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PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?
reddit.com
Incidentally I came across this while trying to find information about how reddit stores threaded comments. I've read they use postgres and while I've also read about many workable techniques to force hierarchical (and frequently reordered) comments into a relational db these solutions all sort of make me cringe. I'd welcome anyone's ideas here as well.
My solution was to store a comment thread in display order in the database with hinting as to how deep in the heirarchy the comment is. Optimizes for output, although with some cost every time something gets posted. Luckily, for most forums, views outnumber posts by hundreds of times.
The one issue that system has is that if you're doing a lot of reordering, let's say from quality scores. In that case you'll basically have to remake the thread after every post and after vote that makes a difference. Not recommended...
While reddit's comment system is obviously an improvement over Slashdot's, I'm increasingly convinced that community makeup is far more important than the tool it uses.
To be fair to the reddits, it wasn't their fault that the discussion on reddit sank down toward that of digg and slashdot. They have really strong beliefs against censorship. They were never going to jump into a discussion and tell people to stop being jerks. But empirically it looks as if you may have to.
The optimistic way of phrasing this is: if you have good customs and existing users enforce them, you can probably survive the influx of 14 year olds when it comes.
Incidentally I came across this while trying to find information about how reddit stores threaded comments. I've read they use postgres and while I've also read about many workable techniques to force hierarchical (and frequently reordered) comments into a relational db these solutions all sort of make me cringe. I'd welcome anyone's ideas here as well.
[edit] especially when the comments get reordered on votes.
Incidentally I came across this while trying to find information about how reddit stores threaded comments. I've read they use postgres and while I've also read about many workable techniques to force hierarchical (and frequently reordered) comments into a relational db these solutions all sort of make me cringe. I'd welcome anyone's ideas here as well.
i am in the process of making a news.yc clone... threaded comments are not as easy as it looks on news.yc. [edit] especially when the comments get reordered on votes.
edit on the edit: scratch that.
While reddit's comment system is obviously an improvement over Slashdot's, I'm increasingly convinced that community makeup is far more important than the tool it uses.
I agree, basically. Except I think customs are as important as or more important than makeup. That's why I try to discourage ad hominems. To be fair to the reddits, it wasn't their fault that the discussion on reddit sank down toward that of digg and slashdot. They have really strong beliefs against censorship. They were never going to jump into a discussion and tell people to stop being jerks. But empirically it loo…
Incidentally I came across this while trying to find information about how reddit stores threaded comments. I've read they use postgres and while I've also read about many workable techniques to force hierarchical (and frequently reordered) comments into a relational db these solutions all sort of make me cringe. I'd welcome anyone's ideas here as well.
Reordering can be done just by looking at all records whose IDs contain the parent as a prefix and have a length 2 greater than the parent, and then renumbering them. This should be computationally feasible in most cases.
This does limit users to 65,536 replies to a single comment, and a maximum comment nesting depth of 127. Based on my experience with some very active LiveJournal threads, I considered these to be acceptable limitations (LJ limits comments to 5000/post anyway). A nesting depth of 127 would be nearly 2400 pixels over, so it's not like it'd all fit on one screen anyway.