Hidden comments settings not working?

post by TLW · 2022-04-09T23:15:17.973Z · LW · GW · No comments

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    2 habryka
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(Meta/site question.)

I have all settings related to comment hiding disabled[1] (do not collapse comments / do not truncate comments in large threads / do not truncate comments on home page)[2]. However, today I noted that comments appear to be hidden some of the time regardless[3].

This appears to be a recent regression[4][5]. I do note that there have been some other QoL changes recently ( code, improved  behavior, etc). 

Is there a way to turn this behaviour off?

  1. ^

    That is, set. Yay negative options.

  2. ^

    In general, I do not believe information hiding is a good idea[6]. I am willing to publicly discuss this elsewhere; please not on this question.

  3. ^

    As an example, when opening this link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F5EmBWyryhgNtqsKb/convoy-crackdown?commentId=E9KdstpkKMX59bhMh [LW(p) · GW(p)] I get "Showing 3 of 5 replies (Click to show all)".

  4. ^

    It is possible that I simply did not encounter said hiding before. That being said, said link is from 2m ago.

  5. ^

    It is possible that I simply did not notice it before; I would be surprised if so.

  6. ^

    I acknowledge there are potentially cases where all known alternatives are even worse.

Answers

answer by habryka · 2022-04-09T23:47:49.770Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My guess is you are confusing truncation/collapsing with hiding comments. In certain (quite rare) circumstances, we will show the root of a thread, followed by the leaves of a thread, while omitting some intermediate comments. Changing that behavior would require some changes to what data we load at all on the client (I think, though not totally confident), and is not something that you can currently turn off. 

↑ comment by TLW · 2022-04-10T01:05:51.190Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My guess is you are confusing truncation/collapsing with hiding comments.

I would argue that these all fall into the same category - namely hiding/showing comment content. Truncation being 'hiding part of a comment', collapsing being 'hiding most of a comment', and and hiding being 'hiding all of a comment' - to a first approximation.

Hm. Perhaps part of this is that the settings category name is misleading. The title is 'Comment Truncation Options', but the options in said category are both truncation and collapsing. I had assumed that said category - given it is already somewhat more general than the name suggests - would include all comment-content-hiding-related functionality.

Changing that behavior would require some changes to what data we load at all on the client (I think, though not totally confident), and is not something that you can currently turn off. 

That is unfortunate, but good to know. Time for me to come up with yet another user script I guess.

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