a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
Wintermute  ·  4335 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Collapsible comments extension for Hubski [edit: bug fix]

    Collapsing comments is the same as ignoring them, and removing information from discourse. It's one of the more powerful things setting Reddit dialogue back, and I don't think that a raw implementation of it here will help.

A thousand times no!

For any post that has more than some number of substantial comments, I'm not going to read every single one of them. That's true of every single person here. Likewise, I'm not going to read every article posted to hubski.

I can ignore comments just as effectively by scrolling past them. That doesn't mean others won't read them though. I'm not even sure how you can make the quoted claim in earnest. If I choose not to read the comments for an article in my feed, am I "removing information from the discourse"?

Collapsible comments are a necessary tools to effectively navigate a large post. When the largest post on the first page of my feed has 48 comments, it's not a big deal. But, if I had a post with 480 comments, the comments that are at the bottom are effectively hidden, because I'm not going to wear out my mouse scrolling through 4000 lines of text.