Ask HN/PG: Why are comments being paginated?

[roxstar]

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]

I 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]

The 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.

[RiderOfGiraffes]

Ironic that PG's definitive reply is now below the fold:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118936

[thecoffman]

I 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.

[blahedo]

Perhaps 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.

[Flenser]

I 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.

[jasonkester]

This 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]

This 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.

[RiderOfGiraffes]

The 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

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]

You 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.

[staunch]

I'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]

Yeah, horrible feature. I get lost where I'm at. I'd love to see it back the way it was please. :)

[pg]

To cut load. I'm not sure it helped much though, so I may not keep it.

[Eliezer]

Er, that doesn't seem like a good reason to downgrade the UI of something important. I don't know how much money it takes to keep HN running, but would just buying ten times as much computing power really be a significant expense for YCombinator, compared to the dealflow from HN?

[acqq]

How 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."

[seancron]

I almost missed this comment because it was just barely above the fold.

[tommi]

Good. Your comment is the most valuable answer in this thread and it was the last one to show on first page.

[nitrogen]

Is there some way the HN community could help with the load, or some pathological behavior that a lot of us are doing that could be replaced by behavior that's easier on the server(s)?

[gokhan]

If you decide to keep it, please keep displaying the header on subsequent pages. Ajax loading the rest on the first page is better, though.

[paolomaffei]

it's fun that this answer is below the fold. I wouldn't keep it.

[alttab]

It 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]

I'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/

It's such a better experience on every site when things auto-load as you scroll down.

[cabalamat]

I very much hope pg doesn't do this; I find it very annoying.

[danvet]

As 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).

[sans-serif]

As long as it doesn't grow at the same rate as Twitter's, this should scale.

[redthrowaway]

There'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.

[flatline]

Ugh, I hope this does not happen, I hate the scroll-to-the-bottom-and-get-more thing. Particularly if the server is under heavy load already, you never know if there is more or if so how much, and it takes the scrollbar away from your mouse pointer once it's loaded another chunk due to the relative offset.

[marshray]

NOoooo!!! Anything but the Scrollbar of Sisyphus!

[mambodog]

This still would prevent being able to CTRL/CMD-F for a particular term to see if anyone has mentioned it already, something I do a lot, and I imagine others do too.

[antimatter15]

Infinite scrolling screws with scrollbar behavior though :(

[cincinnatus]

That would be the first instance of an ajaxy thing on HN I believe.

[forkandwait]

I like plain text emails, terminals, emacs, and I really prefer un-paginated html pages.

[ratsbane]

Often I read HN with Lynx. The plain HTML here works much better than the markup at most other sites, including Reddit.

[kmfrk]

I 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.

[nhebb]

It'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.

[shawndumas]

Until it gets reverted (hopefully) -- AutoPagerize [1]

----

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/igiofjhpmpihnifd...

[jamesbritt]

I'm curious: Why does this plug-in need access to my browsing history?

[spencerfry]

Worst HN feature. Please revert.

[dimarco]

Couldn'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]

That is what happens on slashdot.

[zppx]

Let'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]

Your more likely to upvote to get comments that you like higher. I typically do not upvote much but now it seems important.

[lwhi]

I 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.

[kentosi]

There should at least be a feature within our profile settings to disable this.

[requinot59]

Using Ajax for "load on scroll" may be a solution. Or go the reddit way, don't paginate but don't load full sub-threads.

[cousin_it]

I 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.

[oomkiller]

Of all the features we need on HN, this is not one of them.

[kmfrk]

I just noticed the hilarious(ly atrocious) redundancy this causes: Go to the [W3C HTML5 logo thread](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.