= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
NancyLebovitz comments on Proposed New Features for Less Wrong - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (169)
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.
This doesn't need to be invented from scratch. trn (a very handy way of reading usenet) has all the features you've listed, and much more.
Having an interface as bandwidth-light as USENET's would also benefit people with poor connections.
A couple of programmers have told me that it wouldn't be that hard to write a version of trn for the the web, but it's just too boring. I'm not qualified to say whether this is reasonable.
How much money would make it interesting, do you imagine? I'm fairly sure I could throw a twenty into the pot were such a venture feasible.
I"m not sure.
I've raised the question.
If you think this is a worthwhile project, I hope you'll raise the question, too.
Meanwhile, assuming there's interest, how would you identify who should be doing it?
Autopope's analysis there seems spot on to me. Doing it right is a biggish problem, on the order of a programmer-year of work.
That's the $64,000 question. I'm not competent to identify good coders.
I wonder if there shouldn't be a focus on a specific application, here - phpBB, for example.