Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: New features and a moderator

news.ycombinator.com

181–190 of 475 posts

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#181
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it was 500.

I'm not sure the number is constant. I think it scales with either the age or the prominence of the comment. I've seen threads where I was unable to downvote top tier comments, even though I could downvote their children.

I think after 8 hours you can't downvote a comment anymore.

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#182
> 1. You can collapse comments in threads. If you're logged in, collapses persist across page refreshes and devices for a week.

The most impressive thing to me is that this feature exists and yet HN seems to have kept its good ol' fashioned -layout. Obviously, it logically follows that it is perfectly possible to write a script to traverse a hierarchy of nested-, just as it's possible to recreate the Apollo guidance software in Brainfuck...but it's still impressive nonetheless.

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#183
post #166
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the number is constant. I think it scales with either the age or the prominence of the comment. I've seen threads where I was unable to downvote top tier comments, even though I could downvote their children.

It's constant at 501.

I did see interesting behavior when I crossed the threshold: I couldn't downvote comments that existed before I reached that karma level (or at least the UI didn't render them with a down vote button).

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#184
post #26

I recall vaguely that one of the reasons for not allowing collapsable comment trees in the past was related to the desire to make it difficult to continue comment trees, which was a good thing (more comments is generally bad, beyond a point, was the underlying philosophy). Does this represent a departure from that philosophy, or was this never part of consideration for the feature?

Not sure I follow; introducing collapses makes it harder to extend trees (once they're collapsed), so wouldn't that argument go the other way?

In any case, we didn't think much about that concern in discussing the new features. We did (and do) worry about whether they will lessen the impact of HN's having a single communal front page and threads, now that people can hide and collapse things they don't want to see. That's something we'll try to watch out for, though I'm not sure how to measure it.

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#187
post #155

I have a piece of feedback. The new collapse button is at the end of the comment. This means that the collapse button's position on the page changes based on username length and duration wording (hours Vs. minutes, etc). One nice thing about other websites which I won't name, is that you can read and collapse all of the top comments without having to "seek" the collapse button constantly. You can literally scroll and…

The argument against that is that with the collapse button so close to the vote arrow, we would be guaranteed to get misvotes, especially on mobile. The undo vote feature would no doubt help with that some, but only so much.

> The undo vote feature would no doubt help with that some

As long as the user is aware of the misclick, I don't see this as a likely problem, personally. Awareness of the misclick is, in my opinion, quite likely, given that they will see the arrows disappear and won't observe the expected thread collapse.

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#188
Welcome Scott. @dang - Good luck with the initial "vacations and a day off". I found that the initial incantations of these turned into a "Astro work day on neglected home projects" by the life partner. Hopefully not too many down rounds before you see a positive cycle.

Like the new features.

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#189
post #108

Great features, thanks! The one feature I can't believe I lived without that the HN Enhancement Suite chrome extension provides, is highlighting unread comments since your last visit. It actually makes it worthwhile revisiting e.g. a 200 comment thread when there are now 300 comments without just reading all the same comments again and being unable to spot the new ones. If it became supported cross device by HN itsel…

Yes. Another user has argued for this effectively and persuaded us to do some version of it.

The simple hack I use in my own extension to provide that feature on reddit without Gold just simply logs the timestamp of every visit of the thread in a cookie, and then allows to select "new comments since visit X", and then just computes the comment time back into a timestamp, compares, highlights.

If HN would provide the actual timestamp in ISO format, as reddit does it, we could've had that a lot simpler a lot earlier.

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#190
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's constant at 501.

I did see interesting behavior when I crossed the threshold: I couldn't downvote comments that existed before I reached that karma level (or at least the UI didn't render them with a down vote button).

Downvoting wouldn't be affected by that per se, but downvote arrows last for a much briefer time window than upvote arrows do.
Post reply on HN