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comment by veen
veen  ·  4096 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Comment sorting

No, I think that the downside of creating an echo chamber / filter bubble is far greater than the benefit of nudging a post up a bit. Posts from people I follow are already clearly marked with the colors. A thread as big as the who are you isn't going to be much more readable with different sorting, I think.

I've been thinking about comments, and a bigger problem I have right now is about returning to posts I've already read. When I read a post and it has 5 comments, it might create a good discussion after I've been there. But there is no way for me to tell if I'm missing new comments on a post I already read, unless I remember how many comments it had. I've read the above post at least five times because the number just kept on growing, but it's the exception. Maybe a number next to the comments indicating new comments, or giving the comment logo a soft color?





mk  ·  4096 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks.

Yes, I think you are right that we are going to need some sort of mechanism to discern read from unread comments.

Collapsing is also something that we will likely have to implement.

veen  ·  4096 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well, I think we need to be careful with collapsing comments. It promotes top comments too much and dampens further conversation. I actually like uncollapsed comments. I would never had read kleinbl00's comment down here if comments were collapsed as easy as on most other sites.

mk  ·  4096 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Absolutely. I prefer them not to be collapsed too. It's likely something that we have a toggle option for, with the default to uncollapsed.

veen  ·  4096 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Maybe only collapse one-on-one conversations? They tend to become quite long and take up a lot of space.

mk  ·  4096 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There's a thought.

lil  ·  4096 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'd like to see collapsing. Uncollapsed could be the default though. Even though there are 200 comments on "who are you," only 30 of them might be answers to the question. I'd like to know that without having to scroll through the sideline conversations -- not that kleinbl00's diamond ring opinions are uninteresting -- but they are not answers to the main question.

It's a hard call. It would be interesting to see what the majority feel about the collapse option.

EDIT: 29 not 30 - What does that say about this community? 29 introductions and 171 riffs on the theme.

elizabeth  ·  4096 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes, i second this. Maybe an option to sort by "new" ? Not a a default but as an option you could activate on certain posts.