Does the current LW design let one find the All Comments page, or is this feature no longer intended to be used? I couldn’t find any mention of it. I’m a bit worried, since this is the main way in which I’ve always interacted with the site. (Thankfully this is available on GreaterWrong as a primary feature.)
(Incidentally, an issue I have with the current implementation of All Comments is that negatively voted comments disappear and there is no way of getting them to show. IIRC they used to show in a collapsed form, but now they are just absent. A harder-to-settle and less important issue is that reading multiple days’ worth of comments is inconvenient, because there are no URLs for enumerating pages of older comments. GreaterWrong has neither of these issues.)
It’s not promoted as a first-class feature since most people don’t have enough time to read quite so many comments, and need more filtering, but some people requested it and use it, and the code-implementation is simple, so it won’t be going away.
The reason negatively-voted comments don’t appear is because it once shared code with the All Posts page, which has a checkbox for controlling that, but it doesn’t have a checkbox wired up. GitHub issue: https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2/issues/2415 . Hiding negative-karma content used to be important because the most-recent content was often spam, and displaying it in between when it was posted and when the mods deleted it made for a bad experience; but we now have enough other anti-spam measures in place that this isn’t really a concern.
The way pagination is currently handled is something we inherited from our framework, which is pretty suboptimal. At some point we’re going to redo the way pagination is handled, not for allComments in particular but at a lower level which will affect multiple places, allComments included. This is likely to be awhile, though, since it’s a somewhat involved piece of development and there are more important things in the queue in front of it.
We definitely should make an overall better pagination system. And given how tucked away it is and that it’s probably used mostly by power-users who want to read everything I probably agree it should show negative karma comments.
I agree that /allComments should be linked from _somewhere_ although no, it’s not meant to be a primary use case. We switched to the Recent Discussion setup because “show all comments in order” naturally creates cascading effects where a single huge thread becomes even more huge because it’s the only thing most readers see in the comments section.
Most users don’t read through every single comment. It probably makes sense to me to have a section that works well for dedicated power-user-comment readers, but I expect it’d be a feature that maybe 5-20 people would use total. (If I turned out to be wrong about that I might prioritize it higher)
Most users don’t read through every single comment. [...] dedicated power-user-comment readers [...]
This is not my use case. I mostly skim based on the author, post title, and votes. I don’t want to miss certain things, but I’m also completely ignoring (not reading) most discussions.
FYI, a feature I expect to build in the not-too-distant future is “subscribe to author”, which might address that particular use case more directly. Curious if that feels like it’s pointing in a direction that’s useful to you.
Not unless the traffic increases severalfold where it would be too much trouble to even skim everything. Skimming the content can turn up interesting things from unfamiliar authors under uninterestingly titled topics, and this can’t be recovered by going subscription-only.
I am still planning on supporting the All Comments page, though I don’t currently have a good sense from where we should link to it. I feel like we already have a lot of stuff in the side-navigation, and adding an additional link probably wouldn’t be worth the cost, though it obviously depends on how many people would use something like the All Comments page.
Agree that there should be an option to show negatively voted comments.
Does the current LW design let one find the All Comments page, or is this feature no longer intended to be used? I couldn’t find any mention of it. I’m a bit worried, since this is the main way in which I’ve always interacted with the site. (Thankfully this is available on GreaterWrong as a primary feature.)
(Incidentally, an issue I have with the current implementation of All Comments is that negatively voted comments disappear and there is no way of getting them to show. IIRC they used to show in a collapsed form, but now they are just absent. A harder-to-settle and less important issue is that reading multiple days’ worth of comments is inconvenient, because there are no URLs for enumerating pages of older comments. GreaterWrong has neither of these issues.)
It’s not promoted as a first-class feature since most people don’t have enough time to read quite so many comments, and need more filtering, but some people requested it and use it, and the code-implementation is simple, so it won’t be going away.
The reason negatively-voted comments don’t appear is because it once shared code with the All Posts page, which has a checkbox for controlling that, but it doesn’t have a checkbox wired up. GitHub issue: https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2/issues/2415 . Hiding negative-karma content used to be important because the most-recent content was often spam, and displaying it in between when it was posted and when the mods deleted it made for a bad experience; but we now have enough other anti-spam measures in place that this isn’t really a concern.
The way pagination is currently handled is something we inherited from our framework, which is pretty suboptimal. At some point we’re going to redo the way pagination is handled, not for allComments in particular but at a lower level which will affect multiple places, allComments included. This is likely to be awhile, though, since it’s a somewhat involved piece of development and there are more important things in the queue in front of it.
We definitely should make an overall better pagination system. And given how tucked away it is and that it’s probably used mostly by power-users who want to read everything I probably agree it should show negative karma comments.
I agree that /allComments should be linked from _somewhere_ although no, it’s not meant to be a primary use case. We switched to the Recent Discussion setup because “show all comments in order” naturally creates cascading effects where a single huge thread becomes even more huge because it’s the only thing most readers see in the comments section.
Most users don’t read through every single comment. It probably makes sense to me to have a section that works well for dedicated power-user-comment readers, but I expect it’d be a feature that maybe 5-20 people would use total. (If I turned out to be wrong about that I might prioritize it higher)
This is not my use case. I mostly skim based on the author, post title, and votes. I don’t want to miss certain things, but I’m also completely ignoring (not reading) most discussions.
FYI, a feature I expect to build in the not-too-distant future is “subscribe to author”, which might address that particular use case more directly. Curious if that feels like it’s pointing in a direction that’s useful to you.
Not unless the traffic increases severalfold where it would be too much trouble to even skim everything. Skimming the content can turn up interesting things from unfamiliar authors under uninterestingly titled topics, and this can’t be recovered by going subscription-only.
I am still planning on supporting the All Comments page, though I don’t currently have a good sense from where we should link to it. I feel like we already have a lot of stuff in the side-navigation, and adding an additional link probably wouldn’t be worth the cost, though it obviously depends on how many people would use something like the All Comments page.
Agree that there should be an option to show negatively voted comments.