HN Explorer

Ask HN: Two-Dimensional Comments

4 points by harpastum ↗ HN
Person A is one of the first to read a story, and has an interesting comment to make. This comment is immediately voted up, and there are several replies. Then Person B adds their interesting comment at root level. This comment goes to the bottom of the list, below all of the replies to Person A's comment. This leaves Person B's comment to be read only by those that make it all the way through.

The current system takes up a lot of vertical space for each reply, making it less likely that people will make it to the comments below. My idea is to put replies to comments directly to the right of the original comment, moving horizontally as more comments are added, so that each comment and its subtree takes up a much smaller amount of vertical space. This will allow those following a conversation to scroll from left to right, and those looking for different conversations to move from top to bottom.

Having a very wide site would probably cause no end of trouble, and I'm not saying that it's the optimum solution. I just think that it is an interesting idea to consider.

4 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 15.9 ms ] thread
inerte
Horizontal scrolling bars are a no-no. None expects them. Mouse wheels and page-down and space bar doesn't work. It breaks how users expect the page to behave.
harpastum
Granted it's confusing for people unfamiliar with the site, but I'd argue the population here is ideally suited for unorthodox ideas.

An interesting example of a horizontal site is the Urban Outfitters Blog: http://blog.urbanoutfitters.com/

timf
An alternative would be to collapse 2nd level comments and below. You choose which thread to get involved with by clicking in. There's probably a greasemonkey script that does this.

That's how I read the site without any help from the UI, I don't find it to be that big of a deal. If there are more than ~5 comments on a topic, I will scan all the top level comments first to get a feel for the conversations and then dive into what I want to read.

run4yourlives
Why wouldn't you just hide them and put a link up to expand the thread like Slashdot does?