Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

#111

Post by bbuffone » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 4:28 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #100

This feature is actually causing damage. Several times yesterday I found myself opening a seemingly interesting discussion, reading the comments, then wondering why so few people were talking about it. The link that says "Hey, there's actually more discussion that we're hiding. Click here to see it" is tiny (and unexpected) so I just plain missed it. I even missed it on this thread until I read a comment talking abou…

This feature makes me want reply to the comment at the top page. Even if my comment has nothing to do with the parent comment, at least people will read it.

I don't even hit the "more" button on the homepage to see older stories; there is no way I am going to hit the more comments.

Re: Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

#112

Post by kmfrk » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 5:18 PM UTC

I just noticed the hilarious(ly atrocious) redundancy this causes: Go to the [W3C HTML5 logo thread](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115551) and see how many times the "Autobot" joke is made.

I've counted at least four instances. (I'm even a part of one of the branches, as oblivious as I was to the new system and similar discussions.)

I wonder if this comment will show above or below the fold. Flip a coin, I guess.

Re: Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

#113

Post by blahedo » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 5:55 PM UTC

msbarnett wrote: post #2

I agree, I think this basically disincentivizes commenting when you know you're going to end up "below the fold". I went into the feature request thread to see if anyone had requested the ability to turn this off, but gave up on looking after rapid-fire clicking "More" 25+ times. Content more than a page or two back might as well not exist.

Perhaps more importantly, it seriously skews the karma that accrues to responses---those that are above the fold will continue to get upvotes while those below the fold get none, so the disparity grows.

I've seen this effect on other sites; one gaming site[0] shows two views of the comment list, "recent" and "top-voted" (both with a "more" button that few people seem to click)---the "recent" comments rarely get more than two or three votes before scrolling off, while the difference between the lowest upvote count in the "top-voted" count and the next-highest comment can be in the hundreds or thousands once a game has been up for more than a day or two.

[0]Kongregate.com, if anyone's curious.

Re: Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

#114

Post by pg » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 6:24 PM UTC

Eliezer wrote: post #83

pg wrote: post #72

To cut load. I'm not sure it helped much though, so I may not keep it.

Er, that doesn't seem like a good reason to downgrade the UI of something important. I don't know how much money it takes to keep HN running, but would just buying ten times as much computing power really be a significant expense for YCombinator, compared to the dealflow from HN?

As far as I know, the current server has close to the fastest processor available.

Re: Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

#115

Post by jamesbritt » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 6:35 PM UTC

Joakal wrote: post #67

ezalor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wat do you mean?

If you type into Chrome's URL/browser bar, it sends the query to google's servers which in turn returns a list of possible search suggestions (autocomplete style). Google likely retains the query for commercialisation purposes. So the user being worried about a Chrome plugin sending browsing data seems bizarre.

So, when I click a link on HN, using Chrome, Chrome is sending that information to Google? Likewise when I type http://somethingorother, that's going through Google first?

Re: Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

#116

Post by jamesbritt » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 7:47 PM UTC

johnswamps wrote: post #47

jamesbritt wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious: Why does this plug-in need access to my browsing history?

It's probably requesting "tabs" permissions. The Chrome security permissions aren't fine grained enough so often you need to request permission for a lot more than you actually need. For some reason requesting "tabs" shows a scary warning about having access to all your history. You'll find that a ton of extensions need access to your history for this reason, it's actually really annoying as an extension developer.

Cool. Thanks very much.

Re: Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

#117

Post by ezalor » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 1:08 AM UTC

update: no more the case: see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2121727

Re: Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

#118

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 6:55 AM UTC

flatline wrote: post #56

jedsmith wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Reddit community actually speaks of this phenomenon in threads addressed to new members ("things you should know about Reddit", etc). They say that once there's several long threads with a lot of upvotes, you're better off not commenting as your comment will most likely languish without any attention whatsoever. I'd say that's partially due to scrolling, but you're correct - that More button is so non-obvious tha…

The more link has the rel="nofollow" attribute, so anything but the top comments will (in theory) not be indexed by search engines either. Given that some functions of the site are based on karma, I hope it's just a stopgap measure.

I believe rel=nofollow only means that the link carries no weight for PageRank and other signals that may affect the target URLs ranking, not that it won't be indexed. To block indexing, you need a tag on the target page itself.

Re: Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

#119

Post by regularfry » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 11:23 AM UTC

riledhel wrote: post #53

jedsmith wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Reddit community actually speaks of this phenomenon in threads addressed to new members ("things you should know about Reddit", etc). They say that once there's several long threads with a lot of upvotes, you're better off not commenting as your comment will most likely languish without any attention whatsoever. I'd say that's partially due to scrolling, but you're correct - that More button is so non-obvious tha…

Maybe we need something like twitter implemented... when you scroll below certain number of comments they load n comments more automagically .

That kills the scrollbar. A better way to do it would be to show far fewer comments per page, so that you get approximately a screenful at a time, then make the "next" and "previous" links huge and blindingly obvious. I think you should scroll or navigate, not both.

Re: Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

#120

Post by regularfry » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 11:28 AM UTC

brianpan wrote: post #71

flatline wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, I hope this does not happen, I hate the scroll-to-the-bottom-and-get-more thing. Particularly if the server is under heavy load already, you never know if there is more or if so how much, and it takes the scrollbar away from your mouse pointer once it's loaded another chunk due to the relative offset.

I'm confused by your reasons. With scroll for more, you would know if there is more- the end is the end, just like with pagination. And it's no worse than pagination in the "you don't know how much more" department, either. The pagination is a "More" link, it doesn't indicate how much is on the next page.

One would think it would be relatively trivial for "More" to become "256 More" or similar...