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Tell HN: New features and a moderator

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#352
post #167
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be honest I would rather have the vote arrow moved somewhere else. I'm often more interested in collapsing a comment thread than voting. I'm not sure if this is something only I care about though.

But it would be a backward incompatible change :D

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#355
post #159

Some UI issues and recommendations. 1. The up/down arrows after a vote leave behind a clickable void. That means you can still click that void after you have voted. If you changed the visibility on .votelinks instead of the buttons this would get fixed. Though even better UX would be to have togglable up/down buttons ala stackoverflow and others. 2. Why not provide the favourite link directly on the comment instead o…

It would also be handy to have some visual guides for the indentation levels of nested comments as on Reddit. I've hacked my own indentation marks using a CSS injection for now, but this is clearly still not optimal:

    @-moz-document url-prefix(https://news.ycombinator.com/) {
      td { vertical-align: top }
      td > img { background: repeating-linear-gradient(to right, rgba(0,0,0,0), rgba(0,0,0,0) 38px, rgba(0,0,0,0.3) 38px, rgba(0,0,0,0.3) 40px); margin-top: 4px; height: 12px!important; }
      div.votearrow { padding-bottom: 3px; background: url('http://localhost/uparrow.png') !important; background-size: 12px 20px !important; width: 12px!important;}
    }
I've also increased the size of the voting arrow because it's just uncomfortably small. By Fitt's law [0], smaller buttons require more time and effort to click!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#356
I have a skimpy monthly data plan, and appreciate the fact that your changes does nothing to increase data intentionally or accidentally (like Reddit).

I like the fact that the hide feature does not persist when I am not logged in. I mostly use mobile and never log in (via mobile).

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few weeks ago I recently obtained the downvote ability at 500 karma.

I suspect you mean 501. I reached 500 a few weeks ago, and left it there for a while... it was such a nice, round number.

Can I suggest 512 for an even nicer round number.

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#360
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be hard to say what most users prefer. I would venture to guess that we're all conditioned to vote before collapsing comments simply because we've never had the option to collapse comments until today. So behavior preferences will change over time. However, I'll hypothesize that it's preferable (overall) to have more friction on collapsing comments. A lot of great discussion happens in response to even a mediocr…

>A lot of great discussion happens in response to even a mediocre top-level comment, and forcing the user to take a few extra moments to skim the child-comments will increase the serendipitous discovery of these nested gems. Is this actually data-driven or just a guess on your part? My experience is that a mediocre comment rarely ever gets good replies.

Anecdotal; comment vote scores aren't exposed so I'm not sure if an analysis is possible, even with what's been loaded on to BigQuery [0].

Maybe "mediocre" is the wrong word, as it implies an absolute judgment (on some non-existent scale of "quality"). I guess my intuition is derivative of the "don't judge a book by its cover", in that even if a submitted and upvoted story is not something I feel like reading, I still might read the comments to see the discussion.

Maybe someone internal to HN can do a quick calculation of how many child-comments surpass their parents (while accounting for the differences in visibility).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502

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