Highlighting New Comments |
November 7th, 2021 |
| tech |
Why isn't this more common?
The general idea is quite old: mail readers have always marked new
messages, so a threaded view with highlighted messages goes back at
least to the beginning of threading mail readers. I was using this in
the early 2000s, but it's surely older: the In-Reply-To
header goes back to RFC 680 (1975)
via RFC 733
(1977) and RFC
822 (1982).
On web forums, Reddit added new comment highlighting August 2010, but limited it to subscribers (then "Gold", now "Premium"). It used to be a headline feature of Gold (#2 in 2012, falling to #4 in 2013) but was dropped from advertising in the 2018 rebrand to Premium.
Since I never bought a Reddit subscription, I first saw new comment highlighting on LessWrong, where it was added on May 2011. Some time before 2015 (I think it was early 2014) it was added to SlateStarCodex, and I added it to my commenting system in August 2014. It survived the LessWrong rewrite, and it's supported by the other deployments of that platform.
From a technical perspective, it is a pretty small change: you can implement it client-side in a dozen lines. Many people have written userscripts to add this functionality to sites that don't have it.
The idea has been around for over ten years, it's very simple to implement, it dramatically improves the experience of returning to a complex discussion, but most comment systems that would benefit from it don't support it. Since at this point the explanation is not going to be that the people who would need to add it to FB/HN/etc haven't heard of it, I think the explanation likely goes back to some form of me (and the LW/EA communities) having unusual preferences? Maybe most people don't return to discussions? Or find it distracting? What's going on?
Football Outsiders highlights new comments. It's not socially connected to LW/EA, though there is some overlap in thinking style. (Also there's a problem in their implementation, where comment threads of >200 comments are split across multiple pages, and if you navigate to one page it treats you as having seen all of the pages, so when you go from page 1 to page 2 there is no highlighting. They haven't fixed this despite years of complaints, although they did increase the number of comments per page from 50 or 100 to 200.)
They're using Drupal, which does provide this feature.
Might it be because people don't really understand what a forum is anymore (the distinction being something like "a place where discussions take place asynchronously over the course of hours, days, or more" versus "a place where the last post was in 2004")
Facebook does have this a little; there's a blue line on the left border of some comments and things. I don't understand all the details of how it works. One issue that they presumably have to address is that nobody clicks on the links for individual Facebook posts; they read them in the context of a feed. So you need to decide what counts as having "read" a comment. Hacker News just does whatever they want for arbitrary reasons. I think forum software usually does have this. At least, I think I remember phpBB having it back in the day, maybe? Discourse definitely has it. I don't know why WordPress and Disqus don't have it, that does seem mysterious.
The SB Nation sites have been highlighting new comments since... I don't know, a long time ago. Maybe as far back as when we were in college.
Wild speculation on HN specifically. I don't read it much these days, but when I did, I feel like the kind of thread I used to go back to regularly was the kind of thread the mods didn't want to encourage. Culture war stuff and other flamebait. So I wouldn't be surprised if they deliberately didn't want to make that kind of thing easier.