They’re more like inconveniences, but still.
1. I’ve set my account setting to display “magical algorithm” comments, but when I read posts I still see them in the order of “oldest”. I guess that’s because of a discrepancy between those drop-down options: in 1 it’s “top scored”, in another it’s “magical”.
2. The truncation of comments works, but sometimes I find it actually making them longer.
Example: the site displays someone’s comment: blah blah blah therefore your argument is i… (Read more) (Click to expand thread. Ctrl F to expand all).
I click Read more. Now it is: blah blah blah therefore your argument is invalid.
So I guess your algorithm of how to display comments looks something like this (pardon my below expression, I’m not a programmer at all):
If [comment_length] >150
then display [1st 150 characters of comment] and [...(Read more) (Click to expand thread. Ctrl F to expand all)]
This leads to the problem as described above. When a comment is 157 char long, for example, this truncate method actually increases the length displayed AND leaves readers like me with a weird feeling after clicking.
Here I propose a solution within my ability of thinking:
If [comment_length] >150
then display [1st 75 characters of comment] and [...(Read more) (Click to expand thread. Ctrl F to expand all)]
So… have those 2 minor things above been mentioned before? If not, I’d like to report. If yes, then are you going to look into them and when can they be changed? :)
Can you link to a particular comment that does the awkward truncation thing? Our truncation process is supposed to address that using a method similar to what you describe. But if you give me a working example I can look into it.
re: “Magical Algorithm” vs “Oldest”: what you’re problem running into here is a hard-coded edgecase. Very Old Posts were published before LessWrong had a threading system (or indeed, before LessWrong even existed – originally published on OvercomingBias.com). In those cases, some old comments actually only make sense if read in chronological order, and we override the usual settings.
Here you are: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-lights?commentId=wqTug9AggXcKxfgXt
Or https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/48WeP7oTec3kBEada/two-more-things-to-unlearn-from-school?commentId=Keof7iH7obZsRuM2B