Show HN: Collapse Comments on Hacker News
chrome.google.comThis should be a standard feature in HN.
The other pain point is the up/down arrows being so close to each other on mobile that I have to zoom in, vote, then zoom out.
Completely agree that this should be a standard feature, and I think it's a big mistake that it wasn't introduced back when comment score visibility was removed.
Back then, I used a comment's score as a way of finding more interesting comments. I totally understand why this feature was removed, however, without it, I'm left to look for comments that get a lot of replies to weed out the boring comments from the interesting ones, and keeping track of indentation while scrolling through hundreds of comments is tedious. I'm sitting in front of a computer that should be able to do this for me.
Perhaps this is a feature that would make the comments on hacker news worse?
I'd be interested if they tested it, but I can't say for certain if I think it should become a feature or not.
I don't see how it could possibly make the comments worse, if for no other reason than people are already using plugins to accomplish this. Either the damage has already been done, or it's not relevant.
I would imagine most users do not use plugins. Though I would be interested if it's possible to get statistics for this.
I'm convinced that the designers of HN deliberately designed the interface to be slightly annoying, although I do not have any theories as to why. That is the only explanation I have come up with for several things that are annoying and would be trivial for them to fix.
• The placement of the up/down arrows, as you noted.
• On text submissions, such as "Ask HN" submissions, the submitter's text is greyed out similar to the way down voted comments are greyed out.
• If you want to see dead comments, which are by default completely hidden, you can turn on the "showdead" option. That makes them visible...but they are greyed out so that it is hard to read them.
I think they grey out of dead comments is a feature. It lets you read them if you want, but is a huge visual indicator that it isn't worth reading.
They could accomplish this by using some color that is readable, such as red or purple. That would give a huge visual indicator so that you'd know you are dealing with a dead comment.
Remember, people who do not want to read any dead comments will have left "showdead" in its default state of "off", and so won't see these at all. The only people who see dead comments are those who explicitly said they want to see them.
Is that definitely the way it works? I don't think I've ever configured anything on HN and I see dead comments. I also think it's really nice - as grandparent said, it's a very clear indicator that I'm dealing with something I probably want to ignore.
What does "showdead" say in your settings (click on your username in the orange bar to get to settings)? It should be "no" if you have not changed it.
You can test it on the comments on this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213213
There are several dead comments near the bottom that are visible if showdead is "yes", and invisible if it is "no".
Ohh, are 'dead' comments different from ones that have just been downvoted into mostly-grayness? In that case I don't actually see them, I just see undead comments :) thanks for clarifying
If you click on a comment's timestamp to go to its page, it shouldn't be greyed out there.
I think a better way to handle this would be to remove killed comments from the normal thread view altogether, but make them available to anyone ("showdead" or not) by clicking on the comment's timestamp.
How would anyone see the timestamp to click on it?
Display the comment, but replace the text of the comment with [this comment has been flagged].
I almost wrote [this comment has been flagged, click the timestamp to read it], but why encourage people?
Oh I get it. That's actually similar to a change we've been meaning to make, but only for [flagged] comments as opposed to all [dead] ones. I'll think about the latter.
Personally I don't like this idea. If I've chosen to turn on "showdead", why hide dead comments from me? I've explicitly indicated I'd like to see them.
Because if we do it this way, we won't need "showdead" any more: "dead" posts will work naturally no matter what your settings are. There's no reason to have an advanced setting to allow you to click through to a dead comment; everyone should just be able to do it.
It also neatly dodges the problem of deemphasizing toxic posts on threads; the content simply isn't displayed in the thread, but is available in a more readable form just a click away.
It will also do nice things for the formatting of the threads themselves (flagged comments on nested threads won't take up much vertical space).
But I do not want it hidden, I do not want to have to click through to it. I want to see it, as my selected preference indicates.
Then they can keep the "showdead" option, make it behave like it does now, and the whole site will still get more intuitive for people who don't know about "showdead", to the point where 'dang will never have to explain it again.
Yes! And on mobile, I manage to flag things on accident at least a few times per week.
I tried to upvote you both on mobile but to be totally honest I have no idea... Clickable area and distance between buttons is important!!
Exactly the same here.
It makes me wonder why they won't bother spending the 15 minutes to implement the feature which everyone wants.
Didn't pg actually say that he deliberately wants the UX of Hacker News to be kind of crappy to keep out the riffraff? There's certainly a discussion to be had about whether that's good thinking, but for better or worse, I think it's intentional.
The downvote button doesn't even appear until you have 500 karma. It's an anti feature that only affects experienced users.
Collapsing comment trees and notification of replies, please.
Is monkey-patching other people's web apps really the right way to get this done? It's very brittle and it seems that the policy-driven (i.e. convince HN to do it) method is better than the vigilante programmer method.
People have been asking for it for years with no action or even response (that I've seen). I've used the same HN collapse extension in Chrome for a while now with no problems - dislike browsing HN on my phone without it.
It's obvious to me which approach has been better.
These two approaches don't need to be exclusive. Community workarounds such as this can also function as building blocks for discussion.
Yes. I made my own collapsible comments Greasemonkey script years ago and only had to update once, about a year ago. I am really happy with it because it has precisely the features I want and need, and every time I log into HN from another machine I miss it sorely. Maybe I'll submit it to HN but my website needs one quick fix first.
Why not both? This is an immediate solution.
> It's very brittle
So? Things break and then I uninstall them.
