LW Update 2018-11-22 – Abridged Comments

Abridging feels so bad to me that I'd probably just stop reading LW if GW didn't exist. Thanks to Said :-)

A bunch of us have commented to say how much we hate the comment-abridging "feature". It would be good to hear from the other side.

Hear ye, hear ye! If you (1) think comment-abridgement is an improvement and (2) aren't one of the admins responsible for implementing it (whose reasons I think we already know), please comment below and tell us why. Thanks!

I've already been whingeing at Ben in PMs about the comment-abridging system; Ben, if you're reading this, feel free to ignore it since I promised I'd shut up about it :-). Anyway, this is just to go on record as really disliking this "feature", which I think encourages superficial skimming over careful reading, makes it a big pain to engage fully with what others have said (because you have to expand lots of things separately), and just generally feels to me as if it does nothing I can see why I should actually want.

I agree with Raemon that any choice about how comments behaviour will shape what sort of conversations are had. I think this particular choice will encourage the wrong sort of conversations. And it makes LW harder to read.

Update:

We've tweaked a bunch of parameters on the abridging function, and added user settings as a safety valve.

This remains an overall pretty experimental feature, and I wouldn't be surprised if there turns out be a better way to accomplish the same goals (Taymon had listed a few good contenders). But for the immediate future it should be at least a bit less aggressive.

• Comments now load about twice as much content by default.
• High karma comments load about 40% more than they previously did.
• The threshold for high-karma comment is now 10 instead of 20
• Comments from the past two days get the high-karma-truncation-amount
• Users have two additional settings, one to turn off truncation on post pages, one to turn off truncation on the home page (where truncation is serving a fairly different purpose)

I was talking with someone about why we did the abridging-comments thing, and realized it was probably better to write up those reasons publicly so others could engage or reference them:

First, quick update: if you type "ctrl-F" or "cmd-F", it'll autoexpand all comments (this is so that people trying to search for a given phrase automatically get the behavior they want). [Note: this doesn't currently expand comments that are collapsed because of low karma, which I currently lean towards changing]

Second: I'm not at all confident the current setup is optimal, but here's what I was thinking about that led to it:

There's a few tradeoffs we could make with the comments. Obviously, leaving them expanded-by-default makes it easier to read an entire thread if you're already committed to doing that.

But auto-expansion is implicitly making a choice on which direction to nudge people. (It's a different choice depending on whether you're sorting comments by top karma, or most recent, or oldest). Whichever way you're sorting comments, default-expanded means that if you're quickly perusing the thread and _not_ committed to reading through the whole thing, you basically just get to read the first couple conversations, and those conversations aren't necessarily the ones most relevant to you.

This becomes especially bad on huge threads where it's just impossible to read everything, but even on a mid-length thread it can get a bit tiresome to read through looking for gems.

This has an effect not just on people's reading experience, but on what sort of followup-comments we're incentivizing.

If someone writes a mediocre comment that ends up sorted last, but someone else makes an insightful reply to it, it ends up buried and less engaged with. Meanwhile people sometimes end up replying to a top-karma comment (that has nothing to do with their new comment) just to give it a chance of being seen.

Put another way:

Any choice you make about the comments section will dictate what content people experience in the first minute or so, which in turn shapes what discussions people are incentivized to have, and my current guess is that it's better to allow a breadth first search (while still providing tools that make expanded all comments pretty easy for people that want that)

A thing that occurs to me after using this for a week:

I like being able to skim a thread and have my attention mostly directed to the good comments. However, this somewhat unfairly punishes new comments (which haven't had a chance to attract karma)

The first 25 comments of a post are on even footing, since the truncation process hasn't begun yet. But comments that arrive after the 25th will start being somewhat harder to inadvertently skim, and meanwhile the already-upvoted comments will probably continue to get upvoted.

Not sure how big an effect that is, but one possibility is to have new comments get the larger-abridging for about 24 hours.

I want to make my signal here. I don't like abridged comments.