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HN: Please add Reddit style collapsible comments

311 points| AndyKelley | 10 years ago | reply

It could be much, much easier to browse HN if we could hide subtrees of comments the same as works on reddit.

It's a huge usability problem.

It's dead simple to program.

Please?

109 comments

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[+] MaxfordAndSons|10 years ago|reply
Yea it is rather frustrating when the top comment spawns an enormous tangential discussion and you have to scroll through it; it doesn't help that there are no indent guides to at least make it easier to tell when you've finally scrolled to the next top level comment. And all this is doubly annoying on mobile.
[+] Normal_gaussian|10 years ago|reply
I do not want collapsible comments - I feel that this encourages "skipping" over discussion (which helps polarise and lower the quality of the entire thread)

Indent guides? Yes please. I often find myself wanting to find and read all the replies to a particular comment (it is often posing a question or defending an opinion I find questionable).

[+] andrewflnr|10 years ago|reply
That reminds me, it would be cool if we could collapse a thread from the bottom as well as from the root.
[+] ghayes|10 years ago|reply
To all the top level comments about browser extensions, I want to use HN on mobile without an app. It's not possible due only to collapsibility. Comments sections are effectively top-comment-only.
[+] snowwrestler|10 years ago|reply
I browse HN a lot in the default iOS browser, and it works fine for me. I can scroll pretty darn fast with flicks of my finger, to get past sub-threads I want to skip. Heck I do the same thing on Reddit; it's faster and simpler for me than collapsing threads.
[+] kuschku|10 years ago|reply
Use Firefox? (It has addons on mobile)
[+] threeseven37|10 years ago|reply
If you don't mind me asking, why don't you want to use an app?
[+] mratzloff|10 years ago|reply
While we're wishing, I wish:

- Arrows indicated which way I voted instead of disappearing completely.

- I could change my up or down vote on a comment after making it. When viewing on a phone it's easy to fat finger the wrong arrow. If there's a concern about changing votes long after a discussion, gate it by time.

[+] chollida1|10 years ago|reply
I'd also like to see a "hide" button on each story so I can filter out stories that just aren't interesting to me.

I get that "Left-pad as a service" is interesting to many people here(182 comments at the moment), but I've never really done any web development at all in my life and I am never really going to be interested in any javascript or node.js link.

Similarly I'm guessing most people won't care about my favorite topics quantitative finance or algorithmic trading.

It might cut down on the weekly posts where someone complains that HN is going to shit because a story made the front page and they just can't believe someone would find it interesting.

[+] striking|10 years ago|reply
That would be contrary to Hacker News' existence with regards to Y Combinator. I like to know where the SV pulse is, and I'm almost certain that's why this site exists. It's for watching SV and commenting on it and interacting with it as well as posting cool links that anyone is interested in.
[+] dsr_|10 years ago|reply
Oh. Are you interested in security? Deployment? Or "idiotic practices that are apparently widespread but only coming to light in the wake of a disaster"?

Because that's what that story is actually about.

[+] thoughtpalette|10 years ago|reply
Beautiful HN Chrome plugin UI, supports:

- Improved readability design

- Retina screen support

- User following

- Super fast inline replies

- Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames

- Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user

- Endless scrolling

- Collapsible comment threads

- Direct link to Google Cache version

- Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...

(not affiliated in any way with this, just love it)

[+] shostack|10 years ago|reply
I always wonder what level of security and data transparency exists behind things like this. Are there any real risks to using something like that?
[+] kuschku|10 years ago|reply
Is there a firefox version?
[+] 55555|10 years ago|reply
It's not a straightforwardly positive UX decision. Allowing people to hide conversation trees they are not interested in has other effects. It would reduce discussion. the current setup promotes constructive disagreements.

We already hide things if our collective mind thinks it's a bad idea, but I'm not sure it's beneficial to let this occur on an individual basis.

If everyone thinks what I am saying is wrong, then this comment will get whited out and sent to the bottom, but if only you think it's dumb, maybe you should still have to read it.

I kinda like the current way.

[+] bargl|10 years ago|reply
I actually find I get into more discussions by using a plugin that allows me to collapse so that I can comment on lower threads because I can actually get there when I'm interested. It really should be built in though.
[+] SpaceCadetJones|10 years ago|reply
Once discussions get long I can't even follow them, though. There at least needs to some something added to the UI so I can see who is replying to what and where a tree starts/ends
[+] darawk|10 years ago|reply
I think he's just talking about the ability to collapse something after you've read it, which is a great feature on reddit - particularly on mobile.

I use it all the time. I read as much of the comment tree as i'm interested in, then collapse the root node to move on to the next one. It makes it easier than having to scan down and do visual indentation tracking.

[+] DougWebb|10 years ago|reply
I can see why collapsible sub-trees aren't quite dead-simple. The comment list is a single table, and each comment is a separate row. There's no container around a comment's children. (Also, the indenting is implemented by putting a 1x1 image in the first column and setting its width based on the indent depth required.)

Internally, there's obviously tracking of parent/child relationships, but adding container elements so that the children can be hidden would require getting rid of the table-based layout and replacing it with a nested div-based layout. The markup and styling changes would be fairly simple, but none of us know what the impact is on the backend, or on anything that depends on the markup structure that may or may not be in HN's control. My guess is that these non-technical impacts are the driving force behind keeping the markup as it is, which prevents the kind of features you want.

[+] pas|10 years ago|reply
Find the row clicked on.

Find the indent.

For every row that has larger indent (until one with the same indent), set display: none.

For this row, mark it collapsed (even by putting a div around the current content, un-displaying it and putting a "show thread" button/link there).

So indent is width of the "invisible pixel", easy to query, isn't it?

What am I missing?

[+] andrewflnr|10 years ago|reply
You can actually beat Reddit's UI on this: save collapsing state across page loads. It's quite annoying on mobile to open a link on reddit, come back and be forced to reload the page, and then be presented with the same wall of irrelevance I closed up a minute ago.
[+] Namrog84|10 years ago|reply
With res. Or at least for me. It's saved. Sometimes i go to comments thinking I haven't even and find my already collapsed comments and realize I just forgot I already read comments for this post
[+] verandaguy|10 years ago|reply
I believe the RES extension does do this for Reddit, actually.
[+] simonswords82|10 years ago|reply
While we're suggesting improvements...

Why is it that the discuss option isn't available on posts that are job adverts?

I think it would be useful/interesting to allow casual conversation about job postings.

[+] yoha|10 years ago|reply
It really needs some polishing, but I am using a handcrafted UserScript [1] that lets me navigate comments with the keyboard (j/k as well as p/g/J/K), fold/unfold (m) and vote (a/z). Also some styling to ease reading (larger font, indentation marker). However, the "reply" (r) feature is not complete (i.e. broken), "last" (G) shortcut fails for some reason and flagged comments break the navigation.

If you look in the relevant folder, you may notice it was initially designed for Word Press (WP.user.js), more precisely SlateStarCodex, and seems to work for most such blogs. SSC.user.js is just meant to improve the styling of SlateStarCodex.

[1] http://sinon.org/userscripts/HN.user.js

[+] znpy|10 years ago|reply
I think users should be able to flag a certain subtree of the comments tree as "off-topic" or "tangential" so that after a certain flag threshold such subtree is automatically shown as folded, and users would be able to see the most related comments first.
[+] Grue3|10 years ago|reply
I never used collapsible comments on reddit. By the time you're reading deep into a branch and decide that it's better to skip it, you already too far from the comment that started the branch. It's actually more difficult to scroll back and click collapse than scroll forward until the next top-level comment.
[+] yoha|10 years ago|reply
Use RES keyboard navigation to navigate to top comment, fold it, and then go to next. With my settings, I just have to type OMJ.
[+] logn|10 years ago|reply
This is Hacker News. JavaScript should be added by users as a browser extension. Only requests to make the website more user-serviceable such as class names and element names/IDs should be considered.
[+] mpwoz|10 years ago|reply
I actually got frustrated enough with this a few weeks ago to write a quick extension that lets me jump between comment trees:

https://github.com/mpwoz/jumper

It's very lightweight and doesn't clutter up your screen with an icon since that's literally the only use case. I haven't gotten around to publishing it on the web store yet unfortunately so you'll have to install manually.