Is this a new experiment or is it a new permanent thing to reduce load, I don't think many people are going to be looking at the lower end of the spectrum (clicking more) which may detract from interesting comments and conversations.<p>Examples: look on the front page with comment threads >~30
I agree, I think this basically disincentivizes commenting when you know you're going to end up "below the fold".<p>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.
This feature is actually causing damage.<p>Several times yesterday I found myself opening a seemingly interesting discussion, reading the comments, then wondering why so few people were talking about it.<p>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 <i>on this thread</i> 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.<p>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.
The new system can easily be "gamed," as has been discussed already several times. Here's a specific example. I wanted to observe the irony that PG's definitive answer is now below the fold, but I wanted my comment to be "above the fold" so that people could find PG's comment. Realising that if I simply commented in the appropriate place - as a reply to the original submission, as I have done with this comment - then my comment would repidly disappear even further below the fold, I added it as a reply to the unshakeably top reply:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119471" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119471</a><p>Thus my comment is technically mis-placed, but guaranteed to be on the first page of replies and discussion.<p>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 (<i>always</i> the first step) I would investigate more cacheing to make the system less dynamic.<p>ADDED IN EDIT: I <i>love</i> 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!
I'd rather the page take 10 minutes to load than have it paginated. I know PG is just trying to implement a quick temporary fix, but this one is so annoying it made me go back to work (gasp!).
It would be interesting to see an auto-extend feature like Facebook does with the timeline. Keep scrolling? We will AJAX load them into the page in batches. That should do ya. No buttons necessary, full comment history the further you go, and you don't show more information than you originally ask for (just a couple of comments).
There's a really easy fix to this: Load more comments on scroll-to-bottom. No button, no bandwidth used, but those who make it to the bottom of a thread don't have to do anything to see new comments.<p>I agree with OP; the current system is suboptimal, to say the least.
I didn't even notice that - that's incredibly annoying.<p>I'd be fine with it, if the More returned <i>the rest</i> of the comments, not the x next comments.<p>I don't really see the point of this either; it can hardly be that big of a resource hog on either ends.
It's harder to see whether someone has already made the same point that you want to make, so it could lead to redundant commentary. I often do a quick keyword search of the page to see if someone has already made a related comment. With pagination, you can't easily do that.
Couldn't people take advantage of this by only commenting on high-karma comments, regardless of whether or not it's relevant to the parent-comment, but instead just piggy-backing to stay on the first page?
Let's wait for the official answer, but I also include my take.<p>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.<p>Today it's common to see posts with more than 100 in the front page and comments receiving 60 or so.<p>EDIT: The number of comments in each posts also exploded, 20 comments in a thread used to make it very active.<p>EDIT 2: For clarification.
I noticed the same, and assumed that it was a measure designed to improve site performance.<p>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.
I don't understand the rationale for this feature.<p>Here's a better way to reduce load: make commenting not require a reload. Same for editing comments, deleting them, etc.
I just noticed the hilarious(ly atrocious) redundancy this causes: Go to the [W3C HTML5 logo thread](<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115551" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115551</a>) and see how many times the "Autobot" joke is made.<p>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.)<p>I wonder if this comment will show above or below the fold. Flip a coin, I guess.
When did this start? I read almost exclusively through the ihackernews.com mobile site. I just checked and it does not implement the more button and only shows the first 40 or so comments. It looks like I have been missing out on the end comments of popular threads without realizing it. :(
Everyone should be using AutoPagerize[1] (a Sarari extension) by now, or at least something similar. It makes your life a lot easier on most websites, one of which is now HN.<p>[1] - <a href="http://autopagerize.net/" rel="nofollow">http://autopagerize.net/</a>
I, for one, tend not to even read comment threads larger than a certain size, unless I want to see specific reactions to an article. I think jedsmith has it partially right up above when he says "it's about contributing to the conversation", but for me it's also about reading conversations that I can hold in my head. Beyond about 40 comments, I'm not sure I can do this at all.
Yet another reason to use Auto Patch Work - <a href="https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aeolcjbaammbkgaiagooljfdepnjmkfd" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aeolcjbaammbkgai...</a><p>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)
Quoth RiderOfGiraffes 34 minutes ago,<p>Ironic that PG's definitive reply is now below the fold:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118936" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2118936</a>
Is the feature really saving that significant of load time? I mean HN is as minimal as it gets, I'd rather all the comments load and take 3-4 seconds more than have to manually go through and hit more several times.