HughRistik comments on Proposed New Features for Less Wrong - Less Wrong

7 Post author: alyssavance 27 April 2010 01:10AM

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Comment author: HughRistik 29 April 2010 09:59:08PM *  5 points [-]

I have a suggestion: recent comments for threads.

Once the comments to a post get big and grow into many trees (which get split off onto other "continue this thread..." pages), it becomes very hard to follow and find new replies to those threads.

Manually scanning through all the branches in the tree is time-consuming, and it can be easy to miss one or two new posts. Sometimes I find myself using the recent comments page, but then I have to scan through comments in other discussions that I'm not so interested in. Another technique I've tried is watching the comments page of the prolific posters in the discussion I am following, but that also gets time-consuming, and will lead me to miss comments from other people in the discussion.

Does anyone else find this a problem? Any solutions within the current features of the site? If not, is there anything that can be done to make this easier to follow?

The best thing I can think of would be a "recent comments" page for each individual post. It would basically be another "Sort By" of the comments that would take them out of their tree structure, and put them in a flat view ordered by recentness.

Comment author: HughRistik 29 April 2010 10:54:52PM 1 point [-]

I forgot to mention another strategy I use for mitigating the need to scan through multiple child pages of comments: I figure out which comment the big discussion is in response to, and click "permalink," then I keep refreshing this page and scanning through it. Doing so mitigates the number of comments I need to scan, but it has a few drawbacks:

  • I will miss replies to other comments in the original thread that might be interesting, which are at the same level of the comment I am re-examining
  • Multiple comments at the same level are the parents of discussions I want to follow; to scan through the permalinks of both costs multiple page views
  • Sometimes even if I hit a permalink to a comment that sparked a discussion and exclude a lot of the comments, there are still so many comments, falling into so many "continue" child branches that I must do 3-4 page scans to find the new responses to a single comment in a single thread