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Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?
Is this a new experiment or is it a new permanent thing to reduce load, I don't think many people are going to be looking at the lower end of the spectrum (clicking more) which may detract from interesting comments and conversations.
Examples: look on the front page with comment threads >~30
- msbarnett 16y agoI agree, I think this basically disincentivizes commenting when you know you're going to end up "below the fold". I went into the feature request thread to see if anyone had requested the ability to turn this off, but gave up on looking after rapid-fire clicking "More" 25+ times. Content more than a page or two back might as well not exist.
- jedsmith 16y agoThe Reddit community actually speaks of this phenomenon in threads addressed to new members ("things you should know about Reddit", etc). They say that once there's several long threads with a lot of upvotes, you're better off not commenting as your comment will most likely languish without any attention whatsoever. I'd say that's partially due to scrolling, but you're correct - that More button is so non-obvious that I didn't even see it until I read this thread. Those comments below More might as well not even exist. The most common retort to that viewpoint that I saw was "well, so you won't get karma. Bummer. Your opinion is out there anyway," which is missing the point, I think. It's not about the karma, it's about contributing to the conversation. Now, contributing to the conversation is a competition based on time and popularity. This change will probably do two things: hide a lot of good comments below page flips, and cause people to quickly comment on stories to fill above the fold.
- drivebyacct2 16y agoFunny, I find that I can reply to a comment, even when it's childrens' comments number in the hundreds, and it still gets attention.
- dauphin 16y agoNaab it's because of shitty posts like yours than HN is slow! New users should not be able to post. Abusing the system is a problem.
- jedsmith 16y ago[Edit: The comment I replied to here originally had very different content about threading and scoring. I don't know what it is now, so I've removed the reply.]
- zbanks 16y agoI don't know how reddit works exactly, but I notice that they generally have a few "hidden" comments in the tree. I assume this is to prevent this phenomenon. If your comment is significantly worse than the rest of an active thread, it shouldn't be prominently displayed.
- jedsmith 16y agoThe 'hidden' comments are based on a per-user threshold. My brief Reddit experience improved significantly when I raised said threshold.
- repsilat 16y agoI agree that there's a lot of fluff on Reddit, but I don't think I agree with your solution. I find a lot of good, technical comments end up quite a way down the page in more detailed discussions between users who are more interested in the subject matter than having a conversation (or having their joke voted up the page.) Really, I wish Reddit had something closer to Slashdot's moderation categorisation to filter on. Filtering out "funny" comments would be nice. Ignoring votes cast by people who just want to register their agreement or disagreement would be an incredible, impossible goal.
- drivebyacct2 16y ago
- nostrademons 16y agoOn the plus side - this encourages people to check out the New page and upvote stories they find interesting there, so that they can get in on the comment threads before they've become hot.
- silentbicycle 16y agoIt could be counterbalanced by some sort of notification (on the Threads page, especially) for replies. I don't care if it's fallen off the front page, if somebody is carrying an interesting discussion in a thread in which I've commented, I may still like to know. Even if there are several days between each comment. The site's incentives to only comment on the hot threads are probably detrimental.
- JeremyBanks 16y agoYou can get reply notifications (email or mobile) using Notifo (YC W10)[1]. I think it's only for replies to your comments, not for all activity in a thread. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720763
- riledhel 16y agoMaybe we need something like twitter implemented... when you scroll below certain number of comments they load n comments more automagically.
- regularfry 16y agoThat kills the scrollbar. A better way to do it would be to show far fewer comments per page, so that you get approximately a screenful at a time, then make the "next" and "previous" links huge and blindingly obvious. I think you should scroll or navigate, not both.
- flatline 16y agoThe more link has the rel="nofollow" attribute, so anything but the top comments will (in theory) not be indexed by search engines either. Given that some functions of the site are based on karma, I hope it's just a stopgap measure.
- nostrademons 16y agoI believe rel=nofollow only means that the link carries no weight for PageRank and other signals that may affect the target URLs ranking, not that it won't be indexed. To block indexing, you need a <meta name=robots content=noindex> tag on the target page itself.
- bendtheblock 16y agoIf performance is an issue, some sort of lazy load would be better, so just before you reach the bottom of the page more comments are loaded.
