[codinghorror]

Speaking of categories: I was browsing many pages deep in HN a few hours ago and I noticed a ton of "Ask HN:" topics buried on pages 6-10. That kind of implies those should be different category area on the site, rather than being mixed in with the regular "here's a link, discuss the content on that link", perhaps? To me, there seems to be a very broad divide between "here is a link to an article, discuss", and "here is something I am thinking, discuss". One is of the community, the other is fundamentally outside it.

> without realizing that HN actually supported downvotes

I have almost 500 HN "rep" and I still can't find any way to downvote. Is this documented anywhere? At Stack Exchange downvotes require 125 rep to cast, and cost you 1 point of rep for each answer downvote. (Question downvotes are free, but still require 125 rep to cast..) This is all listed in the FAQ.

> one thread taking about the politics, one talking about the economics, one talking about the font used on the website, and another angry that the post got enough upvotes to be on the front page in the first place

I should have mentioned this in the article (and I might revise it to add this, actually) but each one of those blocks the other. In other words, if the politics branch of the tree is first, that's 50+ replies I have to wade through to get to the next branch (say, economics). There's not even any way to collapse branches here as there is on Reddit...

Have we also talked about first topic reply advantage? How many people will bother to read past that first massive 50 reply tirade about politics to get to anything else?

[chris_wot]

Have we also talked about first topic reply advantage? How many people will bother to read past that first massive 50 reply tirade about politics to get to anything else?

How do you handle that anyway? If you make it a flat discussion, if someone brings up a new topic (in other words, a branch) then how do you respond to it if there were lots of responses between the time you wanted to reply and the time the original post was made?

If you have a long distance between the original post and the post you are responding to, then that means that the audience loses context and don't know what you are talking about - thus instead of asking "how many people will bother to read past that first massive 50 reply tirade?" you now have to ask "how many people will bother to read past the first insightful comment?"

Basically, how do you keep the thread of discussion without using indenting, or expanding/contracting the discussions? I can well understand that StackExchange needs to keep discussions punchy by design, because it's about keeping information succinct in order to properly answer questions, but on a site like HN that is designed for discussion I think that flat discussions would be an absolute disaster!

Slashdot actually allows for flat discussions, try using it sometime and I think you'll see that it's a nightmare.

[kijin]

> the audience loses context and don't know what you are talking about

In most forums, you just jump quote the post you want to talk about. Doesn't matter if you're on page 144 and the original post was on page 36. Click "Quote" and phpBB/vBulletin automatically adds a link to the other post.

And it's an unholy mess to wade through a 144-page forum topic. A lot of people just quote the whole post to add a one-liner. It's a nightmare. Any long thread is probably 90% quotes and 10% new content. Just the other day I was trying to find some information in an XDA Developers forum. I gave up after a dozen pages or so. Too much garbage thrown in between useful content.

On HN and Reddit, on the other hand, people quote one another much less frequently. For example, I only quote other comments if I want to say something specific about a particular passage. Here, we get along just fine without excessive quoting, because the context is already there. HNers understand the cost of context switching.

I wouldn't want to read a HN thread where 90% of the content was made up of quotes a.k.a. context-switching crutches.

[tripzilch]

> How do you handle that anyway?

Reddit does it by limiting both the tree depth with a "continue this discussion" link (often seen in pun-offs) and the vertical tree length / number of replies with a "load more comments" link.

This ensures that the top thread is never really more than 1.5 screenlengths. Works very well IMO.

(For completeness sake, there's one other comment hiding feature, "Comment score below threshold", but that serves a different purpose--a bit like HN's [dead] comments except you can collapse/expand them and reply to them).

[shrikant]

> [...] I noticed a ton of "Ask HN:" topics buried on pages 6-10. That kind of implies those should be different category area on the site, rather than being mixed in with the regular "here's a link, discuss the content on that link", perhaps?

There is -- in the top bar, there's a link called "ask" [1] that shows only the "here is something I am thinking, discuss" sort of submissions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/ask

[saurik]

> Speaking of categories: I was browsing many pages deep in HN a few hours ago and I noticed a ton of "Ask HN:" topics buried on pages 6-10.

I actually almost mentioned this myself as a form of "level", but decided that it wasn't explicit enough in the navigation; I guess it would then have been valuable to just point out "maybe it should be a level". ;P

The analogy to this specific gap in a traditional forum is the category change between "on-topic" and "chat"/"meta"/"general discussion" (with then having the topics come below those section headings, followed by the threads, etc.).

> I have almost 500 HN "rep" and I still can't find any way to downvote.

(Someone else already responded to this comment, but for completion-sake and because I'm the person who called it out in the first place: you need 500 points before you can downvote, so you aren't quite there yet ;P. Downvotes on this site are pretty powerful, actually, so they thereby seem to be reserved for people who have deeply invested in the website, of which there are enough people versus the total amount of content posted that this isn't a problem.)

> There's not even any way to collapse branches here as there is on Reddit...

I agree that this is useful; it is a highly requested feature and I believe it offers a lot of value: it is, of course, an important feature of the explicit tree... within a single collapsed linear level, all content blocks all other content, and you are just screwed if you want to skip anything, as there isn't even a visual differentiator.

(That said, some of us use user scripts to get past this problem; I wrote my own, but there are a few on the GreaseMonkey archive site whose name I'm forgetting, as well as in the Chrome extension store. If the content didn't have the trees at all, you wouldn't be able to do this no matter how hard you tried. That said, again: most online community discussion systems, even the ones that claim to be flat, have trees at least 4-5 deep.)

[hfsktr]

Well the downvoting was a question I had at one point (but now is answered). I have actually just noticed the FAQ and Guidelines links so that might answer many of the questions I've wondered about.

I am glad that they don't have collapsible branches here. It might be that here the discussion is generally on track and in general is educational and/or polite. On a site like Reddit though I do like the threaded as they (from the little I go there) seem to devolve into long threads with not much substance.

When I didn't find any extensions for Chrome that made comments' depth more visible (but did see many for collapsible) I learned how to write my own extension (not polished but functional) and am in the process of making another.

[elithrar]

> I have almost 500 HN "rep" and I still can't find any way to downvote. Is this documented anywhere? At Stack Exchange downvotes require 125 rep to cast, and cost you 1 point of rep for each answer downvote. (Question downvotes are free, but still require 125 rep to cast..) This is all listed in the FAQ.

The min. requirement to downvote, I'm told, moves upward ever so slightly. I think I managed it just past 500, but that was several months ago (I lurk and/or comment on obscure communications articles). You're sitting at 496 as I write this so you're still a little while off.

[codinghorror]

confirmed, I now have 502 and see downvote.

Don't worry, I take downvotes seriously and don't cast them without a reason. That's why downvotes on answers cost you 1 reputation on Stack Exchange.

(here is why question downvotes are free, since I know you are wondering: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-... )

[jrajav]

> The min. requirement to downvote, I'm told, moves upward ever so slightly.

That is what is told, but I think it goes upwards in increments. I recall clearly that I first saw the down arrows right at 500.

[skylan_q]

It'll get me further from 500, but here's a post that is being made with the intent of making the discussion less flat.