I was browsing shortform and noticed that a comment was elided (presumably for low score) in a way that made its children appear to be children of its parents. This is really super duper misleading. LW should find some way to indicate that this is not the case, other than the existence of a tiny “show more comments” link that isn’t necessarily even very nearby.
[I have no reason to believe that this was specifically a shortform thing—I assume it will do this elsewhere too. This is just where I discovered it.]
I think this is actually specific to shortform. A couple people have made similar comments.
The /shortform page, each post only shows the 3 most recent replies. It displays an ‘show parent’ icon if there are intermediate replies between comment and the top-level comment, but it’s still a bit confusing.
I can imagine coming up with better UI for this. I don’t think it makes sense to show the entire comment tree, because the whole point is let you skim for conversations that are interesting and then dive into them (and having to read through 5 different 50-comment-length discussions could get quite unwieldy). But maybe there’s a way to more clearly showcase that the comments aren’t (necessarily) direct descendants of the parent.
But my experience with facebook (which did a similar thing a couple years back) was that initially I was like ‘aaaah facebook why are you only showing me a part of the conversation?”, but I then quickly learned ‘ah, actually it’s not that hard to click to expand the conversation, and now that I know to do that it’s actually useful to be able to skim for conversations that look interesting and then dive into them.’
(Facebook does an additional annoying thing of hyper-optimize for the most exciting comments, rather than showing the most recent discussion, which makes it harder to track what’s going on. But I think we could just… not do that)
I have some thoughts on how to locally improve the UI (such as making the “load more comments” button much more prominent), and if those prove insufficient can looking into a more serious overhaul.
Facebook does not in any way have the specific problem I’m pointing to here, which is that the nesting structure of the comments is misrepresented. Facebook never elides a comment while showing a direct child of that comment. Of course, facebook only supports a single level of comment nesting, so it does sometimes elide a comment while showing a same-level reply. But I think that does not appear misleading, both because (1) fb users are thus accustomed to a reply-looking comment NOT being a reply to the thing it’s displayed under, and (2) the ‘show more’ link is DIRECTLY in the place where the eye goes searching for the missing comment, not in some unrelated location down below.
(EDIT: Another thing I realized while composing my other comment: If you use the ‘reply’ button on facebook, and you’re replying to a reply to a comment, so that you generate a same-level reply, it will be prefixed with the name of the person you’re replying to. So at worst I will see a comment starting with “B: (reply to b)” nested under a comment by person A, which is another cue that the intermediate comment has been hidden.)
Dunno, when FB first introduced that UI I found it quite confusing. (i.e. FB only has two thread levels, but prior to this UI change, you could reliably expect a comment in a given thread level to be preceded by the preceding comment).
I agree that if we can avoid the confusion it’s preferable to do that (I think showing the nesting levels may be the correct approach, it requires a bit more dev-time than some of the other options so it may take awhile longer)
Also note that the comments I assume you’re looking at do have an “show parent” icon on them (which comments normally don’t have). [this isn’t an argument that the status quo is okay, I’m just sort of pedantically arguing that the status quo isn’t much more confusing that FB was when it introduced it’s own truncation scheme]
I do see the “show parent” icon, now that you have pointed it out, and I have viewed a short-form post with missing comments, expanded the comments, then explicitly gone back and looked for the comments I knew were missing. I would say that it is extremely subtle. I couldn’t find it, even when I was looking for it, until I knew exactly which comment to look for it on.
I think (absent a more-code solution) a reasonable thing would be to replace the tiny subtle icon with text like “(… parent comment omitted, click to show …)” (presumably on a line by itself above the current top line.)
Right now I claim there is really no indication that a comment is missing unless the reader is extremely familiar with the interface, and even then it’s tiny and would be easy to miss even if you knew where to look.
I think displaying this in a non-misleading fashion would be pretty easy—just display the divs for any intermediate elided comments, but with no content in them. Then the nesting will be visible. You could display their content as ‘...’ or ‘show comment’ or whatever if you wanted, but I think the minimal solution without that would totally solve the problem where I claim the current display is super misleading about the context of comments.
(The most severe example of the thing I’m pointing to would be something like:
> A: I hate puppies, kick them all!
> B: You are a terrible person!
> C: I agree completely.
being rendered as:
> A: I hate puppies, kick them all!
> C: I agree completely.
with no direct indication that anything is missing. The example that prompted me to complain was not at this level of severity but the out-of-context reply was jarring and confusing.)
