Comment Sort / Ranking
Would be amazing if comments could be sorted by "likes" or ranked, similar to Reddit. Engenders great community engagement and democratic comment filtering.
Replies 21
One would assume an organization that depends upon members and subscribers would routinely advise them of changes before they were implemented--and include a brief explanation of its reasoning.
Frankly, I don't like the new sorting, and IMO the default should be chron order (as before this morning).
One would assume an organization that depends upon members and subscribers would routinely advise them of changes before they were implemented--and include a brief explanation of its reasoning.
Frankly, I don't like the new sorting, and IMO the default should be chron order (as before this morning).
Apart from that, there is NO way this has been tested as even the most basic function, the orange arrow, doesn't work anymore.
By the way, there is a seperate thread with other comments on the new sort order.
drftr
Just noticed the comment thread now has the box for your post at the top. Cool, I thought, don't have to go to the bottom of 200 comments on T or GE. Then I discovered that the whole thread had been reversed!
Newest comments at the top makes no sense to me. I want to start with the earliest ones to see what is brought up in discussion. I suppose some folks might have a different take though. Is it possible to give us an option (preference that is stored with our user name?)
New comment sort order is nauseating. Makes my head spin. Like walking into an upside down room. I see the "Sort by" can be adjusted. But the "Add Your Comment" box stays on top regardless. It doesn't track with the selected sort order. Very confusing and disorienting. Also sort reverts back to "Newest" on every refresh. What the hell?
I like reading things in chronological order. It makes more sense to me. I don't buy a book and go right to the end to see if the butler did it. SA comments have been very readable until now.
Please repeal this nonsense. In lieu of that, keep "Oldest" sort as default in a salute to years of tradition. Make sure the comment box tracks with sort order. Sort order should be sticky and remember how you set it. That way folks who don't use default won't constantly have to adjust sort order.
What happened to usability testing? Changing stuff willy-nilly is playing with fire. There's a lesson here.
• Not everything new is good.
• If it ain't broke don't fix it.
• Remember New Coke?
Please allow me to add fuel to this well-deserved fire:
I have been on SA since 2016, and have witnessed more than one gaffe with respect to SA's updates/changes:
Email links that garnered an error message, for days, instead of allowing access to the site/article;
an update that changed the user's total # of Comments and Likes, which was never accurately rectified (my Profile still shows a discrepancy of more than 500 Likes that were never 'returned' to my public profile);
iPhone apps that suddenly stopped working as they should;
and more.
However, this new 'ordering' of Comments from newest-to-oldest may very well take the cake!
There is now no real 'readability' or 'flow' to the Comments section.
Perhaps starting at the end worked for Margaret Mitchell, when she wrote Gone With the Wind, but I do believe that the publisher still chose to start the book from the beginning, when all was said and done.....
This change from SA makes absolutely no sense, and attempting to wade-through the Comments section is now beyond awkward and disjointed!
Hi - sort by most recent on top has been implemented now and is now the default. Thanks for the feedback.
This isn't what I asked for at all
Well, I still hate the default to 'Newest first' as much as when it first came out - and *especially* the fact that it doesn't remember my preference.
However, I did happen to notice one thing today that makes it slightly less bad. While switching to 'Oldest' seems to destroy the 'New posts' feature, it turns out that next to the number of comments, there is an item in red showing how many new comments there are (presumably only when you are in new comments mode). Anyway, clicking on that DOES in fact take you to the first new comment after changing the order to oldest first.
So it's not quite so bad. Very disappointing that no-one from SA noticed this criticism in the earlier comments and pointed out this useful feature ... sigh ...
Well, it seems that 'Oldest' is now the default for comments - at least for me. Haven't had time to play around with it yet, but VERY pleased to see that things are apparently back to a useful state in this regard. Thanks !!!!
I am not seeing any change here to how comments are organized. From what I can tell, they still only show up in this two-level quasi-conversational mode, where the most recent comment may appear somewhere in the middle of a 500+ comments list as, for example response #12 to comment #285. Can you see how painful it would be to stay on top of that kind of active discussion from one day to the next?
It would be quite acceptable to me if you retain the conversational mode as the default, as long as you provide the option to flatten the presentation, sorted on date or post sequence. Investorvillage.com has the right idea. Note the sequential presentation, most recent towards the top. Here's an individual comment. Note the "in response to" link to the replied-to comment, as well as the set of "replies" links below the comment. If offered as an option, that presentation format would make active discussions so much easier to monitor.