[hidro]

It's because stories/comments are loaded on demand. If you never scroll to it it won't be loaded. It was designed this way partly due to how HN API works, which doesn't provide all data up front.

Alternatively app can aggressively load everything up front, which is slow; or paginate content. To me it tends to feel faster when u have progressive UI change (empty card then fill it) than abrupt change (completely empty then all items appear), so I decided not to paginate.

[shostack]

I used another app called HN before yours. It did not have this problem. TBH I'd rather have it aggressively load all the content. It isn't that much data and the current experience is frankly jarring.

I also can't seem to figure out how to consistently jump to the next top level parent comment with the nav button. It seems to jump to other comments lower in the current thread which I'm trying to skip past. Am I missing something?

Overall love the app though. Love that I can click a user name and see their profile.

One other odd thing is when I open a HN Notify email link telling me I have a response, I can't figure out how to go up a level from the response comment to my parent comment they responded to in order to remind myself what I posted.

[hidro]

I already did some optimization to load 1 extra page of comments in advance, which I believe should improve the experience. I also tried the same trick for stories but got some janky issues that I need to figure out first.

Swipe down the button should go to next same level comment, or if none it goes to the next one, which is the 1st child.

User-related content support is quite limited at the moment as I need to crawl HN web for that.

[shostack]

Do you have any user data on whether people would prefer the downswiping went to the next comment at the same level, or the next parent regardless of if they are currently on a child?

My use case is that I'm scrolling and I get bored with a thread. It isn't much different to swipe up on the thread to scroll down further if I wanted to keep reading, and there is no easy way to just jump to the next top-level thread. I'm left either having to collapse several levels of comments to condense things, or scroll until I hope I find the next one and don't miss it.

At the very least, I feel like this should be configurable behavior for the button.

But again, this is just me, so you might have data saying people want otherwise, and this is free so I shouldn't complain :)

[hidro]

It's the 1st version of on-screen navigation so for sure there are rooms for improvement. I think of it as a D-pad, as in games, when you make selection with D-pad, down means selecting below item. I can make a toggle option to reverse scroll direction though.