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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

#131

Post by dang »

Tomte wrote: post #29

Still, the most urgently needed feature is missing: telling me which comments I haven't seen, yet. It's a constant nuisance in longer threads. Really, this is much more vital than just about every feature you've introduced over the last months.

> Really, this is much more vital than just about every feature you've introduced over the last months

That is a highly disputable claim, given the overall user feedback we've seen.

Such things always remind me of Jerry Weinberg's fable about how he couldn't sleep because a dripping faucet was driving him crazy. He gets up to fix it in the middle of the night, finally gets back to bed, and... now he can't sleep because hears a gate creaking. Moral: when you fix your #1 problem, your #2 problem becomes your #1 problem.

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#132

Post by ChuckMcM »

dang wrote: post #98
ChuckMcM wrote: post #72

Dang those are some nice features! :-) I really really love the collapse feature. Does the collapse persist across new comments being added or are those not collapsed? We'll have to see. And final thought on the stories/submissions vs comments the challenge is that comment is both a verb and a noun, you comment, and you can read a comment. Whereas stories is always a noun. Submission is the correct name for something…

Collapses persist even if new comments are added underneath them, though the number of comments in the tree (e.g. '[+4]') will update. Comments are submitted, too, though, so the word 'submission' seems oddly ambiguous to me. Also, I doubt I've ever anyone say 'submission' in conversation. People say "story" or "post" and of those two only "story" is unambiguous. (But I'm happy to change it back if people feel strong…

Posts is an interesting alternative. It has the same verb/noun flexibility as comments. But really it is minor, I wondered what 'stories' was but quickly realized it was things that I had submitted. So I think you should keep what ever you feel is best.

Given that you know "when" a thread was collapsed and you know when a given comment was added, there is data available to compute "new since you collapsed it" but I recognize that would an interesting challenge. So you keep the comments in a list, and the list can be internally sorted in date or karma order, then sorting by date you could splice it at the date it was collapsed and compute the length of the two lists (pre-collapse and post-collapse). I have no idea how useful that is, just collapsing huge threads (especially ones that wander off topic) is such a huge win.

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#134

Post by c17r »

pgrote wrote: post #120
c17r wrote: post #93

All good stuff. The HackerNews Enhancement Suite plugin for Chrome really borks the page the now! http://imgur.com/CXaHIqO

Can confirm. Hopefully, the extension will be updated soon.

Opened a ticket with the things I've found so far.

https://github.com/etcet/HNES/issues/117

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#136

Post by gedrap »

dang wrote: post #108
duncanawoods wrote: post #90

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.

Yay. I often find threads where I have an educated guess that there will valuable comments but the thread is very new, not many comments yet, ends up as yet another HN tab that I left open and then go through them all once or twice a week... Although maybe that's not a bad thing - that saves tons of time ;)

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#140

Post by wtracy »

sdegutis wrote: post #84

These mostly seem like bad ideas: #1 This is the only good feature listed. It helps people skim comment threads for a relevant discussion. #2 Without this feature, people are encouraged to think before voting, and only vote when they mean it. #3 Without this feature, people are encouraged to use HN as a transient source of news and intellectual discussion, and not twitter. #4 Without this feature, people are encourag…

For #2, on mobile I'm constantly down-voting when I mean to up-vote, and vice-versa. (Before HN officially supported mobile, I sometimes ended up voting when I was just trying to zoom in!)

Taking a chance that people might not "think before voting" seems well worth it to remove a bunch of random noise generated by unintended clicks.

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