I have now tried this twice, and in neither case did I leave it on for more than about 10 minutes. Votes and poster name are not sufficient for me to know if I want to read a comment, so I have to pretty much roll-over or expand everything.
Skimming and scrolling is _SO MUCH_ easier and faster than that, on both mobile (note: I tend to use 8″ tablet more than actual tiny phone) and desktop. Either hide the not-good-enough comment entirely so I don’t have to think about it, or show enough (maybe first 5 lines) for me to decide if I want to read more.
Or leave it optional—this may simply be a strong preference of mine that others don’t share. Note: calling it “experimental features” is a mistake. Call it “(experimental) collapse most comments by default”. This makes it possible to have multiple experiments running, and allows those of us who hate this one to still participate in other experimental features. The even better middle ground is to have a checkbox for this feature, AND a checkbox for “opt in to new experimental features”, which will cause any future experiments to be turned on until the user turns that experiment off.
It’s good in theory but probably not practical for us to make separate experimental feature checkboxes for every feature set. Experimental features change pretty rapidly, might change names or otherwise get reworked in a way that makes individual checkboxes hard to maintain. (Note that right now the experimental features also do things like show you a new link to the /shortform page on the sidebar.)
But you can probably get what you want by toggling the nearby checkbox “Do not collapse comments on Posts” and/or “Do not collapse comments (on home page)”
(A week ago we also broke the singleLineComments in a way that made them much more annoying, which will hopefully fixed within a day)
I have now tried this twice, and in neither case did I leave it on for more than about 10 minutes. Votes and poster name are not sufficient for me to know if I want to read a comment, so I have to pretty much roll-over or expand everything.
Skimming and scrolling is _SO MUCH_ easier and faster than that, on both mobile (note: I tend to use 8″ tablet more than actual tiny phone) and desktop. Either hide the not-good-enough comment entirely so I don’t have to think about it, or show enough (maybe first 5 lines) for me to decide if I want to read more.
Or leave it optional—this may simply be a strong preference of mine that others don’t share. Note: calling it “experimental features” is a mistake. Call it “(experimental) collapse most comments by default”. This makes it possible to have multiple experiments running, and allows those of us who hate this one to still participate in other experimental features. The even better middle ground is to have a checkbox for this feature, AND a checkbox for “opt in to new experimental features”, which will cause any future experiments to be turned on until the user turns that experiment off.
It’s good in theory but probably not practical for us to make separate experimental feature checkboxes for every feature set. Experimental features change pretty rapidly, might change names or otherwise get reworked in a way that makes individual checkboxes hard to maintain. (Note that right now the experimental features also do things like show you a new link to the /shortform page on the sidebar.)
But you can probably get what you want by toggling the nearby checkbox “Do not collapse comments on Posts” and/or “Do not collapse comments (on home page)”
(A week ago we also broke the singleLineComments in a way that made them much more annoying, which will hopefully fixed within a day)