Bug report copied from a FB comment I made:
I was browsing shortform and noticed that a comment was elided (presumably for low score) in a way that made its children appear to be children of its parents. This is really super duper misleading. LW should find some way to indicate that this is not the case, other than the existence of a tiny “show more comments” link that isn’t necessarily even very nearby.
[I have no reason to believe that this was specifically a shortform thing—I assume it will do this elsewhere too. This is just where I discovered it.]
I think this is actually specific to shortform. A couple people have made similar comments.
The /shortform page, each post only shows the 3 most recent replies. It displays an ‘show parent’ icon if there are intermediate replies between comment and the top-level comment, but it’s still a bit confusing.
I can imagine coming up with better UI for this. I don’t think it makes sense to show the entire comment tree, because the whole point is let you skim for conversations that are interesting and then dive into them (and having to read through 5 different 50-comment-length discussions could get quite unwieldy). But maybe there’s a way to more clearly showcase that the comments aren’t (necessarily) direct descendants of the parent.
But my experience with facebook (which did a similar thing a couple years back) was that initially I was like ‘aaaah facebook why are you only showing me a part of the conversation?”, but I then quickly learned ‘ah, actually it’s not that hard to click to expand the conversation, and now that I know to do that it’s actually useful to be able to skim for conversations that look interesting and then dive into them.’
(Facebook does an additional annoying thing of hyper-optimize for the most exciting comments, rather than showing the most recent discussion, which makes it harder to track what’s going on. But I think we could just… not do that)
I have some thoughts on how to locally improve the UI (such as making the “load more comments” button much more prominent), and if those prove insufficient can looking into a more serious overhaul.
Facebook does not in any way have the specific problem I’m pointing to here, which is that the nesting structure of the comments is misrepresented. Facebook never elides a comment while showing a direct child of that comment. Of course, facebook only supports a single level of comment nesting, so it does sometimes elide a comment while showing a same-level reply. But I think that does not appear misleading, both because (1) fb users are thus accustomed to a reply-looking comment NOT being a reply to the thing it’s displayed under, and (2) the ‘show more’ link is DIRECTLY in the place where the eye goes searching for the missing comment, not in some unrelated location down below.
(EDIT: Another thing I realized while composing my other comment: If you use the ‘reply’ button on facebook, and you’re replying to a reply to a comment, so that you generate a same-level reply, it will be prefixed with the name of the person you’re replying to. So at worst I will see a comment starting with “B: (reply to b)” nested under a comment by person A, which is another cue that the intermediate comment has been hidden.)
Dunno, when FB first introduced that UI I found it quite confusing. (i.e. FB only has two thread levels, but prior to this UI change, you could reliably expect a comment in a given thread level to be preceded by the preceding comment).
I agree that if we can avoid the confusion it’s preferable to do that (I think showing the nesting levels may be the correct approach, it requires a bit more dev-time than some of the other options so it may take awhile longer)
Also note that the comments I assume you’re looking at do have an “show parent” icon on them (which comments normally don’t have). [this isn’t an argument that the status quo is okay, I’m just sort of pedantically arguing that the status quo isn’t much more confusing that FB was when it introduced it’s own truncation scheme]
I do see the “show parent” icon, now that you have pointed it out, and I have viewed a short-form post with missing comments, expanded the comments, then explicitly gone back and looked for the comments I knew were missing. I would say that it is extremely subtle. I couldn’t find it, even when I was looking for it, until I knew exactly which comment to look for it on.
I think (absent a more-code solution) a reasonable thing would be to replace the tiny subtle icon with text like “(… parent comment omitted, click to show …)” (presumably on a line by itself above the current top line.)
Right now I claim there is really no indication that a comment is missing unless the reader is extremely familiar with the interface, and even then it’s tiny and would be easy to miss even if you knew where to look.
I think displaying this in a non-misleading fashion would be pretty easy—just display the divs for any intermediate elided comments, but with no content in them. Then the nesting will be visible. You could display their content as ‘...’ or ‘show comment’ or whatever if you wanted, but I think the minimal solution without that would totally solve the problem where I claim the current display is super misleading about the context of comments.
(The most severe example of the thing I’m pointing to would be something like:
being rendered as:
with no direct indication that anything is missing. The example that prompted me to complain was not at this level of severity but the out-of-context reply was jarring and confusing.)