HN Explorer

HN: Please add Reddit style collapsible comments

311 points by AndyKelley ↗ HN
It could be much, much easier to browse HN if we could hide subtrees of comments the same as works on reddit.

It's a huge usability problem.

It's dead simple to program.

Please?

115 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] thread
chollida1
I'd also like to see a "hide" button on each story so I can filter out stories that just aren't interesting to me.

I get that "Left-pad as a service" is interesting to many people here(182 comments at the moment), but I've never really done any web development at all in my life and I am never really going to be interested in any javascript or node.js link.

Similarly I'm guessing most people won't care about my favorite topics quantitative finance or algorithmic trading.

It might cut down on the weekly posts where someone complains that HN is going to shit because a story made the front page and they just can't believe someone would find it interesting.

dsr_
Oh. Are you interested in security? Deployment? Or "idiotic practices that are apparently widespread but only coming to light in the wake of a disaster"?

Because that's what that story is actually about.

buckbova
And this is why HN became my goto after ditching my basket of reddits. I can find a takeaway from nearly every one of the links that make the front page.
jonahx
While you're correct about npm story, I think the grandparent has a valid point. Not everyone is interested in every story, and the ability to hide would be a nice enhancement.
Normal_gaussian
Ironically the posts I am least interested in are the ycombinator posts.

However I assume hacker news is rendered on the server incrementally (anyone have any links on this?) so hiding links will simply reduce the number you see.

striking
That would be contrary to Hacker News' existence with regards to Y Combinator. I like to know where the SV pulse is, and I'm almost certain that's why this site exists. It's for watching SV and commenting on it and interacting with it as well as posting cool links that anyone is interested in.
ghayes
To all the top level comments about browser extensions, I want to use HN on mobile without an app. It's not possible due only to collapsibility. Comments sections are effectively top-comment-only.
threeseven37
If you don't mind me asking, why don't you want to use an app?
greggman
Apps can spy on me more than webpages and have more potential to do bad things to my device.
prplhaz4
Because I already have an app for that - the web browser, and it works great with countless other services I use on a daily basis.
ryanisnan
Yet another tool to keep track of for something that could easily be native?

Biggest reason to use an app in this case would be only if pg was expressly against an idea that an app could achieve.

kuschku
Use Firefox? (It has addons on mobile)
snowwrestler
I browse HN a lot in the default iOS browser, and it works fine for me. I can scroll pretty darn fast with flicks of my finger, to get past sub-threads I want to skip. Heck I do the same thing on Reddit; it's faster and simpler for me than collapsing threads.
ghayes
Without a good ident guide, I never quite know if I'm at a top-level comment or a second-level comment.
notliketherest
Hacker News Enhancement Suite works wonders https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
ihuman
I personally use "Hacker News Collapsible Comments"[1], but it breaks whenever they add the black bar to the top of the site.

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

tokenizerrr
Hacker News Enhancement Suite deals with that just fine in my experience.
elliotec
What is that bar at the top for anyway?
stevekemp
It is added when somebody "noteworthy" has died.
yock
This doesn't help on mobile, and these browser extensions are frequently broken when markup changes.
chejazi
Given how infrequently HN updates their markup, I don't think such extensions will break very often.
yock
It's probably a couple times a year. Is that infrequent? That depends on how much time you have to devote to being a plugin maintainer I suppose.
ino
And the screen on mobile is obviously smaller so collapsability is even more needed.
simonswords82
Where has this been all my life! Excellent, thanks for this.
Kalroth
Thank you for this link, this extension really makes the site a lot more enjoyable.
iSloth
Why have I never seen this magic before?!
slantaclaus
Yeah but I had to download the enhancement suite first to find this second comment...thanks though
thoughtpalette
Beautiful HN Chrome plugin UI, supports:

- Improved readability design

- Retina screen support

- User following

- Super fast inline replies

- Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames

- Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user

- Endless scrolling

- Collapsible comment threads

- Direct link to Google Cache version

- Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...

(not affiliated in any way with this, just love it)

shostack
I always wonder what level of security and data transparency exists behind things like this. Are there any real risks to using something like that?
jeremyw
This one happens to be open source (https://github.com/tommoor/HackerNew), but you can always unpack plugins, take a look at their Javascript, and if you don't like what you see, repack with your own modifications.
ryanisnan
I absolutely understand the notion that being open source makes it significantly more difficult to hide devious code, but let's be realistic. If you had to scrutinize every piece of OSS for something malicious, you would never get anything done.
kuschku
Is there a firefox version?
Laaw
There's a philosophical reason for a cumbersome UI, and it revolves around the idea that comment volume should overall remain somewhat low.

