The tool solves my biggest frustration, which is best shown with an example.
Here's a submission from a few days ago:
Each reply at each indent level changes the topic of discourse at whim. Following along can feel disorganized and disorienting.
Notice how quickly the conversation topic derails across so many topics before the user has even scrolled down.
This type of reading experience happens consistently on HN because the vertical layout indiscriminately shows all replies to comments (and also ALL replies to that reply), instead of harmoniously sharing the space with other sibling comments. Sibling comments get starved for attention, while replies always steal the spotlight, dominating the discourse.
This makes the reading experience feel meandering, scatterbrained, and unfocused. Conversations often feel like they drift into squabbling and pedantry, because that's what the platform design prioritizes and presents.
As the reader scans top-down, they are effectively led through a “depth-first” traversal into all subdiscussions. Comment replies (no matter their quality or relevance) are always given precedence to sidetrack and derail the reading experience.
The default reading experience for HN comments is depth-first traversal. This has implications.
The issue magnifies for larger threads, where most readers never scroll down far enough to get past the first reply, or even the first reply to the first reply. Commenters also pile on to the first comment’s replies, knowing that that is prime real estate, and thus artificially inflating the discourse there.
The default HN reading experience is still available, you can read down the leftmost vertical edge and recreate the depth-first comment traversal.
I hit ↓ a few times to read vertically down the leftmost comments (normal HN comments flow). Then I hit Shift + ↑ to quickly return to the top home row. On the second row, I use → to scan across the various replies at the second level only.
However, as you’ll notice, for each level you can now easily see the sibling comments as well and jump to them.
Power-user keyboard shortcuts make all this effortless:
Left, Right to sidestep quickly between sibling comments.
Up, Down to traverse through reply trails. Shift+Up to quickly return back up to the top.
That’s really it. The magic is in hitting Left / Right which quickly allows you to “opt out” of going down any reply thread rabbit-hole. This is my favorite feature and I call it: “thank u, next”.
Left / Right gets you breadth-first traversal, instead of depth-first traversal, as a first-class operation. You are in control.
Fixing HN comments with breadth-first navigation
I made a tool to fix Hacker News comments.
It’s available at hn-comments.netlify.app.
The tool solves my biggest frustration, which is best shown with an example.
Here's a submission from a few days ago:
Notice how quickly the conversation topic derails across so many topics before the user has even scrolled down.
This type of reading experience happens consistently on HN because the vertical layout indiscriminately shows all replies to comments (and also ALL replies to that reply), instead of harmoniously sharing the space with other sibling comments. Sibling comments get starved for attention, while replies always steal the spotlight, dominating the discourse.
This makes the reading experience feel meandering, scatterbrained, and unfocused. Conversations often feel like they drift into squabbling and pedantry, because that's what the platform design prioritizes and presents.
As the reader scans top-down, they are effectively led through a “depth-first” traversal into all subdiscussions. Comment replies (no matter their quality or relevance) are always given precedence to sidetrack and derail the reading experience.
The issue magnifies for larger threads, where most readers never scroll down far enough to get past the first reply, or even the first reply to the first reply. Commenters also pile on to the first comment’s replies, knowing that that is prime real estate, and thus artificially inflating the discourse there.
The fix
Here's the same reply thread as above, shown a different way.
The default HN reading experience is still available, you can read down the leftmost vertical edge and recreate the depth-first comment traversal.
I hit ↓ a few times to read vertically down the leftmost comments (normal HN comments flow). Then I hit Shift + ↑ to quickly return to the top home row. On the second row, I use → to scan across the various replies at the second level only.
However, as you’ll notice, for each level you can now easily see the sibling comments as well and jump to them.
Power-user keyboard shortcuts make all this effortless:
That’s really it. The magic is in hitting Left / Right which quickly allows you to “opt out” of going down any reply thread rabbit-hole. This is my favorite feature and I call it: “thank u, next”.
Left / Right gets you breadth-first traversal, instead of depth-first traversal, as a first-class operation. You are in control.
Try it out
The tool is available at hn-comments.netlify.app.
Or for your convenience, modify the URL for any comment thread to load it in the tool:
https://
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352930https://hn-comments.netlify.app/item?id=46352930
~
Enjoy!