Examples: look on the front page with comment threads >~30
I went into the feature request thread to see if anyone had requested the ability to turn this off, but gave up on looking after rapid-fire clicking "More" 25+ times. Content more than a page or two back might as well not exist.
I'd say that's partially due to scrolling, but you're correct - that More button is so non-obvious that I didn't even see it until I read this thread. Those comments below More might as well not even exist.
The most common retort to that viewpoint that I saw was "well, so you won't get karma. Bummer. Your opinion is out there anyway," which is missing the point, I think. It's not about the karma, it's about contributing to the conversation. Now, contributing to the conversation is a competition based on time and popularity.
This change will probably do two things: hide a lot of good comments below page flips, and cause people to quickly comment on stories to fill above the fold.
The site's incentives to only comment on the hot threads are probably detrimental.
I've seen this effect on other sites; one gaming site[0] shows two views of the comment list, "recent" and "top-voted" (both with a "more" button that few people seem to click)---the "recent" comments rarely get more than two or three votes before scrolling off, while the difference between the lowest upvote count in the "top-voted" count and the next-highest comment can be in the hundreds or thousands once a game has been up for more than a day or two.
[0]Kongregate.com, if anyone's curious.
And incentivises replying to comments above the fold.
Several times yesterday I found myself opening a seemingly interesting discussion, reading the comments, then wondering why so few people were talking about it.
The link that says "Hey, there's actually more discussion that we're hiding. Click here to see it" is tiny (and unexpected) so I just plain missed it. I even missed it on this thread until I read a comment talking about other comments that had scrolled off the 1st page, thus demonstrating that there must indeed be a 2nd page and that I should look harder for a way to find it.
Had I been able to find (and therefore read) the whole discussion on those topics yesterday, I might have had interesting things to add. So might all the other people who missed them for the same reason. I suspect that the overall quality of discussion has taken a dip since this feature went live.
I don't even hit the "more" button on the homepage to see older stories; there is no way I am going to hit the more comments.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119471
Thus my comment is technically mis-placed, but guaranteed to be on the first page of replies and discussion.
There has to be a better solution to the problem of load. It depends on the cause, of course, but in the absence of profiling information (always the first step) I would investigate more cacheing to make the system less dynamic.
ADDED IN EDIT: I love the way this comment has attracted down-votes - I've been watching it bounce up and down for a bit now. It's clearly alright to discuss the merits and otherwise, but for some people, clearly not alright to demonstrate the effect. On a forum for hackers, I find that delightful!
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Farther in the future: HN's arc webserver uses simple flat files for storage, so moving from one host to two is probably a big context switch as well. I wonder what the current server's specs are, and how long we have until that kinda-sorta-Y2K-like barrier.
Such comment handling would however certainly motivate people to "post without the parent."
I think preventing such "sticky" threads from clobbering the first pages of comments may add some decent value to the discussion. Especially in brining in different aspects and povs, perhaps sometimes yielding a more balanced discussion.
It's such a better experience on every site when things auto-load as you scroll down.
I agree with OP; the current system is suboptimal, to say the least.
The Scrollbar of Sisyphus breaks the back button (click "Back", browser remembers where you had scrolled to, can't go that far down, lands at the bottom, triggers second "page" of results) jumping to the bottom of the page, occasionally searching, and forces you to jump to the end of the page repeatedly to figure out where you were. It breaks nearly every UI expectation one has about scrolling (especially on a phone) and several that your browser has about caching.
I'd be fine with it, if the More returned the rest of the comments, not the x next comments.
I don't really see the point of this either; it can hardly be that big of a resource hog on either ends.
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[1]: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/igiofjhpmpihnifd...
Maybe because of the community growth. When I began to hang out around here, 6 months before I created an account I believe, 40 upvotes was a huge amount for a post or a comment.
Today it's common to see posts with more than 100 in the front page and comments receiving 60 or so.
EDIT: The number of comments in each posts also exploded, 20 comments in a thread used to make it very active.
EDIT 2: For clarification.
Recently, I've found the HN site has become pretty unresponsive at times - I imagine limiting the number of comments on each page is going to reduce the burden on the server.
Here's a better way to reduce load: make commenting not require a reload. Same for editing comments, deleting them, etc.
I've counted at least four instances. (I'm even a part of one of the branches, as oblivious as I was to the new system and similar discussions.)
I wonder if this comment will show above or below the fold. Flip a coin, I guess.
[1] - http://autopagerize.net/
I didn't even notice the pages were paginated thanks to the extension (it auto appends page 2... page 3... to the bottom of paginated content)
Ironic that PG's definitive reply is now below the fold:
