HN Explorer

Ask HN: Do comments defeat its purpose?

6 points by megamix ↗ HN
Hi

By the time you find a thread and the number of comments reached > 20 it becomes hard to navigate. Any new posting is difficult to gain attention.

Do you agree? I see e.g. here at HN

3 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 20.9 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
ystad
You have a point.

I think comments > 10 especially nested ones are discussions benefitting mostly the folks in the discussion. Its difficult to get a summary out it.

I like to think about nested comments as joining an hour long class in the last 10 minutes.

mettamage
I use Refined Hacker News [1] to collapse comments for quicker navigation. Moreover, I navigate the parent comments first, as they are a good indicator of what the child comments will be about and look at each top level parent, closing the ones I find uninteresting. At some point, you get to uninteresting top level parents, and then I stop my search. This is usually about 25% to 50% through, though in rare cases, I reach the bottom of a HN submission. Then I go back to the most interesting parents and do a similar process on their child comments.

Reading like that is something I've developed over time as I'm active on this site for more than 5 years now. I wouldn't recommend doing it, unless you think you might want to try it for fun. That's always a good excuse :)

For commenting myself on heavy contested topics, I comment on a parent if it's popular and my comment to it is related. When the parent isn't popular, I sometimes comment on it, depending on how relevant my comment is and how low it is.

[1] https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news