> The other pain point is the up/down arrows being so close to each other on mobile that I have to zoom in, vote, then zoom out.
Made even worse because there's no way to fix it if you accidentally vote incorrectly.
I agree that this is something HN should build rather than be supported via a Chrome extension.
I work on a semi-relevant project called Product Pains where people can post and vote on product feedback publicly about any app or website. After seeing this thread, I posted this feedback about HN: https://productpains.com/post/hacker-news/make-comments-coll...
The idea is that a lot of votes on a piece of feedback creates a social responsibility for the team to respond and ideally implement the feature. We're still in early stages but consider voting on this and/or posting other feedback for HN. They could definitely use it. :)
It is if you use HN Special ;) http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/
The worst thing is when people quote text by putting it in a code block. Why? Why would you do such a thing? It makes it impossible to read on mobile, and even in a browser it prevents text wrap.
Its such a simple thing to ask for too! Hacker News interface is complete trash for such a popular website.
A counter might be that popularity can overcome a dated interface. Look at the Drudge Report website, after all - wildly popular, and it looks like something out of the 1990s.
I, too, would like to see collapsible comments on HN, but I also want to keep the interface simple. It never needs to be flashy, just functional.
In what way would collapsible comments be flashy rather than functional, though?
Or risk accidentally downvoting!!!
I'm pretty happy with "Hacker News Enhancement Suite", it supports this and few other nice things. [0]
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
I just tried this and I am not happy with it. I dislike the extreme changes it makes to HN's layout and colors. Way too heavy handed for me. Surprising, given the name, which is obviously a play on Reddit Enhancement Suite, which is a great addon that doesn't make reddit look totally different.
The extension badly needs settings, so that you can control what features you want and don't want. That being said, the author of the extension isn't really active on GitHub. He certainly hasn't replied to my pull request that adds the ability to tag users yet.
I might fork it one day, call it HNES+ or something. Then maybe development can gain a bit of traction again.
I use "HN Special"[1] with the visual theme turned off (it irritates me). It also offers infinite scrolling, although it makes accessing the search box a little tedious.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-special-an-addi...
Just tried it, this IMO is definitely an improvement over the Hacker News Enhancement Suite, especially when using the default HN style.
However, I frequently use HN without scripts and cookies, and I find it somewhat disappointing that it uses cookies to store its settings instead of local storage.
I'll open an issue on the repo when I find the time though.
Why does it need to read my browsing history?
Similar add-on for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...
I use this one (supports Chrome and Safari):
http://hckrnews.com/about.html#extensions
It has collapsing, and it also highlights unread comments.
Thanks - much appreciated as a Safari user.
Just installed it – thanks for the pointer. Works exactly as expected.
This is the one I use, too. It does exactly what you need it to do.
Excellent extension, been using it for years.
This is nice. One feature I'd like in HN is a max comment depth that is collapsed by default. Often a lot of scrolling is needed to get past a controversial thread that has a lot of replies, but doesn't discuss something relevant or informative. People end up replying to the top thread even for a different topic, because they feel that is the only way to get seen.
Great observation. I het annoyed by the scrolling and the fact that I cant tell who they're replying to without hitting parent.
Re-Submitted because I uploaded it to the chrome web store, had some reports of people not being able to enable it or install it because of some recent security changes.
Just a tiny little extension that lets you collapse comments on HN. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Here's the github link if you're interested https://github.com/Igglyboo/hn_collapse
This is pretty cool! I switched from a similar extension purely because I prefer the location on the left of the comment rather than the right.
I've tried a lot of these and one thing I haven't seen is a similar feature to RES that remembers collapsed threads. Any ideas if this is something that HN's design somehow precludes or is it just a matter of someone sitting down and writing the code?
Cool! I've always found it hard to read comments in the big discussions. It would be helpful if you had more details on what comments it collapses in the Chrome store description. In the screenshot it didn't look like comments were collapsed. Can I adjust which comments are collapsed, is it just deeply nested comments?
Awesome work. This is really helpful on stories that have more than a hundred comments.
I like HackerNew
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...
I use this[1] bookmarklet for the same effect.
I had submitted a similar script, among others a few days ago. It is a user script and can be used on Firefox w/ Greasemonkey and Chrome w/ Tampermonkey: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PauliusLabanauskis/UserScr...
Looks quite similar in behaviour to one I've been using previously: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...
I've used https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap... for a while, does this have any extra features?
I had been using hn.premii.com in order to get a better browsing experience, but it was annoying that I couldn't comment on there. I'm not sure why I hadn't thought to look for chrome extensions to enhance HN, but I'm glad that I found them!
I use this one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...
Thank you! This is great and doesn't do anything I don't care about!
Is there a way to sandbox a chrome extension to a specific domain (or know that an extension is only allowed to work on a specific domain)?
Chrome tells you the extension permissions, including for which URLs they apply, before you confirm installing it.
Still missing: an extension that will open links in a frame, keeping comments below (or rather to the side, in the age of widescreen).
Love it. Suggestion: persist the collapse state to `localStorage`. This is enabled on Reddit through a Chrome Extension as well.
The voting buttons should probably disappear for minimized comments.
Works great, thanks!
Thank you!
Thanks for this! I was using an old extension for this that broke with the HN redesign a few months back.
No, wait! I thought only grandma uses chrome and that the HN users care about freedom and use firefox/dillo/icecat/whatever. My wrong.