Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

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Hey Dan, completely unrelated, but I wanted to report what seems to be a HN bug. Please feel free to detach-collapse this.

album: https://imgur.com/a/QcHG9VK

In the first screenshot, notice that the highlighted comment has no replies. Here's a link to the page I was on, anchored to that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?p=3&id=27424195#27429786

In the second screenshot, after navigating to the comment directly, there are in fact replies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27429786

The bug is that those replies should be showing up in the first link, shouldn't they? E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27430242 is a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27429786, but when viewed on the original page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?p=3&id=27424195#27429786, it's absent.

I know that "more" pages shift toplevel comments around, but I've never seen child subtrees get completely pruned with no indication that they exist at all unless you navigate to the comment directly.

Sorry for the distraction. I didn't want to email this for a few reasons, some of which might be invalid. However, it does seem to be a slightly-serious bug if true, since a recent refactoring must've caused deeply-nested children not to show up when browsing top-level "more" links. I'm not sure anyone else has noticed yet.

(If this is intended behavior, sorry!)

Good luck bug hunting.

The 'more' link in place of a 'reply' link is intended to indicate that there are more comments in the subthread.

We're experimenting, in order to deal with this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27437362.

Oh! I’m sorry, I had HN blindness. I didn’t notice at all that “reply” got swapped to “more”. Cool.

(Wish it was a different color, or included the descendant count.)

It probably will.

Ideas about how to get this right are welcome.

why have a different interface than the expandable [more] used for dead comments?

seems intuitive to piggyback on the same fading ui hint as comments, having a bright "more" indicating standing of hidden comments...

Honestly, at HN’s scale, maybe it makes sense now. After spending today using it, my gut reaction was to be sad that people will feel reluctant to throw a bunch of effort into replies that will immediately be hidden (as with Reddit). But after the server meltdown yesterday, it’s understandable.

14 years was a really good run. I suppose even lisp has its limits. :(

Yeah, adding the descendant count would make it pretty good. Hard to think of anything better.

I’ll be honest: I’m really worried this will become another tool for moderators to control discussions, while concealing the fact that it was a moderator (rather than algorithmic) decision. But no one can stop you if that’s the kind of control you want for your team.

The flip side of that is, since 2018, your team has done a stellar job, as far as I can tell. I don’t know if something changed, but things seem calmer now. I can’t even recall the last worrisome moderator decision, and I’ve found myself arguing on your behalf more than once.

Dunno. You’ll get it right; you usually do. Thanks for being welcoming about ideas, and good luck wrestling with transpilers and performance issues.

If anyone wants to see the descendant count now, rather than waiting, I've submitted a snippet of javascript as a Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27442644

Or just open your browser console and run the JS directly:

  [...byTag(document.body, 'a')].filter(x => x.innerText == 'more').map(x => { x.innerText = `${byClass($(x.href.split('item?id=')[1]), 'togg')[0].attributes['n'].value - 1} more`; });

I find it much easier to browse HN now. It's immediately clear whether I'm missing a large subtree.

Hey, it looks like you shut it off entirely (a few seconds ago?). For what it's worth, I didn't hate it. If it's a necessary performance change, people will understand. It was nice to see HN trying an experiment; I'm sorry if my comments sounded negative.

From analyzing it today, one alarming thing I noticed was that in all recent threads with "more" links, the conversation never seemed to nest more than one or two levels deep. But the moment you go to an old thread, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21231208#21232605, the "more" links turned out to be hiding 9+ comments.

But, like, it's not a horrible thing to constrain the comment subtree. If you were feeling like it was the way to go, my only feedback is to trust your judgement on that one. Personally, I thought it was an interesting new dynamic, even if I had my own (probably-unjustified) concerns.

Anyway, best of luck, sorry for the mistaken bug report, and keep trying new experiments! It's really cool!

We all love and owe you, Dan. I hope you hear that constantly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com