I'm trying to read discussion from a thread with 133 comments, on a topic i find interesting, but after a few comments i get overwhelmed. How do you do it?
Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?
#2I’m thinking about making a tool to do this, I haven’t quite gotten to loading a comment thread but I have loaded 250k images and also 400 from Evernote. Next in line is to load some unwieldy discussions, particularly from a site with a horrible comment UI such as Arstechnica.
I’m particularly thinking about how to make sense of badly organized threads from Mastodon and similar things.
Re: Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?
#3I’m thinking about making a tool to do this, I haven’t quite gotten to loading a comment thread but I have loaded 250k images and also 400 from Evernote. Next in line is to load some unwieldy discussions, particularly from a site with a horrible comment UI such as Arstechnica. I’m particularly thinking about how to make sense of badly organized threads from Mastodon and similar things.
With timecode metadata and heatmaps to highlight rapidfire back 'n forth and stuff?
Semantic scoring to rate quip chains Vs. slower, longer considered interactions?
Ways of highlighting high frequency commenters, perhaps rating frequent flyers by degree of interest in what they have to say and weighting threads by "participant rating".
There are many ways to go in this space.
Re: Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?
#4There was an internet meme explaining that: "ain't nobody got time for that".
Re: Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?
#5It always depends on the community. On Hackernews, for example, I only read the top 5 comments and then check the thread 2-3 times later to see if anything has changed. On reddit, for example, I don't read any comments at all because there are too many bots replying.
Otherwise, I try to keep my own thread when I read the comments. For example, when I read an article about a topic, I try to find an extremely positive point of view from the comments, but also an extremely negative point of view and then link this to my own thoughts.
As already mentioned in the thread, I would like to have an online tool, for example, which reduces comments to a clear point and thus makes reading easier for me.
Re: Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?
#6I typically use the "next" links (above each post) to jump to each top-level comment, drilling down if appropriate.
Other than that, I try to resist the urge to read everything. Its almost always better to absorb the gist of the conversation than to try to absorb it all.
Re: Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?
#7If the topic is interesting for me I just wait a day or two so the comment activity subsides and then just collapse each comment I read. Works perfect.
For threads I am interested in but want to comment immediately, I only collapse those comments that I don't find interesting -- and as above, go back a few days later to read the others without constantly having new ones added in real time.
Re: Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?
#8If you want to read every comment in a thread, https://hnrss.org/item?id=
Otherwise, though, HN itself has a terrible format that's nearly impossible to follow.
Re: Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?
#9Skim for keywords you're interested in, decide from a glance whether or not a comment chain is just two people passive-aggressively fighting semantics (and whether or not those semantics matter to you), scroll to the bottom to see if the dead comments have anything useful to say and rescue them if they say something interesting (albeit not popular)
Don't internalize everything you read here, just a quick dip down for some interesting perspectives, and then you resurface with those endorphins and wait for the next hunt
Re: Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?
#10Tree structures suck for that. Linear style all the way.