Feature proposal: Close comment as resolved

There's a no-free-lunch problem with sorting comments

Absolutely, for anyone that doesn't read all comments. Hence: option.

Human preferences are many-dimensional. Everyone is an outlier in something. Something that targets the median in all dimensions results in something that works well in all dimensions for (almost) nobody.

(Including the tradeoff with development time, which is why there aren't more customization options. There is an accessible API, an open GitHub repo, and a third-party client, though, if you're into that sort of thing.)

I've been burnt one too many times by site APIs being disabled or neutered over time by websites that formerly had open APIs to really want to head down that path.

(Also, "if you want anything build your own frontend^[1]" is an interesting answer to 'why isn't LessWrong more popular^[2]'. I find this site clunky in general, and I am here largely despite it. I wonder how many people^[3] end up simply leaving instead.)

1. ^{^}

   Which admittedly isn't exactly what you said.

2. ^{^}

   Admittedly, not said by you. See e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x3ENSpeC76AzuP476/yitz-s-shortform?commentId=fMDP8vz6SRMewETEL [LW(p) · GW(p)] .

3. ^{^}

   Admittedly, the answer very well may be 'not many'.

Which part do you object to? Collapsing threads? Sorting? Both?

Both, although collapsing more than sorting. A few things -

1. I would have far less objections if this was strictly about typos; it isn't^[1].
2. I would have far less objections if the comment author was the only person that could mark a comment as such. Unfortunately, I recognize that in the good-faith case this somewhat reduces its utility.
3. It's a way for a post author to unilaterally make responses 'go away' in a somewhat less blatant manner^[2]. As long as the site is small this isn't the end of the world; this becomes more and more of a concern as the site grows.
4. Receiving a notification if your comment was marked as such helps, but does not fully alleviate my concerns.
   1. (If you get a notification on an account you no longer check, that doesn't really help.)
   2. (Ditto, if you get a notification that you disagree with... then what?)
5. For sorting: either people ended up upvoting said comment a lot - in which case knowing that e.g. 'this post was heavily edited to address X and many of the comments are discussing pre-edit' is useful - or they didn't, in which case there's no real need to downsort the comment.

There is already a user setting "Do not collapse comments to single line", it makes sense that this would also apply to editorial comments.

I would be fine if this was combined.

1. ^{^}

   The post starts off by talking about typos, but then says "this comment was useful at the moment it was made, but it has outlived is usefulness" - which covers far more than just typos.

2. ^{^}

   The current moderation is bad enough for this; it's a whole lot easier to detect bad-faith 'removing comment entirely' than it is to detect bad-faith 'I did an edit that (didn't actually) address(ed) this point, so this comment no longer applies'.