- thecoffman 16y agoI feel like it would be more tolerable if it loaded the new comments inline a la reddit: at least you wouldn't lose the context/continuity of the conversation that way. Unfortunately it appears that its actually spreading the comments across multiple pages so that when you click "more" you lose everything you were just looking at.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Flenser 16y agoI think this basically disincentivizes commenting when you know you're going to end up "below the fold". And incentivises replying to comments above the fold.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoIronic that PG's definitive reply is now below the fold: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118936 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118936
- ghurlman 16y agoDouble ironic that his post is below the fold - but this one isn't.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoThat's deliberate gaming of the system by me, as discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119549 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119549
- blahedo 16y agoPerhaps more importantly, it seriously skews the karma that accrues to responses---those that are above the fold will continue to get upvotes while those below the fold get none, so the disparity grows. I've seen this effect on other sites; one gaming site[0] shows two views of the comment list, "recent" and "top-voted" (both with a "more" button that few people seem to click)---the "recent" comments rarely get more than two or three votes before scrolling off, while the difference between the lowest upvote count in the "top-voted" count and the next-highest comment can be in the hundreds or thousands once a game has been up for more than a day or two. [0]Kongregate.com, if anyone's curious.
- cincinnatus 16y agoIs there anything around on the HN site architecture? A quickly google didn't turn up anything specific.
- requinot59 16y agohttp://www.arclanguage.org http://www.arclanguage.org -> install -> arc3.0.tar/news.arc.
- zppx 16y agoLet's wait for the official answer, but I also include my take. Maybe because of the community growth. When I began to hang out around here, 6 months before I created an account I believe, 40 upvotes was a huge amount for a post or a comment. Today it's common to see posts with more than 100 in the front page and comments receiving 60 or so. EDIT: The number of comments in each posts also exploded, 20 comments in a thread used to make it very active. EDIT 2: For clarification.
- gscott 16y agoYour more likely to upvote to get comments that you like higher. I typically do not upvote much but now it seems important.
- kmfrk 16y agoI didn't even notice that - that's incredibly annoying. I'd be fine with it, if the More returned the rest of the comments, not the x next comments. I don't really see the point of this either; it can hardly be that big of a resource hog on either ends.
- staunch 16y agoI'd rather the page take 10 minutes to load than have it paginated. I know PG is just trying to implement a quick temporary fix, but this one is so annoying it made me go back to work (gasp!).
- eam 16y agoYeah, horrible feature. I get lost where I'm at. I'd love to see it back the way it was please. :)
- alttab 16y agoIt would be interesting to see an auto-extend feature like Facebook does with the timeline. Keep scrolling? We will AJAX load them into the page in batches. That should do ya. No buttons necessary, full comment history the further you go, and you don't show more information than you originally ask for (just a couple of comments).
- Jach 16y agoI've been using this for some time (though on HN it seems to choke on author-comment pages, I haven't taken the time to update the rule): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autopager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autopager/ It's such a better experience on every site when things auto-load as you scroll down.
- sahaj 16y agochrome version: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mmgagnmbebdebebbcleklifnobamjonh https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mmgagnmbebdebebb...
- sans-serif 16y agoAs long as it doesn't grow at the same rate as Twitter's, this should scale.
- cabalamat 16y agoI very much hope pg doesn't do this; I find it very annoying.
- danvet 16y agoAs some other commenter already noted, this breaks browser text-search. In case you want to quickly checked whether what you want to say has been said already (and upvoted that comment instead or add something as a reply).
- shawndumas 16y agoUntil it gets reverted (hopefully) -- AutoPagerize [1] ---- [1]: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/igiofjhpmpihnifddepnpngfjhkfenbp https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/igiofjhpmpihnifd...
- jamesbritt 16y agoI'm curious: Why does this plug-in need access to my browsing history?
- Joakal 16y agoThat's a bit bizarre to comment when the primary company that developed Chrome is known for keeping tabs on users' browsing history.
- ezalor 16y agowat do you mean?
- Joakal 16y agoIf you type into Chrome's URL/browser bar, it sends the query to google's servers which in turn returns a list of possible search suggestions (autocomplete style). Google likely retains the query for commercialisation purposes. So the user being worried about a Chrome plugin sending browsing data seems bizarre.
