're referring to conversation view, then they're not as good as traditional threads since they don't handle keeping track of conversation between multiple people that may branch off into different topics.

I don't think it's impossible. Slack's threads work pretty well for me in busy channels.

I've seen a lot of failures in this space as well, but I still think Flowdock was the only product so far that got the second layer right.

It never tried to hide messages from you, the threads worked more like filters. Instead of finding the discussion you wanted you filtered out messages that weren't related to that discussion.

Do you think HN solves point 2 correctly?

What's the proper way to only show 'new' comments on HN?

Text search for " minute"? Haven't done that in a long time because it is so cumbersome. But the friction it adds is part of what shapes the discussions here. Adding a feature like that (or making it more visible if it already exists) could have unpredictable side effects, with symptoms almost impossible to trace back to the causing change.

> Text search for "minute"

This is the sort of thing I love about the web, and composability in general I suppose.

The people who designed the HN UI didn't think or care about that feature at all, but just by virtue of the fact that the user has powerful general-purpose tools at his disposal, and the HN UI is just as valid as content as the actual content is, the user can piece it together for himself.

This would not be possible if HN were a traditionally-designed desktop application instead of a web page.

The web returns us lots of the composability that was lost when "progressing" from CLI applications to GUI applications.

Iow, everything is searchable if you put it into Word-like text container. Of course Word had issues like jumping tables and blocks floating at wrong positions between versions, but who doesn’t.

@cygx, @usrusr, @jstanley:

Here's one way to show new comments at HN: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...

— part 1: "Finding new comments". Video, + live demo if you click "Recent comments" in the upper right corner.

> Text search for " minute"?

That's not very intuitive. It's easier to see new replies to comments one posts by going to the comments view on one's own user profile page, but seeing new replies in general is definitely not (especially if you don't check for several hours).

I think that traditional mail and news clients with their threaded view go it right for that purpose decades ago.

dont know about proper, but https://github.com/raszpl/hackahackernews

I think it does something unusual on deeply nested comments. It simply discourages deeply nested comments because they are usually unuseful except for the two participants.

> I think it does something unusual on deeply nested comments.

IIRC, HN does roughly the same thing that reddit does for deeply nested comments (meaning that you have to click on a link to view more of the thread). The most deeply nested thread I was involved in [1] on HN didn't appear to be handled any differently than any other thread I've seen here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13632352

It (temporarily?) hides the "reply" link after some depth, so you have to click the timestamp to go to the comment permalink instead and reply there.

For example: your comment had no reply link, but the one above did.

Is that a function of nesting, I thought it was rapidity of responses -- to try to inhibit back-and-forth arguing.

I have seen this happen if I try to reply soon after a post appears, but I don't recall it happening in the nested thread that I linked to.

idk but Slack surely does.

To some extent both HN and reddit solve it. But neither make it easy to check which messages are new messages on subsequent viewings (though reddit gold will highlight them).

A properly implemented mail and news reader will indicate new messages in a threaded view after retrieving them. For example, Thunderbird viewing a usenet group makes it very easy to see new messages in threads after clicking on the "Get Messages" button.

Here's another approach: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... — part 1: "Finding new comments".

To me the Thunderbird approach actually seems a bit annoying. What if I return after lunch, click "Get messages", and then Thunderbird highlights new comments in orange. But I don't read all of them, instead I go for another errand. Later, I return ... and click "Get messages" again. But now the orange marks from after-lunch will be lost, right? And only the very most recently loaded messages will get marked?

> What if I return after lunch, click "Get messages", and then Thunderbird highlights new comments in orange. But I don't read all of them, instead I go for another errand. Later, I return ... and click "Get messages" again. But now the orange marks from after-lunch will be lost, right?

As far as I know, the thread overview pane will still show the unread message in a bold font, but the indicator that you just retrieved the message would be lost for the messages that you retrieved right after lunch (though it would then show up for messages you retrieved after you returned from your errand).

In either case, it would still be obvious which messages you haven't read as of yet which is something that HN doesn't really show on subsequent viewings of a given comment thread.

Perhaps Thunderbird could be extended to show a different symbol associated with each message retrieval so that, in your example, you would have one symbol for messages retrieved after lunch and a second symbol for messages retrieved after you return from your errand.

Aha, I forgot that in Thunderbird and other email clients, one needs to click a message to see it in full and read it (right). So then Thunderbird knows exactly which messages one has read, and can highlight the unread ones in bold.

Whereas here at HN, it's a lot harder for the software to know which messages one has read (because here messages are shown without the user indicating what s/he is reading).

Yes perhaps different symbols — actually I'd be happy with just Thunderbird's bold font :- )

I never cease to be amazed and dismayed at how much worse contemporary web based discussion technologies (HN, Slashdot, Reddit, Disqus) are than Usenet was back in the day.

Even on the web there are/were much better fora from a UI perspective than the four you mention, for instance 'scoop'. But those have not been maintained and would likely die instantly on the hostile place that is the web today.

But functionality wise they were pretty good.

That’s fascinating… because I remember Usenet as being a complete cesspool, useful if you wanted to get into arguments with the loudest people out there.

Not sure what “back in the day” is for you, but I remember e.g. comp.lang.lisp being terrible in the 90s. And we all made jokes about flamewars, because flamewars were reality.

A lot of those problems could be solved by using a kill filter for posts from certain individuals and ones that were crossposted to certain groups. You could also just selectively kill threads (or subthreads) for discussions that weren't of interest to you.

Yes, there were lots of arguments and loud people (referring to the 1990s), but thanks to open protocols, there were newsreaders suitable for every kind of usage profile, and many of them had very effective killfiles.

Even the dumbest of them would remember what articles you read and let you pick up where you left when you came back the next day. That's a straightforward feature that is sorely lacking on most web based discussion sites (Twitter does it, but is lacking in threading).

I'd say no. HN doesn't have "enough" chronological order. To find new comments when you're back from lunch, you need to scan the whole discussion from top to bottom.

Here's a demo video of how HN and Reddit could be modified to solve that, i.e. how chronological order could be added to HN:

https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...

This part: "1. Finding new comments". I've actually implemented this for real — click "Recent comments" in the upper right corner

If you have Reddit gold, Reddit will clearly mark new comments when you revisit a thread.

Some apps also do it, the app I use (Sync) will tell me the number of new comment and highlight them when I revisit.

Regarding #1, wasn't there an option to not preview your message? I remember it being just under the input form.

I remember looking for such a thing and not finding it. Maybe it was added later? I tried an early version of Wave, briefly.

If it was indeed added later, this is an example of something Joel Spolsky cautioned against: don't do a huge marketing blitz for version 1.0 of your product. Aim for user count to increase in step with product maturity.

Though admittedly this might be hard to avoid with a product that has strong network effects.

Wave didn't have a UI, it had clients. Google's client might have been a problem, but that would be like me complaining about email because the client I'm using one accepts a single email address at a time.

If every email client currently in existence only accepted a single email address at a time it would be a perfectly valid complaint about email. It's like all those W3C standards that none of the browsers actually implement, "it's not a problem with <protocol> it's just a problem with every implementation in existence" is not a useful distinction to make.

> If every email client currently in existence only accepted a single email address at a time it would be a perfectly valid complaint about email.

Sounds like Nirvana to me. No more eternal “reply to all” chains that span months? I’m in.

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