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.
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.
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.