- jamesbritt 16y agoSo, when I click a link on HN, using Chrome, Chrome is sending that information to Google? Likewise when I type http://somethingorother http://somethingorother, that's going through Google first?
- johnswamps 16y agoIt's probably requesting "tabs" permissions. The Chrome security permissions aren't fine grained enough so often you need to request permission for a lot more than you actually need. For some reason requesting "tabs" shows a scary warning about having access to all your history. You'll find that a ton of extensions need access to your history for this reason, it's actually really annoying as an extension developer.
- requinot59 16y agoUsing Ajax for "load on scroll" may be a solution. Or go the reddit way, don't paginate but don't load full sub-threads.
- lwhi 16y agoI noticed the same, and assumed that it was a measure designed to improve site performance. Recently, I've found the HN site has become pretty unresponsive at times - I imagine limiting the number of comments on each page is going to reduce the burden on the server.
- forkandwait 16y agoI like plain text emails, terminals, emacs, and I really prefer un-paginated html pages.
- ratsbane 16y agoOften I read HN with Lynx. The plain HTML here works much better than the markup at most other sites, including Reddit.
- redthrowaway 16y agoThere's a really easy fix to this: Load more comments on scroll-to-bottom. No button, no bandwidth used, but those who make it to the bottom of a thread don't have to do anything to see new comments. I agree with OP; the current system is suboptimal, to say the least.
- cincinnatus 16y agoThat would be the first instance of an ajaxy thing on HN I believe.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ianl 16y agoThe upvote/downvote on comments and stories uses ajax i believe.
- requinot59 16y agoyes/no: it uses simple assignations to (new Image()).src.
- nfriedly 16y agoNot sure why you got hit with the down votes, I always assumed it used "real" ajax.
- antimatter15 16y agoInfinite scrolling screws with scrollbar behavior though :(
- redthrowaway 16y agoNot until you hit the bottom of the first "page", at which point you've resigned yourself to more content.
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoIs the feature really saving that significant of load time? I mean HN is as minimal as it gets, I'd rather all the comments load and take 3-4 seconds more than have to manually go through and hit more several times.
- 1337p337 16y agoAs pointed out by pg above, it seems not to. An educated guess (read: wild speculation on my part) indicates that, due to the ranking algorithm of HN (versus Twitter's simple sort, where new things show up first and order never changes) rendering and bandwith time are probably dwarfed by the time required to load and sort all of the comments on all pages to determine what comments show up on the first page.
- klbarry 16y agoIt might be a good idea for PG to charge a small monthly fee if the issue is server strength.
- kentosi 16y agoThere should at least be a feature within our profile settings to disable this.
- oomkiller 16y agoOf all the features we need on HN, this is not one of them.
- nhebb 16y agoIt's harder to see whether someone has already made the same point that you want to make, so it could lead to redundant commentary. I often do a quick keyword search of the page to see if someone has already made a related comment. With pagination, you can't easily do that.
- solipsist 16y agoEveryone should be using AutoPagerize[1] (a Sarari extension) by now, or at least something similar. It makes your life a lot easier on most websites, one of which is now HN. [1] - http://autopagerize.net/ http://autopagerize.net/
- dimarco 16y agoCouldn't people take advantage of this by only commenting on high-karma comments, regardless of whether or not it's relevant to the parent-comment, but instead just piggy-backing to stay on the first page?
- simcop2387 16y agoThat is what happens on slashdot.
- spencerfry 16y agoWorst HN feature. Please revert.
- wvenable 16y agoThere is no meaningful information in this comment because nobody is going to see it anyway.
- zaphoyd 16y agoWhen did this start? I read almost exclusively through the ihackernews.com mobile site. I just checked and it does not implement the more button and only shows the first 40 or so comments. It looks like I have been missing out on the end comments of popular threads without realizing it. :(
- trotsky 16y agothe last few hours
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- cousin_it 16y agoI don't understand the rationale for this feature. Here's a better way to reduce load: make commenting not require a reload. Same for editing comments, deleting them, etc.
- invisible 16y agoI'd rather see a hard limit on the number of top-level threads allowed than a "More."
- pg 16y agoTo cut load. I'm not sure it helped much though, so I may not keep it.
- tommi 16y agoGood. Your comment is the most valuable answer in this thread and it was the last one to show on first page.
