Differentiating between comments collapsed via noise versus user-actioned & old collapses
Quick thought. Is there currently a purely visual way of distinguishing the rationale for why a comment is collapsed? It seems to me at the moment there's three distinct ways a comment can take on a collapsed property:
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The user actively collapsed the comment while scrolling through the topic. This type of collapse is transient, and is neither persisted on the Tildes server, or in the browser, after the users leaves the page.
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The comment was collapsed via the "negative weighting" heuristic as the community applied noise/joke tags to the comment. This is permanent, until presumably the comment gains enough votes to exceed any negative weighting causing its collapse.
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Thirdly, the comment can be collapsed because the user has enabled "collapse old comments" in https://tildes.net/settings/comment_visits. Once a user visits a thread, any comments that existed at the last visit to the thread will be collapsed on any subsequent visits to the thread.
Is there any visual way of distinguishing a user-collapsed comment from a community-collapsed comment currently? And if not, should there be one? Perhaps by making the collapsed text slightly more translucent? I'm actually looking to contribute to the Tildes source code in some small way, so this would potentially be an interesting shoehorn for that.
Yes, I'd like to do this. I'm not sure of the best method, but it might be reasonable to just have it inside the brackets that already show up to tell you how many comments there are. So for example, right now if it's a set of 3 comments collapsed you have a "[3]". That could possibly be something like "[3N]" or "[3-Noise]" or similar. I think it's probably better to keep it in that area (compared to right-aligned) so that you don't need to look all over the place for information.
If you implement something like this, could you use colors to indicate which are which?
Obviously this may play havoc with some color schemes, but I feel like I would be able to much more easily understand it if there were some visual effect like that, instead of just plain text.
When we first tried labels, they were all colored and displayed instantly. It however went horribly wrong and Deimos disabled them for long time until recently they were reenabled with silent casting.
The problem was that when a label was used on a comment, the comment actually gained a lot of visibility, because big colorful label was on a post, and that generally brings attention to it.
It ended up with noise and especially joke comments getting much more visibility than other, unlabeled comments.
It's a possibility, but as @Soptik says, the issue with using color for something like this is that it tends to draw more attention. When it's something like a Noise comment where the goal is to deemphasize it, that's the opposite of what you want.
Quick reply for now, will expand later, do not interpret my brevity as annoyance :)
At the moment, I'm thinking either greying the comment heading text in collapsed mode (as per @Happy_Shredder's) suggestion), or having a right aligned snippet of text, i.e.
[noise],[offtopic, joke], etc in collapsed view (as per @cfabbro's suggestion) to indicate the rationale for collapse. Maybe even both.Yup! I enjoy collapsing prior comments after I've read them via the comment folding option available in settings, but I currently am not able to distinguish comments that have been collapsed for this reason versus collapsed for noise.
@Deimos fundamentally indicates that the user should have an understanding of the mechanics of the site, and alludes to transparency in a few locations in the Tildes docs which would indicate to me this sort of feature would be in keeping with this modus operandi.
AFIAK, there is currently no way to easily tell if a comment has been collapsed because of being labeled noise or due to the other reasons you listed... other than to click the "expand all comments" button (
[+]in top left) with "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic" disabled in your settings, then refresh the topic page and go back to the comment in question to see if it's still collapsed or not. If it's still collapsed, it's because it's been labeled noise.However there is already an issue on Gitlab related to this:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/374
I really like that idea you suggested in that GitLab thread of just mentioning
[noise]or[noise, joke]as a right-aligned snippet of text on a community-collapsed comment. That might be the most inoffensive way to go about this.I'd be a fan of lightening noisy etc comments like HN does. Leave collapsed threads as they are.