It should be hard to manage tons of comments on a story, because it lowers the overall comment count.

I'd love to see some A/B testing on this.

function_seven
I understand the philosophy, but the law of unintended consequences means that the comment threads are only about whatever the top commenter brought up.

For example, let's say the article is "Scientists discover new material that boosts solar panel efficiency by 16%". The top comment might be, "This does nothing to alleviate the base-load problem. We still need better battery technology".

Well now the comment section for me is all about battery chemistry, battery manufacturing news, hydro-pumping as a means of storage, etc. All because the top comment spawned its own mega-thread that pushes relevant (to the story) comments off the bottom.

Laaw
Maybe that's okay, or at least an acceptable consequence.
beachstartup
no, i disagree strongly.

i despise reddit's collapsible / half-loading comments. on large threads it loads the same 10% every single time and hides a lot of the good responses.

just give me all the comments in one shot. i'm a big boy, i can handle reading.

function_seven
You're disagreeing with a different request, then. I'd just like to collapse comment trees. That's all. I don't want to only partial load them. (I can see why you'd infer that from the post, because it references reddit)

It's an embarassingly-simple feature to add, and it would provide a huge value to all of us that browse this site on our phones.

caffeinewriter
I agree, but why not keep the loading structure, with just an option to collapse individual threads, having them opened by default. So, the experience doesn't change for users that wish to avoid collapsable trees, but gives the option to users that do want it.
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thex10
it's _not_ given to you 'all in one shot' though. the 'top' comment is first, along with all of its responses, then the second top comment, and so on. you'll still miss many good responses because you won't scroll through hundreds of comments (which can be very lengthy on a mobile screen).

also let's not conflate collapsible and half-loading. this thread is not advocating partial loading. you dont need partial loading of comments in order to enable collapsible functionality.

beachstartup
sometimes i start at the bottom and scroll up. i might be weird.
s_dev
There's no advantage to not having the feature. It isn't a trade off so it's somewhat odd that you disagree "strongly".
MaxfordAndSons
Yea it is rather frustrating when the top comment spawns an enormous tangential discussion and you have to scroll through it; it doesn't help that there are no indent guides to at least make it easier to tell when you've finally scrolled to the next top level comment. And all this is doubly annoying on mobile.
Normal_gaussian
I do not want collapsible comments - I feel that this encourages "skipping" over discussion (which helps polarise and lower the quality of the entire thread)

Indent guides? Yes please. I often find myself wanting to find and read all the replies to a particular comment (it is often posing a question or defending an opinion I find questionable).

mratzloff
As opposed to scrolling by without reading, which is what most already do instead? We're under no obligation to read everything here.
JonahBraun
Actually collapsing comments helps. Often insightful top level comments are posted at a later time. These remain less read and less voted because of their position.
300bps
That's the thing that a lot of HN users don't get. A lot of thought has been put into how to get fewer comments on HN. You have shadow banning, thread depth delays, thread depth limits and so much more.

They don't want to turn HN into reddit.

krapp
Dang has said that collapsible comments are coming[0]. and shadowbanned comments are reversible by the public now[1] - and people vehemently defended shadowbanning as being absolutely essential in maintaining the quality of the community. Plus, other features (like domain links) have been added which make the site superficially more like reddit[2].

There used to be a "feature" where links would expire very quickly, making it impossible to reply to a comment if you spent more than a minute or two with the submit form open. People argued that that was also an intentional feature, even when the staff admitted explicitly that it was a bug. The staff has attempted to add a mobile stylesheet numerous times, and yet people argue that keeping mobile users away was a conscious decision by pg to keep the site from becoming reddit. This site has become so paranoid about "becoming reddit" that it literally tells you in the site guidelines not to complain about the site becoming reddit.

It is entirely possible that, while pg did make a conscious effort to design the site in such a way as to attract certain users and repel others, that is not nearly as overriding and critical a priority as people make it out to be.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8247089

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645

Normal_gaussian
Well, collapsible comments are not the end of the world.

Thank you for the links! I find it interesting how vicious comments around the supposed intentions of the sites maintainers are.

nazka
Agree with that. I wanted this feature for a while but after thinking about it, I think that it would be bad. It would change the focus on the first, second, and slightly third comment where all the other comments in the trees will be disregarded. But right now each comment is valued and has its place. There are less focus on the last leaves but it's still great.

If it's done, the first comments will have all the attention plus it will engage to a race to have the best first comment. We want to seek to engage people with real thoughts and deep discussions, regardless their position here. I have read so many long and great conversations between highly skilled persons, it's so valuable. We have to keep it like that.

nazka
So I am downvoted after taking the time to write a constructive reply and the person doesn't even reply? That's great...
tripzilch
Isn't it really great how we can now have this totally tangent discussion on how you got downvoted, right in the middle of the gigantic singular top-comment dumping ground that always appears on HN discussion threads?