- estel 16y agoIndeed, I had to go below the fold.
- seancron 16y agoI almost missed this comment because it was just barely above the fold.
- cstuder 16y agoIt's actually below the fold now.
- acqq 16y agoHow about displaying the comments "shallower": if some discussion ("a branch in the comments") goes too deep, maybe that's what doesn't have to be on the same page, as it's obviously something where a lot of arguments and counterarguments occur, and not something where the biggest insight is to be expected. Such comment handling would however certainly motivate people to "post without the parent."
- danvet 16y agoI'd very much welcome that. My gut feeling is that on quite a few posts, discussion seems to stick to the first comment. I'm assuming that starts to happen as soon as this top-level comment has enough upvotes to quickly displace any new postings. I think preventing such "sticky" threads from clobbering the first pages of comments may add some decent value to the discussion. Especially in brining in different aspects and povs, perhaps sometimes yielding a more balanced discussion.
- rflrob 16y agoI, for one, tend not to even read comment threads larger than a certain size, unless I want to see specific reactions to an article. I think jedsmith has it partially right up above when he says "it's about contributing to the conversation", but for me it's also about reading conversations that I can hold in my head. Beyond about 40 comments, I'm not sure I can do this at all.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jasonkester 16y agoThis feature is actually causing damage. Several times yesterday I found myself opening a seemingly interesting discussion, reading the comments, then wondering why so few people were talking about it. The link that says "Hey, there's actually more discussion that we're hiding. Click here to see it" is tiny (and unexpected) so I just plain missed it. I even missed it on this thread until I read a comment talking about other comments that had scrolled off the 1st page, thus demonstrating that there must indeed be a 2nd page and that I should look harder for a way to find it. Had I been able to find (and therefore read) the whole discussion on those topics yesterday, I might have had interesting things to add. So might all the other people who missed them for the same reason. I suspect that the overall quality of discussion has taken a dip since this feature went live.
- bbuffone 16y agoThis feature makes me want reply to the comment at the top page. Even if my comment has nothing to do with the parent comment, at least people will read it. I don't even hit the "more" button on the homepage to see older stories; there is no way I am going to hit the more comments.
- isomorph 16y agoQuoth RiderOfGiraffes 34 minutes ago, Ironic that PG's definitive reply is now below the fold: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118936 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118936
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoThe new system can easily be "gamed," as has been discussed already several times. Here's a specific example. I wanted to observe the irony that PG's definitive answer is now below the fold, but I wanted my comment to be "above the fold" so that people could find PG's comment. Realising that if I simply commented in the appropriate place - as a reply to the original submission, as I have done with this comment - then my comment would repidly disappear even further below the fold, I added it as a reply to the unshakeably top reply: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119471 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119471 Thus my comment is technically mis-placed, but guaranteed to be on the first page of replies and discussion. There has to be a better solution to the problem of load. It depends on the cause, of course, but in the absence of profiling information (always the first step) I would investigate more cacheing to make the system less dynamic. ADDED IN EDIT: I love the way this comment has attracted down-votes - I've been watching it bounce up and down for a bit now. It's clearly alright to discuss the merits and otherwise, but for some people, clearly not alright to demonstrate the effect. On a forum for hackers, I find that delightful!
- edanm 16y agoYou know, this isn't a problem specific to the new system. It's always been better, karma-gaining wise, to reply to a high-scoring comment, instead of adding a brand new reply. This just makes that (annoying) behavior even more impactful.
- pclark 16y agoYet another reason to use Auto Patch Work - https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aeolcjbaammbkgaiagooljfdepnjmkfd https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aeolcjbaammbkgai... I didn't even notice the pages were paginated thanks to the extension (it auto appends page 2... page 3... to the bottom of paginated content)
- tsycho 16y agoIronically, if PG does respond to this, his answer might end up unseen below the fold :)
- kmfrk 16y agoI just noticed the hilarious(ly atrocious) redundancy this causes: Go to the [W3C HTML5 logo thread](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115551 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115551) and see how many times the "Autobot" joke is made. I've counted at least four instances. (I'm even a part of one of the branches, as oblivious as I was to the new system and similar discussions.) I wonder if this comment will show above or below the fold. Flip a coin, I guess.
- ezalor 16y agoupdate: no more the case: see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2121727 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2121727