9
votes
Simple suggestion: Two different types of 'new' sort for comments
One thing that's always annoyed me about reddit is that sorting a thread by "new" isn't as useful as scrolling down to the end of a discussion on traditional forum software like phpbb. I propose two ways of sorting threads:
- Breadth-first: Exactly the same as the current sort on reddit and tildes. Each nesting level is sorted independently.
This sort makes it easy to find the oldest discussion of a thread, as well as new top-level comments. - Depth-first: Newer replies 'bump' threads. The timestamp of the latest reply of any depth determines the sorting of all of the parents.
This sort makes it easy to find the newest discussion.
Similar suggestion (though worded differently) is already in the gitlab issue tracker:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/111
I tend to refer to the idea as "Activity sort" for comments... and am definitely a fan of it.
p.s. I added this topic to the issue for more context too.
Oh come on, three people with my exact same suggestion... am I incapable of original ideas?
Well, in the grand scheme of things (beyond Tildes), there are over 7 billion people on this planet. Hardly anyone ever has a truly original idea in the most absolute sense of the term. What matters is that you independently came up with it. Even if other people thought of it, it was still an original idea relative to you.
With that in mind, this is the first time I've personally seen it suggested, so you've brought it to my attention for the first time. Even if you're not the first to think of it, you're the first to get me and some others aware of the idea :)
LOL. Well if it makes you feel any better, knowing that multiple people independently came up with the idea and thought it a good enough one to suggest it lets @deimos know what he should prioritize. ;)
If I may add, I actually really like HN's sorting method for comments. It's kind of like a standard "hot" sorting, based on age/votes. On reddit & elsewhere that means new comments won't be seen after there's a fair amount of comments. on HN, however, they somehow make it that very new comments most of the time get put fairly high up, a chance to be seen, voted on, potentially flagged.
Maybe it only works because most threads don't have a ton of replies. I'm not sure.
Bump.
You don't really need to do that for a thread only an hour old. Even though it dropped off the Activity sort due to lack of comments, I regularly sort by New and go through everything to make sure I don't miss anything. ;)
I only meant it as a joke, “bumping” doesn't really do anything does it?
LOL, yeah... it does. "Bumping" is an actual mechanic on ~ where, like on the forums of old, any new comment triggers the topic to go back to the top of the Activity sort. :P
The default view for most people is activity, which sorts posts by which have the most recent comments. So by posting "bump" here, you actually did bump the post, for most people :P