I dislike forums which indent successive replies.
I hate forums which indent replies and don’t support collapsing sub-threads.
The proper way of handling replies is to post them under each other and support quoting.
I hate forums which indent replies and don’t support collapsing sub-threads.
The proper way of handling replies is to post them under each other and support quoting.
So you get a vast amount of low quality replies above the next high-quality reply.
For low volume it works okay because you can manually collapse but for high volume once it starts paging it breaks down and you just get further into the top level comment without properly being able to escape.
Reddit's model of auto-collapsing so you get a mix of threads and top-level replies is much better for picking out the better responses.
Also for long list of replies, you also only show first few.
This design may helps "smaller comments" to surface when the conversation is relatively "mature".
However, the main issue is that when you can quote multiple comments (when you are in a firehose view) you tend to send a single post for multiple replies; I have no idea how that could be shown in the tree view.
Essentially a firehose is a superset of a tree structure, if your unit is a post.
The potential for problems would arise when everyone Replied using a root-level post to the firehose. This could be mitigated with prominent Reply links on every post in the firehose, with the root-level contribution form deemphasized. So you can quote multiple people but you still chose a parent by choosing which Reply link to click.
One problem is that when people are manually quoting a post, they can edit that quote down to only include the relevant portion of the post they're replying to, and depending on the forum culture unnecessary full-quoting is actively being discouraged.
Automatically added quotes on the other hand don't have such a luxury, so you'd get a big bunch of full quotes, which wouldn't really be ideal, either.
[-] should collapse subthreads. Caveat is that the browser doesn't remember which subthreads were collapsed due to no-JS.
In 1999 I had a cable modem connection that could pull down 2 megabytes per second and ping up and down the west cost well under 50ms.
But forum servers were slow. Like, really really slow. When Sites like Reddit finally came to, 15 or so years later, with inline replies, they were a breath of fresh air.
Back in 99 Slashdot had massive resources put into making it responsive, lots of servers thrown at it, and it was still laggy and slow compared to Reddit now days.
Everyone arguing about "time to first draw being under 100ms" forgets that just a short time ago, web servers took more than 100ms to respond to a connection.
In 1999 I would have been jealous of your internet connection — I still had a 256kbps ISDN line, and there were fast forums even then (but mostly not). I think it mainly depended on whether the sites rendered HTML on the fly (with like maybe Perl? to render database content) or... just served static HTML.
Page reloads only got expensive when we decided that they would do a bunch of other shit besides that.
100ms is noticeable, 500ms is bad.
The old dial up BBSs may have been slow enough that you could watch character appear, but they were responsive! Those characters started printing right after your keypress happened. Of course it helped that it was likely a local phone call.
I imagine HN ever had a 500ms response rate, the engineers behind it would consider it a failure!
(Even reddit is under 500ms for many operations, and it is super heavyweight)
> I think it mainly depended on whether the sites rendered HTML on the fly (with like maybe Perl? to render database content) or... just served static HTML.
Yeah Perl didn't help the 90s web at all. It made stuff possible, but wow, the performance was bad.
Then again web server software design back then was also a long ways away from what we know to do now.
And yet, once you wait that 100ms or however long it takes for the server to respond, your page is fully loaded and interactive. During the loading process, your browser remains responsive and your CPU is not loaded.
Nowadays, we still wait the same amount of time for the initial load, but now your CPU is at 100% parsing megabytes of shitty Javascript, and once the initial load completes, you're still not guaranteed the page won't slow down/overload your CPU again because some stuff can be asynchronously loaded (supposedly for performance reasons, even though doing it on the backend as part of the initial load would be faster in the vast majority of cases).
The new reddit site is fast. Yes initial load time is like 2 seconds, but after that, everything else is instant. Click comments, escape out, go back to feed, load comments of a different story, it is quick.
Yes crappy JS abounds everywhere, NYT is an offender recently (they used to be good!), lots of sites suck in this regard, but when modern web dev is done well, it works really well.
Though having read the Reddit engineering blog posts, they throw a ton of resources at ensuring Reddit is fast.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica loads things almost instantly, but for the last year or two (!!) their article pages have leaked memory and CPU, eventually taking up all my CPU and gigs of memory.
Not sure how even. Great load times, responsive site, keep that background tab open and watch the CPU start to melt down.
Disagree. I just gave it a try on a desktop (!) browser – when switching from the thread list into a particular comment thread, "new" reddit is definitively slower than old.reddit.com, both visually (after the thread page as such displays, it spends another second or two loading the actual comments, whereas on old.reddit.com everything renders instantly), and measured end-to-end (from clicking on the "comments" link to the moment the comments actually appear) as well.
On my underpowered phone, "new" reddit fares even worse, and never mind all that additional "you can only view this in the app"-crap that was thankfully never backported to old.reddit.com.
I did not recognize the [-] as it looks like some weird emoji on my mobile browser due to the too small and uncentered background.