A couple of meta-notes about shortform content and the frontpage “comments” section:
It always felt weird to me to have the comments as their own section on the frontpage, but I could never quite figure out why. Well, I think I’ve figured it out: most comments are extremely context-dependent—without having read the post one usually can’t understand a top-level comment, and it’s even worse for comments that are in the middle of a long thread. So having them all aggregated together feels not particularly useful because the usual optimal reading order is to read the post, then read the comments on that post, so getting to the comments from the post is better than getting to them from a general comments-aggregator. I have found it more useful than I thought I would, however, for 1.) discovering posts I otherwise wouldn’t have because I’m intrigued by one of the comments and want to understand the context, and 2.) discovering new comments on posts I’ve already read but wouldn’t have thought to check back for new comments on (I think this is probably the best use-case).
Note that comments on dedicated shortform-content posts like this one don’t have this problem (or at least have it to a lesser degree) because they’re supposed to be standalone posts, rather than building on the assumptions and framework laid out in a top-level post.
So, a way I think this shortform-content format could be expanded is if we had a tagging system similar to the one that was recently implemented in the section for top-level posts, but in particular with a tag that filters for all comments on posts with “shortform” in the title (that is to say, it doesn’t show posts with “shortform” in the title, but rather it shows any comment that was made on a post with “shortform” in the title). That way, not only can anybody create one of these shortform feeds, but people can see these shortform posts without having to sort through all the regular comments, which differ from shortform posts in the way I outlined above.
Roughly agreed (at least with the underlying issues).
We have some vague plans for what I think are strict-improvements over the current status quo (on the front page, making it so you can quickly see all new comments from a given post, and making it so that you can easily see the parents of a comment on the frontpage to get more context), as well as more complex solutions roughly-in-the-direction of what you suggest in the third bullet point (although with different implementation details).
A couple of meta-notes about shortform content and the frontpage “comments” section:
It always felt weird to me to have the comments as their own section on the frontpage, but I could never quite figure out why. Well, I think I’ve figured it out: most comments are extremely context-dependent—without having read the post one usually can’t understand a top-level comment, and it’s even worse for comments that are in the middle of a long thread. So having them all aggregated together feels not particularly useful because the usual optimal reading order is to read the post, then read the comments on that post, so getting to the comments from the post is better than getting to them from a general comments-aggregator. I have found it more useful than I thought I would, however, for 1.) discovering posts I otherwise wouldn’t have because I’m intrigued by one of the comments and want to understand the context, and 2.) discovering new comments on posts I’ve already read but wouldn’t have thought to check back for new comments on (I think this is probably the best use-case).
Note that comments on dedicated shortform-content posts like this one don’t have this problem (or at least have it to a lesser degree) because they’re supposed to be standalone posts, rather than building on the assumptions and framework laid out in a top-level post.
So, a way I think this shortform-content format could be expanded is if we had a tagging system similar to the one that was recently implemented in the section for top-level posts, but in particular with a tag that filters for all comments on posts with “shortform” in the title (that is to say, it doesn’t show posts with “shortform” in the title, but rather it shows any comment that was made on a post with “shortform” in the title). That way, not only can anybody create one of these shortform feeds, but people can see these shortform posts without having to sort through all the regular comments, which differ from shortform posts in the way I outlined above.
Roughly agreed (at least with the underlying issues).
We have some vague plans for what I think are strict-improvements over the current status quo (on the front page, making it so you can quickly see all new comments from a given post, and making it so that you can easily see the parents of a comment on the frontpage to get more context), as well as more complex solutions roughly-in-the-direction of what you suggest in the third bullet point (although with different implementation details).