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.
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.