Dunno, when FB first introduced that UI I found it quite confusing. (i.e. FB only has two thread levels, but prior to this UI change, you could reliably expect a comment in a given thread level to be preceded by the preceding comment).
I agree that if we can avoid the confusion it’s preferable to do that (I think showing the nesting levels may be the correct approach, it requires a bit more dev-time than some of the other options so it may take awhile longer)
Also note that the comments I assume you’re looking at do have an “show parent” icon on them (which comments normally don’t have). [this isn’t an argument that the status quo is okay, I’m just sort of pedantically arguing that the status quo isn’t much more confusing that FB was when it introduced it’s own truncation scheme]
I do see the “show parent” icon, now that you have pointed it out, and I have viewed a short-form post with missing comments, expanded the comments, then explicitly gone back and looked for the comments I knew were missing. I would say that it is extremely subtle. I couldn’t find it, even when I was looking for it, until I knew exactly which comment to look for it on.
I think (absent a more-code solution) a reasonable thing would be to replace the tiny subtle icon with text like “(… parent comment omitted, click to show …)” (presumably on a line by itself above the current top line.)
Right now I claim there is really no indication that a comment is missing unless the reader is extremely familiar with the interface, and even then it’s tiny and would be easy to miss even if you knew where to look.
Dunno, when FB first introduced that UI I found it quite confusing. (i.e. FB only has two thread levels, but prior to this UI change, you could reliably expect a comment in a given thread level to be preceded by the preceding comment).
I agree that if we can avoid the confusion it’s preferable to do that (I think showing the nesting levels may be the correct approach, it requires a bit more dev-time than some of the other options so it may take awhile longer)
Also note that the comments I assume you’re looking at do have an “show parent” icon on them (which comments normally don’t have). [this isn’t an argument that the status quo is okay, I’m just sort of pedantically arguing that the status quo isn’t much more confusing that FB was when it introduced it’s own truncation scheme]
I do see the “show parent” icon, now that you have pointed it out, and I have viewed a short-form post with missing comments, expanded the comments, then explicitly gone back and looked for the comments I knew were missing. I would say that it is extremely subtle. I couldn’t find it, even when I was looking for it, until I knew exactly which comment to look for it on.
I think (absent a more-code solution) a reasonable thing would be to replace the tiny subtle icon with text like “(… parent comment omitted, click to show …)” (presumably on a line by itself above the current top line.)
Right now I claim there is really no indication that a comment is missing unless the reader is extremely familiar with the interface, and even then it’s tiny and would be easy to miss even if you knew where to look.