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Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

news.ycombinator.com

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

#91

Post by akkartik »

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?

I suspect the bottleneck isn't cost so much as the mental bandwidth to switch hosts, etc. It would be a context switch for PG/RTM/bringing someone else up to speed on arc. HN's just naturally lagging other priorities.

---

Farther in the future: HN's arc webserver uses simple flat files for storage, so moving from one host to two is probably a big context switch as well. I wonder what the current server's specs are, and how long we have until that kinda-sorta-Y2K-like barrier.

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

#92

Post by redthrowaway »

mambodog wrote: post #85
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.

This is true, but a little bit of js would take care of that.

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

#93

Post by redthrowaway »

1337p337 wrote: post #81
marshray wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Those problems you listed are implementation-specific, and not necessary conditions of the feature.

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

#94

Post by axod »

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?

or rewrite it in a more efficient language/runtime would likely have more effect.

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

#95

Post by bendtheblock »

jedsmith wrote: post #7
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.

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…

If performance is an issue, some sort of lazy load would be better, so just before you reach the bottom of the page more comments are loaded.

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

#97

Post by repsilat »

jedsmith wrote: post #36
zbanks wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how reddit works exactly, but I notice that they generally have a few "hidden" comments in the tree. I assume this is to prevent this phenomenon. If your comment is significantly worse than the rest of an active thread, it shouldn't be prominently displayed.

The 'hidden' comments are based on a per-user threshold. My brief Reddit experience improved significantly when I raised said threshold.

I agree that there's a lot of fluff on Reddit, but I don't think I agree with your solution. I find a lot of good, technical comments end up quite a way down the page in more detailed discussions between users who are more interested in the subject matter than having a conversation (or having their joke voted up the page.)

Really, I wish Reddit had something closer to Slashdot's moderation categorisation to filter on. Filtering out "funny" comments would be nice. Ignoring votes cast by people who just want to register their agreement or disagreement would be an incredible, impossible goal.

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

#98

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

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.

Ironic that PG's definitive reply is now below the fold:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118936

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

#100

Post by jasonkester »

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 about other comments that had scrolled off the 1st page, thus demonstrating that there must indeed be a 2nd page and that I should look harder for a way to find it.

Had I been able to find (and therefore read) the whole discussion on those topics yesterday, I might have had interesting things to add. So might all the other people who missed them for the same reason. I suspect that the overall quality of discussion has taken a dip since this feature went live.

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