Completely agree that this should be a standard feature, and I think it's a big mistake that it wasn't introduced back when comment score visibility was removed.
Back then, I used a comment's score as a way of finding more interesting comments. I totally understand why this feature was removed, however, without it, I'm left to look for comments that get a lot of replies to weed out the boring comments from the interesting ones, and keeping track of indentation while scrolling through hundreds of comments is tedious. I'm sitting in front of a computer that should be able to do this for me.
I don't see how it could possibly make the comments worse, if for no other reason than people are already using plugins to accomplish this. Either the damage has already been done, or it's not relevant.
I'm convinced that the designers of HN deliberately designed the interface to be slightly annoying, although I do not have any theories as to why. That is the only explanation I have come up with for several things that are annoying and would be trivial for them to fix.
• The placement of the up/down arrows, as you noted.
• On text submissions, such as "Ask HN" submissions, the submitter's text is greyed out similar to the way down voted comments are greyed out.
• If you want to see dead comments, which are by default completely hidden, you can turn on the "showdead" option. That makes them visible...but they are greyed out so that it is hard to read them.
They could accomplish this by using some color that is readable, such as red or purple. That would give a huge visual indicator so that you'd know you are dealing with a dead comment.
Remember, people who do not want to read any dead comments will have left "showdead" in its default state of "off", and so won't see these at all. The only people who see dead comments are those who explicitly said they want to see them.
Is that definitely the way it works? I don't think I've ever configured anything on HN and I see dead comments. I also think it's really nice - as grandparent said, it's a very clear indicator that I'm dealing with something I probably want to ignore.
Ohh, are 'dead' comments different from ones that have just been downvoted into mostly-grayness? In that case I don't actually see them, I just see undead comments :) thanks for clarifying
I think a better way to handle this would be to remove killed comments from the normal thread view altogether, but make them available to anyone ("showdead" or not) by clicking on the comment's timestamp.
Oh I get it. That's actually similar to a change we've been meaning to make, but only for [flagged] comments as opposed to all [dead] ones. I'll think about the latter.
Personally I don't like this idea. If I've chosen to turn on "showdead", why hide dead comments from me? I've explicitly indicated I'd like to see them.
Because if we do it this way, we won't need "showdead" any more: "dead" posts will work naturally no matter what your settings are. There's no reason to have an advanced setting to allow you to click through to a dead comment; everyone should just be able to do it.
It also neatly dodges the problem of deemphasizing toxic posts on threads; the content simply isn't displayed in the thread, but is available in a more readable form just a click away.
It will also do nice things for the formatting of the threads themselves (flagged comments on nested threads won't take up much vertical space).
Then they can keep the "showdead" option, make it behave like it does now, and the whole site will still get more intuitive for people who don't know about "showdead", to the point where 'dang will never have to explain it again.
Didn't pg actually say that he deliberately wants the UX of Hacker News to be kind of crappy to keep out the riffraff? There's certainly a discussion to be had about whether that's good thinking, but for better or worse, I think it's intentional.
Is monkey-patching other people's web apps really the right way to get this done? It's very brittle and it seems that the policy-driven (i.e. convince HN to do it) method is better than the vigilante programmer method.
People have been asking for it for years with no action or even response (that I've seen). I've used the same HN collapse extension in Chrome for a while now with no problems - dislike browsing HN on my phone without it.
It's obvious to me which approach has been better.
Yes. I made my own collapsible comments Greasemonkey script years ago and only had to update once, about a year ago. I am really happy with it because it has precisely the features I want and need, and every time I log into HN from another machine I miss it sorely. Maybe I'll submit it to HN but my website needs one quick fix first.
I agree that this is something HN should build rather than be supported via a Chrome extension.
I work on a semi-relevant project called Product Pains where people can post and vote on product feedback publicly about any app or website. After seeing this thread, I posted this feedback about HN: https://productpains.com/post/hacker-news/make-comments-coll...
The idea is that a lot of votes on a piece of feedback creates a social responsibility for the team to respond and ideally implement the feature. We're still in early stages but consider voting on this and/or posting other feedback for HN. They could definitely use it. :)
The worst thing is when people quote text by putting it in a code block. Why? Why would you do such a thing? It makes it impossible to read on mobile, and even in a browser it prevents text wrap.
A counter might be that popularity can overcome a dated interface. Look at the Drudge Report website, after all - wildly popular, and it looks like something out of the 1990s.
I, too, would like to see collapsible comments on HN, but I also want to keep the interface simple. It never needs to be flashy, just functional.
I just tried this and I am not happy with it. I dislike the extreme changes it makes to HN's layout and colors. Way too heavy handed for me. Surprising, given the name, which is obviously a play on Reddit Enhancement Suite, which is a great addon that doesn't make reddit look totally different.
The extension badly needs settings, so that you can control what features you want and don't want. That being said, the author of the extension isn't really active on GitHub. He certainly hasn't replied to my pull request that adds the ability to tag users yet.
I might fork it one day, call it HNES+ or something. Then maybe development can gain a bit of traction again.
I use "HN Special"[1] with the visual theme turned off (it irritates me). It also offers infinite scrolling, although it makes accessing the search box a little tedious.
Just tried it, this IMO is definitely an improvement over the Hacker News Enhancement Suite, especially when using the default HN style.
However, I frequently use HN without scripts and cookies, and I find it somewhat disappointing that it uses cookies to store its settings instead of local storage.
I'll open an issue on the repo when I find the time though.
This is nice. One feature I'd like in HN is a max comment depth that is collapsed by default. Often a lot of scrolling is needed to get past a controversial thread that has a lot of replies, but doesn't discuss something relevant or informative. People end up replying to the top thread even for a different topic, because they feel that is the only way to get seen.
Re-Submitted because I uploaded it to the chrome web store, had some reports of people not being able to enable it or install it because of some recent security changes.
Just a tiny little extension that lets you collapse comments on HN. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
This is pretty cool! I switched from a similar extension purely because I prefer the location on the left of the comment rather than the right.
I've tried a lot of these and one thing I haven't seen is a similar feature to RES that remembers collapsed threads. Any ideas if this is something that HN's design somehow precludes or is it just a matter of someone sitting down and writing the code?
Cool! I've always found it hard to read comments in the big discussions. It would be helpful if you had more details on what comments it collapses in the Chrome store description. In the screenshot it didn't look like comments were collapsed. Can I adjust which comments are collapsed, is it just deeply nested comments?
I had been using hn.premii.com in order to get a better browsing experience, but it was annoying that I couldn't comment on there. I'm not sure why I hadn't thought to look for chrome extensions to enhance HN, but I'm glad that I found them!
The other pain point is the up/down arrows being so close to each other on mobile that I have to zoom in, vote, then zoom out.