Hacker News Reader

Comment by aboutruby | Hacker News Reader

I think only Reddit has mastered the large-scale discussion involving thousands or ten of thousands of people at the same time.

View on HN

Eh, maybe for people who've been using it for years. When celebrities do AMAs without guidance by experienced users, they constantly reply to the wrong threads or even the thread itself. Formatting being hard (e.g. you have to press enter two times to do a single line break) also doesn't help.

Markdown is the worst kind of formatting except for all the others.

I literally don't know how to write a sentence with more than one asterisk in on HN, and I've been here several years. Formatting is hard but Reddit at least follows a known standard and has a "formatting help" link right under the comment box if you need it.

I don't tend to agree with this, the biggest issue with Markdown is pretty much the double newline, and it only makes sense in places like email where you want single newlines ignored. On Reddit/HN where nobody writes comments with hard newlines unless they mean to change paragraphs, that feature could have been omitted.

And yet something as basic as a preview is missing. Reddit's community-driven browser plugin ([0]) at least adds that, HN's counterpart [1] sorely needs it.

---

Come to think of it, is there a definitive guide to HN comment formatting? Implementing a preview feature in [1] would be doable if the markup is documented.

[0]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

It's hidden behind the FAQ.

Or you could, you know, gasp, have a visual editor usable by 99% of the world's population, on Reddit.

This is a solved problem. Word solved it back in 1990.

When has there been a visual editor that wasn't awful?

Despite the widespread techie comments against it, I've always found Word to be perfectly usable. I could always do my job with it, with minimal fuss.

Regarding rich text editors for the web, surely there must be one that's ok after all these years.

I prefer 4chan's system with automatic reply linking. The issue with Reddit and HN is they model conversation as a tree, but real written conversation between several people is usually a DAG with one person replying to several posts at once. The UI can definitely be improved, but trees ain't it.

Agreed, it’s so much better. Just being able to reply to two people at once is incredible.

You're downvoted, but I tend to agree. Regardless of the community, reddit's full-width, compact layout is the easiest way I've found to follow a tree-based conversation.

The one thing that reddit and Hacker News lack is the ability to easily see new posts on an existing thread (though you can get this with a reddit gold subscription or becoming a moderator). The other thing they lack is an index of comments (like you would see with a mail reader).

Those two features made something like usenet with a good news reader easier to use compared to reddit or Hacker News.

Reddit does have that, although I'm not sure how an index of comments would be useful... What would they be indexed by?

I agree that Usenet is fantastic for discussion, too bad it fell out of popularity...

> I'm not sure how an index of comments would be useful... What would they be indexed by?

By index, I mean a threaded list of messages that one can scroll through without having the message body present. In an email/news client, you would typically see something like:

  Subject   Some Author  Date
    Re: Subject  Another Author  Date
      Re: Subject  A third Author  Date
    Re: Subject  A fourth Author  Date
    Re: Subject  A fifth Author  Date
      Re: Subject  Some Author  Date

in one window pane. Then you could click on one of the the messages and the body would be displayed in another window pane. Scrolling through that index is much faster than having to scroll through a lot of comments on reddit or Hacker News. And finding a new message was simply looking for ones that were in bold font.

Ah I see, you mean a newsgroup-style tree. With comment collapsing, I never missed that, but to each their own.

Hacker news does some parts of that better, like promoting new comments higher. On reddit, a new comment is unlikely to be visible enough to get traction.

Usenet did that long before reddit came around.

Usenet achieved this in the 80's and 90's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com