LW Update 2018-11-22 – Abridged Comments
Haven’t posted an update in a while. We’ve been working on a mixture of bug fixes, small features to support the new AI Alignment Forum, as well as some longer-term, larger features that aren’t quite ready yet.
Abridged Comments
The biggest change that should be visible to most users is our new Comment Abridging system. For posts with lots of comments, by default it now truncates them to make it easier to skim the thread. Clicking anywhere on a comment thread will expand all the comments below that point (so it’s fairly easy to switch from “skim the thread” to “reading it in detail.”)
We’re fine tuning the exact details, but the current setup is:
Comments are abridged-by-default if the post has 25 or more comments. (See the thread from Realism About Rationality for a good example)
If a comment has more than 20 karma, it’s given a higher character count in the abridging. (i.e. instead of cutting it down to 300 characters, it’s cut down to 1000 characters). The idea is that if a newcomer arrives at a large thread, they can quickly get an overview of the discussion, with some sense of which parts of the discussion were most interesting, rather than automatically having their attention directed to whichever discussion was responding to the top-ranked top-level comment.
For right now, you can expand a given subthread by clicking on a comment node. We’re thinking about ways to make it intuitive to expand all comments but hadn’t quite solved the UI for that. (We’re thinking of making it so that typing “command-F” automatically expands everything, so that if you’re searching for a particular comment via a snippet of text the abridging quickly gets out of your way.)
Abridging feels so bad to me that I’d probably just stop reading LW if GW didn’t exist. Thanks to Said :-)
A bunch of us have commented to say how much we hate the comment-abridging “feature”. It would be good to hear from the other side.
Hear ye, hear ye! If you (1) think comment-abridgement is an improvement and (2) aren’t one of the admins responsible for implementing it (whose reasons I think we already know), please comment below and tell us why. Thanks!
I think the abridgement sounds nice but don’t anticipate it affecting me much either way.
I think the ability to turn this on/off in user preferences is a particularly good idea (as mentioned in Raemon’s comment).
I’ve already been whingeing at Ben in PMs about the comment-abridging system; Ben, if you’re reading this, feel free to ignore it since I promised I’d shut up about it :-). Anyway, this is just to go on record as really disliking this “feature”, which I think encourages superficial skimming over careful reading, makes it a big pain to engage fully with what others have said (because you have to expand lots of things separately), and just generally feels to me as if it does nothing I can see why I should actually want.
I agree with Raemon that any choice about how comments behaviour will shape what sort of conversations are had. I think this particular choice will encourage the wrong sort of conversations. And it makes LW harder to read.
Update:
We’ve tweaked a bunch of parameters on the abridging function, and added user settings as a safety valve.
This remains an overall pretty experimental feature, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there turns out be a better way to accomplish the same goals (Taymon had listed a few good contenders). But for the immediate future it should be at least a bit less aggressive.
Comments now load about twice as much content by default.
High karma comments load about 40% more than they previously did.
The threshold for high-karma comment is now 10 instead of 20
Comments from the past two days get the high-karma-truncation-amount
Users have two additional settings, one to turn off truncation on post pages, one to turn off truncation on the home page (where truncation is serving a fairly different purpose)
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.
A thing that occurs to me after using this for a week:
I like being able to skim a thread and have my attention mostly directed to the good comments. However, this somewhat unfairly punishes new comments (which haven’t had a chance to attract karma)
The first 25 comments of a post are on even footing, since the truncation process hasn’t begun yet. But comments that arrive after the 25th will start being somewhat harder to inadvertently skim, and meanwhile the already-upvoted comments will probably continue to get upvoted.
Not sure how big an effect that is, but one possibility is to have new comments get the larger-abridging for about 24 hours.
I want to make my signal here. I don’t like abridged comments.