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

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

#81

Post by 1337p337 » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 8:13 AM UTC

marshray wrote: post #58

redthrowaway wrote: post #16

There's a really easy fix to this: Load more comments on scroll-to-bottom. No button, no bandwidth used, but those who make it to the bottom of a thread don't have to do anything to see new comments. I agree with OP; the current system is suboptimal, to say the least.

NOoooo!!! Anything but the Scrollbar of Sisyphus!

I'd not heard this term for it before, and it sums up the horror accurately. You have enriched my life.

The Scrollbar of Sisyphus breaks the back button (click "Back", browser remembers where you had scrolled to, can't go that far down, lands at the bottom, triggers second "page" of results) jumping to the bottom of the page, occasionally searching, and forces you to jump to the end of the page repeatedly to figure out where you were. It breaks nearly every UI expectation one has about scrolling (especially on a phone) and several that your browser has about caching.

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

#82

Post by 1337p337 » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 8:20 AM UTC

lotusleaf1987 wrote: post #18

Is the feature really saving that significant of load time? I mean HN is as minimal as it gets, I'd rather all the comments load and take 3-4 seconds more than have to manually go through and hit more several times.

As pointed out by pg above, it seems not to. An educated guess (read: wild speculation on my part) indicates that, due to the ranking algorithm of HN (versus Twitter's simple sort, where new things show up first and order never changes) rendering and bandwith time are probably dwarfed by the time required to load and sort all of the comments on all pages to determine what comments show up on the first page.

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

#83

Post by Eliezer » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 8:37 AM UTC

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?

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

#84

Post by Flenser » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 8:58 AM 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.

I think this basically disincentivizes commenting when you know you're going to end up "below the fold".

And incentivises replying to comments above the fold.

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

#85

Post by mambodog » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:00 AM UTC

redthrowaway wrote: post #16

There's a really easy fix to this: Load more comments on scroll-to-bottom. No button, no bandwidth used, but those who make it to the bottom of a thread don't have to do anything to see new comments. I agree with OP; the current system is suboptimal, to say the least.

This still would prevent being able to CTRL/CMD-F for a particular term to see if anyone has mentioned it already, something I do a lot, and I imagine others do too.

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

#86

Post by ratsbane » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:02 AM UTC

forkandwait wrote: post #12

I like plain text emails, terminals, emacs, and I really prefer un-paginated html pages.

Often I read HN with Lynx. The plain HTML here works much better than the markup at most other sites, including Reddit.

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

#87

Post by gokhan » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:07 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #72

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

If you decide to keep it, please keep displaying the header on subsequent pages. Ajax loading the rest on the first page is better, though.

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

#88

Post by rflrob » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:45 AM UTC

jedsmith wrote: post #34

Joakal wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit solves this by hiding poorly ranked comments.

Not quite. That filters out the bad ones, but the underlying problem still remains: people reply to highly-ranked comments with something only tangentially related, or not related at all, in order to put it in front of a wider audience. People then upvote it even though it isn't related because it might be insightful.

> People then upvote it even though it isn't related because it might be insightful.

What if we, as a community, decided that deliberately trying to float with highly rated comments by posting completely unrelated "responses" is not something we'll tolerate, and downvoted violators, regardless of the insightfulness of the comment? Tangential responses are something more of a gray area, but I'm willing to let them be voted upon on their own merits.

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

#89

Post by mnutt » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:49 AM UTC

flatline wrote: post #54

redthrowaway wrote: post #16

There's a really easy fix to this: Load more comments on scroll-to-bottom. No button, no bandwidth used, but those who make it to the bottom of a thread don't have to do anything to see new comments. I agree with OP; the current system is suboptimal, to say the least.

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.

Maybe I'm missing something because I've never seen it before, but has anyone ever tried leaving blank space at the bottom of the first page relative to the total number of comments? It may work better on items of fixed length than comments, but even on comments it would at least make the scrolling a little less jumpy.

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

#90

Post by rflrob » Wed, Jan 19, 2011, 9:55 AM UTC

I, for one, tend not to even read comment threads larger than a certain size, unless I want to see specific reactions to an article. I think jedsmith has it partially right up above when he says "it's about contributing to the conversation", but for me it's also about reading conversations that I can hold in my head. Beyond about 40 comments, I'm not sure I can do this at all.