Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?

It took me a while to realize that there is a “prev” and a “next” button next to every comment. It makes navigation much easier when there are long threads. Using [-]/[+] is another option.

If the problem is just the sheer amount of data and not navigation, you can simply bookmark the thread and come back later. The algorithm usually does a good job getting the best comments on top after things have settled down, just read these. Plus, if you forget about the topic and don’t come back to it, maybe it wasn’t that interesting after all, that’s a good filter.

I minimise threads that get more narrow or argumentative than I’m interested in for a particular topic.

Sometimes in a particularly large discussion I’ll do that even for top-level comments without replies that I’ve either read (and won’t reply to/not interested in replies to) or skimmed/read enough and decided I won’t read.

Help others by voting (both directions) and flagging/vouching where necessary.

It’s quite easy, as long as you have threading, quoting and read/unread flags equivalent to 1990 Usenet.

I typically use the “next” links (above each post) to jump to each top-level comment, drilling down if appropriate.

Other than that, I try to resist the urge to read everything. Its almost always better to absorb the gist of the conversation than to try to absorb it all.

There’s the [-] button on the right which hides a subthread. Then go to the next. On particularly huge ones, just go to the next page.

From that, it’s like a party. Just go out and talk to someone at random. Past a certain level of discussion, there’s going to be repeated conversations on the topic anyway.

It always depends on the community. On Hackernews, for example, I only read the top 5 comments and then check the thread 2-3 times later to see if anything has changed. On reddit, for example, I don’t read any comments at all because there are too many bots replying.

Otherwise, I try to keep my own thread when I read the comments. For example, when I read an article about a topic, I try to find an extremely positive point of view from the comments, but also an extremely negative point of view and then link this to my own thoughts.

As already mentioned in the thread, I would like to have an online tool, for example, which reduces comments to a clear point and thus makes reading easier for me.

If the topic is interesting for me I just wait a day or two so the comment activity subsides and then just collapse each comment I read. Works perfect.

For threads I am interested in but want to comment immediately, I only collapse those comments that I don’t find interesting — and as above, go back a few days later to read the others without constantly having new ones added in real time.

I usually/only read comments with replies to get different opinions and go to next sibling comments if child comments aren’t interesting to me anymore.

I look for comments with responses. Comments with responses are usually more interesting, that filters out like 90% of comments.

If those comments were interesting I read more.

I’m thinking about making a tool to do this, I haven’t quite gotten to loading a comment thread but I have loaded 250k images and also 400 from Evernote. Next in line is to load some unwieldy discussions, particularly from a site with a horrible comment UI such as Arstechnica.

I’m particularly thinking about how to make sense of badly organized threads from Mastodon and similar things.

With timecode metadata and heatmaps to highlight rapidfire back ‘n forth and stuff?

Semantic scoring to rate quip chains Vs. slower, longer considered interactions?

Ways of highlighting high frequency commenters, perhaps rating frequent flyers by degree of interest in what they have to say and weighting threads by “participant rating”.

There are many ways to go in this space.

This is strange to me. Flagging should be reserved for comments that flagrantly break the rules. There’s plenty of stuff I disagree with that is formulated in a perfectly polite and serious way. I come here to have my own views challenged as much as anything.

Skim for keywords you’re interested in, decide from a glance whether or not a comment chain is just two people passive-aggressively fighting semantics (and whether or not those semantics matter to you), scroll to the bottom to see if the dead comments have anything useful to say and rescue them if they say something interesting (albeit not popular)

Don’t internalize everything you read here, just a quick dip down for some interesting perspectives, and then you resurface with those endorphins and wait for the next hunt

Tree structures are the only way it remains manageable at all, IMHO. No tree = no structure = no way to skip forwards.