First, again, by the time this rolls out (if it rolls out) there’ll be a pretty prominent checkbox for “don’t collapse things”, so you won’t be forced to view things this way (and this’ll more prominent that the current user option is)
(The following is just explaining why I prefer the SingleLineComment setup, or something close to it, not trying to explain why your preferences are wrong. :P)
The frame for why I think this is important is not “I want to find information about a particular thing.” It’s “I want to explore a few different options for what to dive into, and then pick the tastiest option depending on what mood I’m in.” (There is a shared assumption between these frames that there is too much information to consume it all. Do you actually just read every comment on a thread and find it valuable, or every comment in RecentDiscussion?)
The intent is not that you use single-line comments to do that. Rather, single-line comments are intended to make lower-karma comments fade into the background, so you can do a breadth first sample of discussions that are more likely to be interesting.
In the case of RecentDiscussion, one comment per post is expanded enough to get a sense of what’s going on in the conversation, and you get to see if particular authors have commented that you tend to like reading. And if the most recent posts are all things you’re not interested in,
Restaurant metaphor
To me, the default, fully expanded version of RecentDiscussion, or posts with big comment sections like this one, feels like going to a restaurant where there is no menu. The way I find out what’s available to eat is to walk to a table that has the first item on the menu, decide whether it’s good enough to stop and start eating. And if not, walk to the next table and do it again. And repeat for 100 tables.
Whereas a good menu a) lets you peruse a high level of what sort of items are available, b) usually shows you a picture of the items that are particular specialties of the restaurant in question. And then if none of those appeal to you you can read through the rest of the list.
One thing that might not be obvious is that, on posts with 50+ comments, comments that are unread-since-your-last-visit are fully expanded by default. The assumption is that you’re either arriving at a giant comment thread where it probably makes sense to first glance at the 4 most upvoted conversations (which might be deep in an otherwise mediocre comment thread), or you’re catching up on existing discussion (whereupon getting to the latest comments probably makes most sense)
(by contrast, collapsing things as I go doesn’t help with any of that)
I typed that on mobile so couldn’t explain more, but I think there’s no need to automatically collapse comments, if you just make the comments take up the whole width of the browser window, and highlight the comments with high karma. This way the user can easily browse through lots of comments by just scrolling down, and choose which comments direct their eyes at, without having to click on anything.
(The automatic collapse feature might still be useful on smaller screens.)
If comments took up the whole width of my browser window, I would find them acutely unpleasant to read. I like my text fairly small and I have my window full-screen; text becomes difficult to read when each line is more than about 15-20 words. (The exact figure depends on size, personal preference, how long those words are, line spacing, etc.)
Yes, I _do_ tend to read every comment on a thread. Or, sometimes, none, but usually if I’m bothering even to look at the comments on a post then I’m going to look at them all.
I don’t eat at restaurants with literally no menu. If a restaurant has a large intimidating menu, I read it all anyway; if I visit it a few times I will get to know what I like. I won’t be helped by a menu that says “Something containing chicken. Something containing turmeric. Something roughly round in shape.” which is roughly what the collapsed comments provide. The menu is only useful in so far as it (together with my past experience, the overall look of the place, etc.) gives me a good enough mental picture of each dish to have a good idea whether I’ll like it.
(An important distinction between visiting a restaurant and visiting Less Wrong: When I go to a restaurant, typically I intend to each a roughly fixed, fairly small number of dishes. I don’t generally go to LW with the intention of reading three comments and then leaving. I don’t so much mind there being no menu if what there is instead is a great multitude of little snacks I can try dozens of without feeling ill.)
Collapsed comments don’t (for me; I must stress that I’m not claiming to speak for anyone else) give me any useful view of what’s available; seeing the first few words of a comment tells me little, and I try not to prejudge things too much on the basis of author or score.
Expanding comments that are new since you last visited is a good idea. If I could get that (on all posts, not just ones with 50+ comments; why would I want that restriction) without any collapsing of comments I haven’t read yet, that would probably be useful. I’m interested in tools that let me read all the comments efficiently. I’m interested in tools that help me decide which comments are worthy of more attention. I am not interested in tools that try to decide for me which comments I will want to read. If I want that then I can go and read Facebook with “top stories” mode turned on instead of LW.
Sure. But the thing I was saying might be useful (which, I understand, has nothing to speak of in common with what’s on offer right now) is auto-collapsing all comments I can be presumed to have read or decided not to bother reading on the grounds that they were already there the last time I visited the discussion. That would be useful even on posts with <=50 comments. (At least, it would be useful there if useful at all; it might be that I’m wrong in thinking it would be useful.)
Perhaps another question – so long as comments are expanded like normal, is there anything you feel like you-in-particular are lacking re: the “be able to read all the comments easily” thing?
(Curious how to related to Recent Discussion in particular – do you use that part of the site?)
I’m not feeling any glaring lacks. Of course it’s possible that there are possible changes that once made would be obvious improvements :-).
I do use the “recent discussion” section. I actually don’t mind the collapsing there—it’s not trying to present the whole of any discussion, and clearly space is at a big premium there, so collapsing might not be a bad tradeoff.
Nod. That’s where I found single line comments most important and the use case I originally designed them for. (And then I was actually a bit surprised when I turned out to prefer them on lower-karma comments on large comment sections, without much modification)
(One of my imary motivations for SingleLine comments on RecentDiscussion is so that Shortform has a chance of actually getting seen. If I have to read each comment in order, I have a very tiny window to catch if an author I like has written anything interesting, or a new author has started writing good stuff)
First, again, by the time this rolls out (if it rolls out) there’ll be a pretty prominent checkbox for “don’t collapse things”, so you won’t be forced to view things this way (and this’ll more prominent that the current user option is)
(The following is just explaining why I prefer the SingleLineComment setup, or something close to it, not trying to explain why your preferences are wrong. :P)
The frame for why I think this is important is not “I want to find information about a particular thing.” It’s “I want to explore a few different options for what to dive into, and then pick the tastiest option depending on what mood I’m in.” (There is a shared assumption between these frames that there is too much information to consume it all. Do you actually just read every comment on a thread and find it valuable, or every comment in RecentDiscussion?)
The intent is not that you use single-line comments to do that. Rather, single-line comments are intended to make lower-karma comments fade into the background, so you can do a breadth first sample of discussions that are more likely to be interesting.
In the case of RecentDiscussion, one comment per post is expanded enough to get a sense of what’s going on in the conversation, and you get to see if particular authors have commented that you tend to like reading. And if the most recent posts are all things you’re not interested in,
Restaurant metaphor
To me, the default, fully expanded version of RecentDiscussion, or posts with big comment sections like this one, feels like going to a restaurant where there is no menu. The way I find out what’s available to eat is to walk to a table that has the first item on the menu, decide whether it’s good enough to stop and start eating. And if not, walk to the next table and do it again. And repeat for 100 tables.
Whereas a good menu a) lets you peruse a high level of what sort of items are available, b) usually shows you a picture of the items that are particular specialties of the restaurant in question. And then if none of those appeal to you you can read through the rest of the list.
One thing that might not be obvious is that, on posts with 50+ comments, comments that are unread-since-your-last-visit are fully expanded by default. The assumption is that you’re either arriving at a giant comment thread where it probably makes sense to first glance at the 4 most upvoted conversations (which might be deep in an otherwise mediocre comment thread), or you’re catching up on existing discussion (whereupon getting to the latest comments probably makes most sense)
(by contrast, collapsing things as I go doesn’t help with any of that)
Have you seen my code for doing this back in LW1? It’s not working now for obvious reasons, but you can take a look the screenshot to get an idea.
Oh cool, did not know about that.
I typed that on mobile so couldn’t explain more, but I think there’s no need to automatically collapse comments, if you just make the comments take up the whole width of the browser window, and highlight the comments with high karma. This way the user can easily browse through lots of comments by just scrolling down, and choose which comments direct their eyes at, without having to click on anything.
(The automatic collapse feature might still be useful on smaller screens.)
If comments took up the whole width of my browser window, I would find them acutely unpleasant to read. I like my text fairly small and I have my window full-screen; text becomes difficult to read when each line is more than about 15-20 words. (The exact figure depends on size, personal preference, how long those words are, line spacing, etc.)
Yes, I _do_ tend to read every comment on a thread. Or, sometimes, none, but usually if I’m bothering even to look at the comments on a post then I’m going to look at them all.
I don’t eat at restaurants with literally no menu. If a restaurant has a large intimidating menu, I read it all anyway; if I visit it a few times I will get to know what I like. I won’t be helped by a menu that says “Something containing chicken. Something containing turmeric. Something roughly round in shape.” which is roughly what the collapsed comments provide. The menu is only useful in so far as it (together with my past experience, the overall look of the place, etc.) gives me a good enough mental picture of each dish to have a good idea whether I’ll like it.
(An important distinction between visiting a restaurant and visiting Less Wrong: When I go to a restaurant, typically I intend to each a roughly fixed, fairly small number of dishes. I don’t generally go to LW with the intention of reading three comments and then leaving. I don’t so much mind there being no menu if what there is instead is a great multitude of little snacks I can try dozens of without feeling ill.)
Collapsed comments don’t (for me; I must stress that I’m not claiming to speak for anyone else) give me any useful view of what’s available; seeing the first few words of a comment tells me little, and I try not to prejudge things too much on the basis of author or score.
Expanding comments that are new since you last visited is a good idea. If I could get that (on all posts, not just ones with 50+ comments; why would I want that restriction) without any collapsing of comments I haven’t read yet, that would probably be useful. I’m interested in tools that let me read all the comments efficiently. I’m interested in tools that help me decide which comments are worthy of more attention. I am not interested in tools that try to decide for me which comments I will want to read. If I want that then I can go and read Facebook with “top stories” mode turned on instead of LW.
To clarify, only posts with 50+ comments have collapsed comments, so it wouldn’t make sense to expand comments on posts with less than 50 comments)
Sure. But the thing I was saying might be useful (which, I understand, has nothing to speak of in common with what’s on offer right now) is auto-collapsing all comments I can be presumed to have read or decided not to bother reading on the grounds that they were already there the last time I visited the discussion. That would be useful even on posts with <=50 comments. (At least, it would be useful there if useful at all; it might be that I’m wrong in thinking it would be useful.)
Ah, yeah that makes sense.
Perhaps another question – so long as comments are expanded like normal, is there anything you feel like you-in-particular are lacking re: the “be able to read all the comments easily” thing?
(Curious how to related to Recent Discussion in particular – do you use that part of the site?)
I’m not feeling any glaring lacks. Of course it’s possible that there are possible changes that once made would be obvious improvements :-).
I do use the “recent discussion” section. I actually don’t mind the collapsing there—it’s not trying to present the whole of any discussion, and clearly space is at a big premium there, so collapsing might not be a bad tradeoff.
Nod. That’s where I found single line comments most important and the use case I originally designed them for. (And then I was actually a bit surprised when I turned out to prefer them on lower-karma comments on large comment sections, without much modification)
(One of my imary motivations for SingleLine comments on RecentDiscussion is so that Shortform has a chance of actually getting seen. If I have to read each comment in order, I have a very tiny window to catch if an author I like has written anything interesting, or a new author has started writing good stuff)