Ask HN: What do you think about HN's comment thread system? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you think about HN's comment thread system?

3 pointsaerialcombat4 comments

I'm talking about the tree structure and how it gets nested into certain depth.

Do you think it serves the purpose well, or do you think there's a better way?

I find deep threads that wander away from the topic distracting and sometimes frustrating. Especially on mobile, there's no easy way to collapse the thread you're currently on without scrolling back to the root comment, which might not be easy to find.

Maybe it would be nice (though hardly matching HN's spartan philosophy) to allow the community to assign titles to subthreads, for example: "subthread about housing costs in SF". That would allow me to skip it without having to read multiple comments before realizing I got into the rabbit hole of a topic I'm not interested in.

Yeah it's a tough problem. Maybe it's a problem without a clear answer. I do think it's more intuitive when reading a tree structure until it breaks somewhere in the middle and starts again. Then I'm lost. But I think about a flat system where I have to connect all the dots myself in the head, and it's not so pleasant either. It'll probably have to be some type of hybrid system where it takes the best of both worlds and combine nicely into one. I have yet to see such system, personally.

The tangents themselves aren't really a problem - the threaded format encourages sub-discussions which diverge from the main topic.

A flat system could go one of two ways - all comments could be replies to the article itself, which would kill discussion, or any comment could reply to any number of other comments, or even other threads, which is how the flat layout of imageboards work. Although that also usually requires adding direct references to the ids of the comments or boards being replied to.

Hacker News could probably do more to make threads more readable and make navigation easier. One feature I've seen in webmail archives is links to sibling threads along with parent and OP - although that could get cluttered. Reddit also automatically paginates threads which go too deep, so the viewer doesn't see comments beyond a certain nesting level on any specific page.

Discovery tends to break down with long threads, regardless of the layout. I don't think there is a solution that won't require the reader to have to read a bit and possibly encounter content they find uninteresting. I liken forums to parties where you're wandering through a crowded room, listening to conversations other people are having. You can't expect to just immediately be entertained, it takes time to get context. With forums, features like karma are supposed to guarantee that the higher quality content is easiest to find (assuming some objective meaning of "quality" not defined here) but you still have to lurk and read.

In the end, though, that's supposed to be part of the fun.

Yeah the deep threads that break in the middle get kind of confusing. Maybe something simple like a link to the parent comment or even a replying to would help a little bit. At least so you have something visual you can link it back to other than comment depth.

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