LW Beta Feature: Side-Comments

I am finding it somewhat difficult to work with. As I'm reading the post, scrolling down and first come across the comment icon, I hover over it. But at this point I'm scrolled down such that the comment icon is at the bottom right of the screen, which makes the text of the comment cut off. It's also covered by the Intercom button. So I have to scroll to see the text of the comment. But when I scroll my cursor is no longer over the comment icon, so the comment text disappears.

All of that just means that I have to scroll to the right position first and then put my cursor over the comment icon. Part of me feels like that's not really a big deal, but another part of me feels like it might be a trivial inconvenience [? · GW] that makes me too unmotivated to use the feature. I can't tell yet.

Oh no, I can't see if sidenotes works because this comment is only at +2! Oh the ironing.

It should probably also match blockquotes where it's been edited at all, like adding '...' ellipses to condense or links or even just simple spelling error/typo fixes. (I do a lot of all of those.) One might look at systems that try to link specific ranges of HTML text for how to do 'loose' matches which don't break at the drop of a hat.

This is very cool. Lining up with the text by matching blockquotes is very clever!

Yeah absolutely. I'm curious: how difficult was it to implement this feature? Utilizing blockquotes that way means you don't have to store side comments any differently really, so maybe it was easy to implement. Then again, things are never as easy as you'd initially expect.

There isn't currently a way to do it. It's feasible to add, but requires adding a fair bit of new code to deal with vertical sizing and overlap issues. (Currently it relies on the fact that one comment icon aligned with the top of each paragraph is guaranteed to not create any overlap issues.) I'm not sure that expanded-by-default is good to have by default, though; one of the goals of the current design is to minimize intrusiveness; there's a risk that, with side-comments visible-by-default on the first pass, people would have trouble making it to the end of a post without getting diverted into sidetracks..

Oh, if I click the icon it pins it, neat.

It only shows one icon on purpose, so that if someone goes through a post responding to things point-by-point in a single long comment, and then a reader goes through the post expanding the comment each time, they don't get flooded with duplicate views of the same comment. If you pin a comment, though, it will highlight where all the blockquotes were, including ones further down in the post, so you can track things somewhat that way.

I don't like to have to scroll my screen horizontally to read the comment. (I notice there's a lot of perfectly good unused white space on the left side; comments would probably fit horizontally if you pushed everything to the left!)

Yeah, this is pretty annoying. We spent a decent amount of time trying to make it so that the whole page shifts to the left when you open a comment, but it ended up feeling too janky. We might still make it work later on.

The current layout is optimized for 1440px wide screen size, which is the most common width that people use the site with, but we can probably make it work for people who are more zoomed in or have smaller screens after a bit more work.

Sometimes when you mouse over the side-comment icon, it tries to scroll the page to make the comment readable. This is very surprising and makes me lose my place.

Hmm, this seems likely a bug. What browser and OS are you using?

Hovering over the icon makes the comment appear briefly. If I then want to scroll in order to read the comment, there seems to be no way to 'stay hovered' -- I have to click and toggle it, to make the comment stick around so I can actually read it. (This plus being forced to scroll the screen makes the hover feature kind of useless.)

The way I've found it most comfortable to engage with the side comments was to hover, read the first few lines, author and karma, then click to pin the comment open and then read the rest. This... is of course harder if you are on a smaller screen and can't even get that basic information without scrolling first. As a bandaid (though this isn't great), the hover-area over the comment icon actually extends horizontally all the way to the right of the screen, so you should be able to start hovering, then scroll to the right, and then decide to click (though if you decide to not click and hover away, your scroll position is janked in a disorienting way, which is also pretty annoying, IMO).

I think overall we probably should find some way to make the post move further to the left. The big problem with this (which you can't see on this post) is the Table of Contents which actually takes up most of the available space on the left when it is present, and making both the side comments appear and the ToC appear is actually pretty hard and we don't have a ton of extra space to work with.

It's technically doable, but I think probably not worth implementing because the main benefit is mostly not there. With posts, the paragraph and the comment that replies to it may be very far away; but comments are usually shorter, so comments-replying-to-comments are not so far apart.

Seems... hard and a bit overwhelming. My current guess is we are unlikely to do that, just because at least in my mental eye it feels like it would make the comment section quite cluttered.

Huh, toggling works fine for me. Maybe this was fixed in the last 12 hours?

If a comment contains more than one blockquote that could be used to place it as a side-comment, it will be placed based on the first one. In order to appear as a side-comment, quotes should be an exact match, including formatting; there is some provision for "..." ellipses, but it's fairly limited.

I am expecting that when I would be writing a post that would qualify for

Trying to wrap my head around I find myself expecting that it would work for comments also, but at this stage it does not.

Yeah, agree that the small comment count is too faint in dark mode.