Please, do go on :)

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tripzilch
I don't understand. I'm all for collapsible comments exactly because the current situation often puts all the focus on the first comment. Because that one will have a disproportionally large tree of discussion hanging off it, usually with one or two tangents that have not a lot to do with the featured article.

While the tangents can be interesting, when checking comments I actually really do want to read the top five voted top-level comments, because that gives me an idea what people think about the article.

Now I do have an HN-comment collapsing plugin installed (I forget which), and I use it for exactly this purpose. Especially when the singular large top-thread contains more than one large tangent that I don't particularly care about, it's absolutely great. Especially compared to the alternative, which is sort of eye-balling where you are in the thread and tracking with your finger or mouse cursor whether you're back at a level where people stopped talking about that thing (which is not always apparent if it's a short reply).

Now if I want to read what people think about what other people think (about what people think ..) about the article, I can always return to the tangent later.

I also believe having the feature built-in will be a net positive on quality of discussion. Even if you may prefer HN's tone of discussion over Reddit's, to assume that adopting any feature that Reddit has will result in a decline of discussion quality is pure cargo-culting.

HN's tone of discussion comes from the guidelines, stringent self-moderation and constructive hints from a moderator. Not from having messy comment threads and lack of UI affordances just because Reddit has them.

andrewflnr
That reminds me, it would be cool if we could collapse a thread from the bottom as well as from the root.
thomasahle
Such as, "Show only threads to depth 3"? Sounds good to me!
andrewflnr
Not quite what I had in mind, but that sounds nice too. I just meant when you get to the bottom of some comment thread (i.e., next comment is de-dented), it would be nice to be able to collapse it there, too.
tripzilch
Yes! That's actually a feature I often wish for on Reddit as well :) It would make reading and keeping track of where you are a lot easier.
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55555
It's not a straightforwardly positive UX decision. Allowing people to hide conversation trees they are not interested in has other effects. It would reduce discussion. the current setup promotes constructive disagreements.

We already hide things if our collective mind thinks it's a bad idea, but I'm not sure it's beneficial to let this occur on an individual basis.

If everyone thinks what I am saying is wrong, then this comment will get whited out and sent to the bottom, but if only you think it's dumb, maybe you should still have to read it.

I kinda like the current way.

darawk
I think he's just talking about the ability to collapse something after you've read it, which is a great feature on reddit - particularly on mobile.

I use it all the time. I read as much of the comment tree as i'm interested in, then collapse the root node to move on to the next one. It makes it easier than having to scan down and do visual indentation tracking.

SpaceCadetJones
Once discussions get long I can't even follow them, though. There at least needs to some something added to the UI so I can see who is replying to what and where a tree starts/ends
bargl
I actually find I get into more discussions by using a plugin that allows me to collapse so that I can comment on lower threads because I can actually get there when I'm interested. It really should be built in though.
Normal_gaussian
I disagree. Often the most insightful comments lie a few posts into a comment I disagree with. When browsing on reddit I would have already collapsed the thread.

When I am genuinely not interested I don't have any problem scrolling down.

anoother
Dear HN: Please don't. Your design is perfect.
znpy
I think users should be able to flag a certain subtree of the comments tree as "off-topic" or "tangential" so that after a certain flag threshold such subtree is automatically shown as folded, and users would be able to see the most related comments first.
btbuildem
Short answer is that the legacy codebase can't handle that. Most people use various browser extensions to help with HN usability issues.
[dead] trollingineeer
Also bad behavior by HN users who piggyback on the top comment ALWAYS because they - the pseudo-intellectuals - think their words need to be seen by as many people as possible.
logicrook
Are you too lazy to roll your own Greasemonkey script if it's such a problem for you? Are you just on HN to lose time, or too learn how to hack things?
andrewflnr
You can actually beat Reddit's UI on this: save collapsing state across page loads. It's quite annoying on mobile to open a link on reddit, come back and be forced to reload the page, and then be presented with the same wall of irrelevance I closed up a minute ago.
Namrog84
With res. Or at least for me. It's saved. Sometimes i go to comments thinking I haven't even and find my already collapsed comments and realize I just forgot I already read comments for this post
verandaguy
I believe the RES extension does do this for Reddit, actually.
simonswords82
While we're suggesting improvements...

Why is it that the discuss option isn't available on posts that are job adverts?

I think it would be useful/interesting to allow casual conversation about job postings.