Long comment threads become unreadable as replies are indented : cohost support

Sciman101

started a topic 7 months ago

The community guidelines discussion has lead to long comment threads under certain posts, something I can only assume will be more common as more users join the platform. Since each successive reply indents the next comment more, after 10 or so successive replies, text becomes so squished against the right margin of the comment box it's completely unreadable and results in visual glitches with parts of the ui. Shorter threads are legible but become uncomfortable once the page is forced to start cutting off words onto the next line. Im not sure how big an issue this is in practice, since most comment threads aren't that long, but with the increase in users it seems like it'll start popping up more. I'm not positive what the ideal fix for this would be, but a few possibilities include

Changing the indent level of replies
Making the comment box below a post wider
Add a horizontal scrollbar to the bottom of the comment box
Break off really long comment threads into their own page?

Silver

said 7 months ago

this problem is extra egregious on mobile, comments get pretty unreadable only a handful of indents in. and in safari at least, the longest comment threads also force the page wider to accommodate them, which allows the rest of the content on the page to be wider than the screen, which makes it a pain to read even just the original post bc i have to scroll back and forth each line.

k

kit-ty-kate

said 7 months ago

> Break off really long comment threads into their own page?

If i understand the suggestion correctly, i think this is what reddit does:

* the max nested comments is 8 and for the 9th and above there is a link to a page that has the 8th, a link to the parent conversation and all their comments below.

Currently on mobile, cohost seems to only behave more or less ok until the 3rd, then all hell breaks loose and you need to zoom out to see the whole text. To fit 8 nested comment reddit:
* tightens the indentation between a parent comment and the nested comment
* adds vertical lines in place of spaces for indentation, to make it easier to follow the hierarchy of nested comments

d

dante

said 4 months ago

Bumping this, as I just came here to propose it but looks like it's already here.

To look at another example of this, this is how Tumblr used to structure reblogs, but the reading of huge reblog threads became frankly untenable at some point. I think there probably is a workable solution in here somewhere.

Reddit's behavior seems like a reasonable solution, though perhaps there's a way to preserve verticality in the general reading experience... the way that Twitter structures replies to posts, where each Tweet can be clicked on to see just the replies to that specific Tweet is behavior that I personally like quite a bit (other grumps about Twitter aside). But that would require probably some fancy dynamic page shit in order to make that work in a comments section.

Definitely agree that the Reddit option is sort of the best compromise for reading's sake. Not perfect though.