The comment box is placed at the bottom of the page to promote reading all — even very new — comments before posting a new one.
As mentioned, we've talked about this multiple times, and it's probably the most common request for change I've heard so far—I think most people think it's a mistake that it's at the bottom, not something I did deliberately. People have already linked you to some of the other discussions about it, so let me cover something new this time that I've come to realize about why I like having it at the bottom.
Of course, I think it's a good thing that it encourages people to read the existing comments before posting their own, but there's also a more subtle side effect to this: it encourages responding to other people over posting your own top-level comment. While you're reading the comments on your way down, it's more likely that you'll consider replying to someone else. Maybe you'll end up saying basically the same thing that your top-level comment would have, but now you're doing it by discussing with someone else, instead of just throwing your thoughts out (and hoping that other people start discussing with you).
Also, yes, this gets more and more inconvenient as the thread gets larger, but I think that's also a good thing in some ways. I think most of us that have a lot of reddit experience have learned that once a thread gets to a certain size, a new top-level comment has very little chance of being seen by more than a tiny group of users. If we're coming into a large thread with hundreds of comments, we know that if we want any chance of our comment being seen at all, you pretty much have to reply to one of the chains that's already near the top. This situation isn't really great overall, but I think it's even worse because the comment box being at the top encourages people to post new top-level comments, which will probably feel discouraging when they end up getting no responses or even votes.
One thing that I think is good to keep in mind too is that all threads don't have to behave the same, and maybe we can eventually have some different thread "types". For example, the introductions thread is one where people definitely should be encouraged to post new top-level comments (and the thread should probably also be sorted so the newest comments come first by default). So maybe in the future we could have a separate thread type that sorts by new by default and also moves the comment box to the top, since it's more appropriate in that type of thread.
I agree with the philosophy specially when relating it to larger threads with 100's of top level comments. In Reddit, it often felt like you were shouting into the void if you were late to these...
I agree with the philosophy specially when relating it to larger threads with 100's of top level comments. In Reddit, it often felt like you were shouting into the void if you were late to these threads and so much of it devolved into innane jokes or 1-liners to the point where comments were borderline irrelevant to the content posted. This was a large part of the reason I kept my interactions to a minimum & just lurked.
I honestly hope this doesn't change and that future improvements focus on encouraging throughtful discussion.
This is an intentional design to ensure you read the article and comments before participating.
Thanks you . I finally get it
https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/site-design#the-comment-box
I agree with the philosophy specially when relating it to larger threads with 100's of top level comments. In Reddit, it often felt like you were shouting into the void if you were late to these threads and so much of it devolved into innane jokes or 1-liners to the point where comments were borderline irrelevant to the content posted. This was a large part of the reason I kept my interactions to a minimum & just lurked.
I honestly hope this doesn't change and that future improvements focus on encouraging throughtful discussion.
I'm going to remove this, since the explanation has been posted and it's been covered so, so many times previously.
You need to lurk more.