There’s a no-free-lunch problem with sorting comments; everything that we display pushes other things further down the page, hiding them from people who don’t scroll that far (and very few people scroll all the way to the bottom). In practice, a lot of features that superficially seem like hiding things, like truncating long comments behind a Read More click, actually do the opposite, preventing things from being hidden. The tradeoffs are inescapable.
(Including the tradeoff with development time, which is why there aren’t more customization options. There is an accessible API, an open GitHub repo, and a third-party client, though, if you’re into that sort of thing.)
There’s a no-free-lunch problem with sorting comments
Absolutely, for anyone that doesn’t read all comments. Hence: option.
Human preferences are many-dimensional. Everyone is an outlier in something. Something that targets the median in all dimensions results in something that works well in all dimensions for (almost) nobody.
(Including the tradeoff with development time, which is why there aren’t more customization options. There is an accessible API, an open GitHub repo, and a third-party client, though, if you’re into that sort of thing.)
I’ve been burnt one too many times by site APIs being disabled or neutered over time by websites that formerly had open APIs to really want to head down that path.
(Also, “if you want anything build your own frontend[1]” is an interesting answer to ‘why isn’t LessWrong more popular[2]’. I find this site clunky in general, and I am here largely despite it. I wonder how many people[3] end up simply leaving instead.)
There’s a no-free-lunch problem with sorting comments; everything that we display pushes other things further down the page, hiding them from people who don’t scroll that far (and very few people scroll all the way to the bottom). In practice, a lot of features that superficially seem like hiding things, like truncating long comments behind a Read More click, actually do the opposite, preventing things from being hidden. The tradeoffs are inescapable.
(Including the tradeoff with development time, which is why there aren’t more customization options. There is an accessible API, an open GitHub repo, and a third-party client, though, if you’re into that sort of thing.)
Absolutely, for anyone that doesn’t read all comments. Hence: option.
Human preferences are many-dimensional. Everyone is an outlier in something. Something that targets the median in all dimensions results in something that works well in all dimensions for (almost) nobody.
I’ve been burnt one too many times by site APIs being disabled or neutered over time by websites that formerly had open APIs to really want to head down that path.
(Also, “if you want anything build your own frontend[1]” is an interesting answer to ‘why isn’t LessWrong more popular[2]’. I find this site clunky in general, and I am here largely despite it. I wonder how many people[3] end up simply leaving instead.)
Which admittedly isn’t exactly what you said.
Admittedly, not said by you. See e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x3ENSpeC76AzuP476/yitz-s-shortform?commentId=fMDP8vz6SRMewETEL .
Admittedly, the answer very well may be ‘not many’.