I agree that it’s unpleasantly unsettling. What’s worse is that (for me) after initially posting a comment, at least some of the time its content never appears at all unless I e.g. edit the comment. I guess some timeout is expiring.
If doing this makes things better in some other way, perhaps there’s a way to give a visual indication that what the user is seeing is known not to be up to date but should get refreshed shortly? Depending on what the advantages of the change were, this might be better than just backing it out. Obviously the right thing is to make it so fast that it isn’t an issue at all :-).
[EDITED to add:] To my surprise, I find that if I open another instance of the same page it doesn’t have the newly posted comment on it, but an empty comment just like the original page where I posted it. So I guess it isn’t just a matter of taking time to reload content, but something more complicated. I don’t have a good mental model of what might be happening underneath to produce this effect, but my gut says it probably isn’t a good idea.
I agree that it’s unpleasantly unsettling. What’s worse is that (for me) after initially posting a comment, at least some of the time its content never appears at all unless I e.g. edit the comment. I guess some timeout is expiring.
If doing this makes things better in some other way, perhaps there’s a way to give a visual indication that what the user is seeing is known not to be up to date but should get refreshed shortly? Depending on what the advantages of the change were, this might be better than just backing it out. Obviously the right thing is to make it so fast that it isn’t an issue at all :-).
[EDITED to add:] To my surprise, I find that if I open another instance of the same page it doesn’t have the newly posted comment on it, but an empty comment just like the original page where I posted it. So I guess it isn’t just a matter of taking time to reload content, but something more complicated. I don’t have a good mental model of what might be happening underneath to produce this effect, but my gut says it probably isn’t a good idea.