2 small problems with the site...

post by Long try · 2019-10-22T04:31:23.468Z · LW · GW · No comments

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    4 Raemon
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They're more like inconveniences, but still.

1. I've set my account setting to display "magical algorithm" comments, but when I read posts I still see them in the order of "oldest". I guess that's because of a discrepancy between those drop-down options: in 1 it's "top scored", in another it's "magical".


2. The truncation of comments works, but sometimes I find it actually making them longer.

Example: the site displays someone's comment: blah blah blah therefore your argument is i... (Read more) (Click to expand thread. Ctrl F to expand all).

I click Read more. Now it is: blah blah blah therefore your argument is invalid.

So I guess your algorithm of how to display comments looks something like this (pardon my below expression, I'm not a programmer at all):

If [comment_length] >150
then display [1st 150 characters of comment] and [...(Read more) (Click to expand thread. Ctrl F to expand all)]

This leads to the problem as described above. When a comment is 157 char long, for example, this truncate method actually increases the length displayed AND leaves readers like me with a weird feeling after clicking.

Here I propose a solution within my ability of thinking:

If [comment_length] >150
then display [1st 75 characters of comment] and [...(Read more) (Click to expand thread. Ctrl F to expand all)]

So... have those 2 minor things above been mentioned before? If not, I'd like to report. If yes, then are you going to look into them and when can they be changed? :)

Answers

answer by Raemon · 2019-10-22T19:48:33.559Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Can you link to a particular comment that does the awkward truncation thing? Our truncation process is supposed to address that using a method similar to what you describe. But if you give me a working example I can look into it.

re: "Magical Algorithm" vs "Oldest": what you're problem running into here is a hard-coded edgecase. Very Old Posts were published before LessWrong had a threading system (or indeed, before LessWrong even existed – originally published on OvercomingBias.com). In those cases, some old comments actually only make sense if read in chronological order, and we override the usual settings.

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