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.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.
I know what you're saying, but there are better ways to handle it than just collapsing comments. And I'm not saying that this is hard and fast a horrible thing, I'm saying that I'm pretty sure that something else is in the works. I could be wrong, but I would check with mk about it before releasing it to the masses, since he's pretty good about responding to mail and definitely has opinions on it.
Could you elaborate on what you think might be in the works? Or, in general, what are the better ways of handling things?
Sure!
So, obviously as more and more people join Hubski we're going to need ways to keep the page from getting cluttered with thousands and thousands of comments. The issue is with the number of comments you can keep on screen at any given time.
Now, it's been said before, but sites that allow you to close comments essentially allow you to ignore information. I'm not saying that to do so is inherently wrong on the part of a user- obviously a lot of Hubski is about ignoring information. But making ignoring information simple contributes to "tl;dr" syndrome. If you're reading through comments and then one of them becomes a huge block of text, I think most people's first instinct is to kinda glance at the key points and move on however they can. Making this easy devalues large posts.
I could be wrong about the above, but it's something I've noticed in myself, and often if you look at comments surrounding large comments you can see people commenting who haven't read the whole comment. The longer something is, the less likely everyone is to read all of it! Seems simple enough.
So, without limiting comment length or accidentally devaluing long comments, what can we do? I've only come up with a few solutions. Imagine if every comment with more than a few replies had a window below it like the reply window- Resizable, scrollable, and similar to its background but slightly different. This would allow you to scroll through comments or make them take up whatever amount of the screen you wanted. These windows wouldn't be nested- you wouldn't want windows in windows in windows. I have also wondered about having the equivalent of a deck of comments- arrows to the left and right of a comment chain which would lead you to the next comment chain. But while any chain was on your screen it would have the full run of it. My basic goal of this is to make the action of the user to be discovering information, not hiding it. If the goal of the site is to discover things, then I'd rather have the way that people interact with comments reflect that. Does that make any sense? Let me know if you have any other ideas about how to organize comments!