61–70 of 85 posts
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I use the collapse thingy as a read flag - if I'm fully sated on a to and fro for a topic I might come back to I'll collapse the thread. Future me will often un-collapse the thread through curiosity of course, but will quickly realise I was right
There is a Hacker News Comment Highlighter add-on both for FF and Chrome based browsers. Highlights what is new after a refresh.
I use the HACK app, a hacker news reader app, for android. It has collapsing sections and jump to next top level comment. Between these two functions reading long threads even with deeply nested comments isn't too bad.
It really is a more streamlined interface to HN comments, but I was used to it by using 3rd party apps on Reddit 100% of the time.
It's quite easy, as long as you have threading, quoting and read/unread flags equivalent to 1990 Usenet.
HN doesn't have read/unread flags for comments AFAIK.
Most discussion systems are inferior to 1990 Usenet, 34 years later.
At this point it is traditional to shout about Usenet not having good moderation. In fact, it is possible for either individual news groups or specific news servers (that only carry a limited number of groups) to have good moderation. It is, of course, expensive: you need to get enough trustworthy people to run it to cover the time and volume.
Then someone will sniff about not wanting to use a TUI, which can be rebutted by pointing at all the GUI newsreaders -- having a standard protocol for talking to a server is quite valuable.
"Isn't Usenet a huge space and bandwidth hog?" Yes, Usenet was a huge space and bandwidth hog -- in 1990, and 2000. If you don't carry the warez groups, it can be adequately handled on a high-end server from 2000 -- which today is equivalent to a Raspberry Pi. (1994: 7 x 2 GB SCSI disks, 1.5Mb/s Internet connection)
HN approximates the activity level and content size of 1 very active Usenet newsgroup.
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This is strange to me. Flagging should be reserved for comments that flagrantly break the rules. There's plenty of stuff I disagree with that is formulated in a perfectly polite and serious way. I come here to have my own views challenged as much as anything.
I wonder if people who abuse the [flag] function as a “mega-downvote” should eventually lose the ability to flag. I quite often see comments flagged here that are not rule breaking, they’re just unpopular takes.
Seriously, though, reading 133 comments usually takes like two to three minutes total. You need to decide whether you want to spend that much on this site doing that or not. I expect for most people the answer is “no” and I commend them for their self-control.
For topics you actually really care about, you’ll find it a lot easier to read through the comments. You will learn which comments to skip (nobody wants to read a rehash of “does anyone else think all developers are lazy and software is so slow now”) and which ones are actually interesting to read.
I sometimes see HN commments that suggest readers prefer nesting. I do not. I dislike indentation; it is distracting. I prefer left justification. I use a text-only browser that presents threads as flat when tables are disabled. I can search through threads of max length using vi mode keystrokes. Much faster than using a graphical browser. Also, I do not use colors so, e.g., "greying out" comments has no effect. All…
Using a non-graphical client I see all comments in a thread in a single page, all at once. Up the maximum that HN will display at one time. Nothing is hidden.