I fear that this system doesn’t actually provide the benefits of a breadth-first search, because you can’t really read half a comment. If I scroll down a comment page without uncollapsing it, I don’t feel like I got much of a picture of what anyone actually said, and also repeatedly seeing what people are saying cut off midsentence is really cognitively distracting.
Reddit (and I think other sites, but on Reddit I know I’ve experienced this) makes threads skimmable by showing a relatively small number of comments, rather than a small snippet of each comment. At least in my experience, this actually works, in that I’ve skimmed threads this way and felt like I got a good picture of the overall gist of the thread without having to read every comment.
I know you don’t like Reddit’s algorithm because it feeds the Matthew effect. But if most comments were hidden entirely and only a few were shown, you could optimize directly for whatever it is you’re trying to do, by tweaking the algorithm that determines which comments to show. As a degenerate example, if you wanted to optimize for strict egalitarianism, you could just show a uniform random sample of comments.
Hmm, nod. The original version of the truncation did actually do something more similar to that, but it came with a different set of technical challenges and annoyances and at the time it had seemed to me that the truncation system would be less annoying. (I thought “not being able to see comments at all” and thus not knowing what the thread structure even looked like” would be worse)
I am curious whether the various people who’ve expressed dislike of the abridgment would feel fine with a version that showers fewer comments rather than less-of-each-comment.
I fear that this system doesn’t actually provide the benefits of a breadth-first search, because you can’t really read half a comment. If I scroll down a comment page without uncollapsing it, I don’t feel like I got much of a picture of what anyone actually said, and also repeatedly seeing what people are saying cut off midsentence is really cognitively distracting.
Reddit (and I think other sites, but on Reddit I know I’ve experienced this) makes threads skimmable by showing a relatively small number of comments, rather than a small snippet of each comment. At least in my experience, this actually works, in that I’ve skimmed threads this way and felt like I got a good picture of the overall gist of the thread without having to read every comment.
I know you don’t like Reddit’s algorithm because it feeds the Matthew effect. But if most comments were hidden entirely and only a few were shown, you could optimize directly for whatever it is you’re trying to do, by tweaking the algorithm that determines which comments to show. As a degenerate example, if you wanted to optimize for strict egalitarianism, you could just show a uniform random sample of comments.
Hmm, nod. The original version of the truncation did actually do something more similar to that, but it came with a different set of technical challenges and annoyances and at the time it had seemed to me that the truncation system would be less annoying. (I thought “not being able to see comments at all” and thus not knowing what the thread structure even looked like” would be worse)
I am curious whether the various people who’ve expressed dislike of the abridgment would feel fine with a version that showers fewer comments rather than less-of-each-comment.