Ask HN: Would this improve reading experience on HN?

5 points by justjimmy 14y ago ↗ HN

Sometimes I find topics with alot of comments to be disconnecting when I'm going through the comments. Especially when there are multiple replies within multiple replies, it can be tricky to follow the conversation and understand the comment's context.

Made a quick sketch of a hover action that would show the comment that it is replying to, to put the comment in context. Think it would help the comment reading experience?

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/29/hovercontextcomment.jpg/

3 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 17.5 ms ] thread

polyfractal 14y ago ↗

Maybe! Greasemonkey scripts are pretty easy to whip up, why don't you try it? If you check my profile it links to a few scripts on Github that could get you started parsing the layout.

LukeRB 14y ago ↗

I like this idea. Perhaps you could even show multiple layers of replies when I hover over a reply to a reply to a reply...?

DanBC 14y ago ↗

Something that would perhaps help more people is a "show unread" when you visit a thread. Reading a thread with 60 posts today and 100 posts tomorrow is sub-optimal.