I was talking with someone about why we did the abridging-comments thing, and realized it was probably better to write up those reasons publicly so others could engage or reference them:
First, quick update: if you type “ctrl-F” or “cmd-F”, it’ll autoexpand all comments (this is so that people trying to search for a given phrase automatically get the behavior they want). [Note: this doesn’t currently expand comments that are collapsed because of low karma, which I currently lean towards changing]
Second: I’m not at all confident the current setup is optimal, but here’s what I was thinking about that led to it:
There’s a few tradeoffs we could make with the comments. Obviously, leaving them expanded-by-default makes it easier to read an entire thread if you’re already committed to doing that.
But auto-expansion is implicitly making a choice on which direction to nudge people. (It’s a different choice depending on whether you’re sorting comments by top karma, or most recent, or oldest). Whichever way you’re sorting comments, default-expanded means that if you’re quickly perusing the thread and _not_ committed to reading through the whole thing, you basically just get to read the first couple conversations, and those conversations aren’t necessarily the ones most relevant to you.
This becomes especially bad on huge threads where it’s just impossible to read everything, but even on a mid-length thread it can get a bit tiresome to read through looking for gems.
This has an effect not just on people’s reading experience, but on what sort of followup-comments we’re incentivizing.
If someone writes a mediocre comment that ends up sorted last, but someone else makes an insightful reply to it, it ends up buried and less engaged with. Meanwhile people sometimes end up replying to a top-karma comment (that has nothing to do with their new comment) just to give it a chance of being seen.
Put another way:
Any choice you make about the comments section will dictate what content people experience in the first minute or so, which in turn shapes what discussions people are incentivized to have, and my current guess is that it’s better to allow a breadth first search (while still providing tools that make expanded all comments pretty easy for people that want that)
Whichever way you’re sorting comments, default-expanded means that if you’re quickly perusing the thread and not committed to reading through the whole thing, you basically just get to read the first couple conversations, and those conversations aren’t necessarily the ones most relevant to you.
I don’t feel like the collapsed comments help with this issue, though—they just make it even less likely that I would read more comments, since reading them requires more work (additional clicks), and if I’m not already invested in it then I’m more likely to just shrug and go do something else after maybe reading a few of the top comments.
Trying to read collapsed comments feels actively annoying: if I was skimming them myself, my brain would automatically determine how much of it I wanted to read, and I could just skim through the whole comment in order to quickly see if there’s anything in it that looks interesting. Not being able to do either of those means that I need to first expand the comment in order to determine whether it’s worth reading. (The only exception to that is if it was a part of a subthread which I’d already determined was uninteresting—in which case I would have used the “hide subthread” feature already.)
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.
Clicking on comment expands all comments below it. We don’t currently expand comments above it because that changes your screen position which can be disorienting, although i could imagine changing my mind about that
By the way, comment permalinks don’t work for comments in collapsed subthreads (example). The anchor should be visible from javascript, so this could be fixed by expanding the subthread and navigating to the anchor.
I was talking with someone about why we did the abridging-comments thing, and realized it was probably better to write up those reasons publicly so others could engage or reference them:
First, quick update: if you type “ctrl-F” or “cmd-F”, it’ll autoexpand all comments (this is so that people trying to search for a given phrase automatically get the behavior they want). [Note: this doesn’t currently expand comments that are collapsed because of low karma, which I currently lean towards changing]
Second: I’m not at all confident the current setup is optimal, but here’s what I was thinking about that led to it:
There’s a few tradeoffs we could make with the comments. Obviously, leaving them expanded-by-default makes it easier to read an entire thread if you’re already committed to doing that.
But auto-expansion is implicitly making a choice on which direction to nudge people. (It’s a different choice depending on whether you’re sorting comments by top karma, or most recent, or oldest). Whichever way you’re sorting comments, default-expanded means that if you’re quickly perusing the thread and _not_ committed to reading through the whole thing, you basically just get to read the first couple conversations, and those conversations aren’t necessarily the ones most relevant to you.
This becomes especially bad on huge threads where it’s just impossible to read everything, but even on a mid-length thread it can get a bit tiresome to read through looking for gems.
This has an effect not just on people’s reading experience, but on what sort of followup-comments we’re incentivizing.
If someone writes a mediocre comment that ends up sorted last, but someone else makes an insightful reply to it, it ends up buried and less engaged with. Meanwhile people sometimes end up replying to a top-karma comment (that has nothing to do with their new comment) just to give it a chance of being seen.
Put another way:
Any choice you make about the comments section will dictate what content people experience in the first minute or so, which in turn shapes what discussions people are incentivized to have, and my current guess is that it’s better to allow a breadth first search (while still providing tools that make expanded all comments pretty easy for people that want that)
I don’t feel like the collapsed comments help with this issue, though—they just make it even less likely that I would read more comments, since reading them requires more work (additional clicks), and if I’m not already invested in it then I’m more likely to just shrug and go do something else after maybe reading a few of the top comments.
Trying to read collapsed comments feels actively annoying: if I was skimming them myself, my brain would automatically determine how much of it I wanted to read, and I could just skim through the whole comment in order to quickly see if there’s anything in it that looks interesting. Not being able to do either of those means that I need to first expand the comment in order to determine whether it’s worth reading. (The only exception to that is if it was a part of a subthread which I’d already determined was uninteresting—in which case I would have used the “hide subthread” feature already.)
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.
Idea: If somebody has expanded several comments, there’s a good chance they want to read the whole thread, so maybe expand all of them.
Clicking on comment expands all comments below it. We don’t currently expand comments above it because that changes your screen position which can be disorienting, although i could imagine changing my mind about that
You don’t currently expand comments that are positioned below the clicked comment but not descendants of it.
Oh, yeah that makes sense.
By the way, comment permalinks don’t work for comments in collapsed subthreads (example). The anchor should be visible from javascript, so this could be fixed by expanding the subthread and navigating to the anchor.