Nowadays its seem like on half the discussion or comment pages on the Internet, it only displays a small number of comments, and then you have to endlessly keep on clicking “load more comments” in order to see the rest.
What moron thought this was a good idea? It occupies my time, having to use the mouse to click “load more comments” and then switching to the keyboard or scroll bar to page down. It often make it impossible to see how many total comments there are. (At least Reddit lets you know that.) Am I done with 10% of them, or 90%? Will it take a minute to finish reading them, or 10 hours? Who knows. And it makes it impossible to search the text because it isn’t displayed, unless you’ve already clicked “load more comments” as many times as possible.
If I accidentally click a link, sometimes after I go back to a page, the comments are hidden again.
Is it supposed to reduced loading times or something? We’re just talking text and a few links here, is it that hard for people’s browsers to handle?
I do read comments… whenever I wake up thinking “Come to think of it, maybe humanity isn’t beyond redemption. I’ll bet somewhere there are intelligent citizens with thoughtful world views, buttressed by logic and evidence.”
A couple of clicks on “Load more comments” and I’m back to despair again. Delicious, delectable despair…
I dunno - it really depends on the culture of the site. Most comment are crap, sure, but some sites develop communities not unlike the SDMB. I usually read the comments on io9, for instance, and the talkback on the Onion AV Club is often funnier than the articles themselves.
I seldom read comments myself because they have no shape or form, just misspelt snips of ungrammatical assault with bits of nastiness thrown in. Internet forums are far more useful places to commit savagery in the English language.
However I do detest web sites which require you to click through a series of pages to find some final fact. Like “the top ten most popular refrigerators in Nome” is ten separate pages. For pity’s sake just put the damn report on one page, maybe two, and let the reader soak it up.
And I guess while I’m having a rant, let me also say that I do not need and absolutely hate video explanations. Write the stuff down by all means use some diagrams, photos, gifs whatever but don’t expect us to suffer through five minutes for a 30 second piece of knowledge.
Yes yes there are plenty of exceptions and TED Talks wouldn’t be anything without video. But lately it seems a lot of simple how stuff works must be delivered by video.
It’s not the culture, it’s the structure. Forums hold the conversation in place as long as needed. I’ve run and participated in many small-interest forums where there were only a few posts per week; it was nice for a a small, isolated community of participants to be able to carry on a coherent discussion, however slowly. Newcomers could catch up in a little while and join the conversations in progress.
No matter how clever, bright or polite a comments community, it’s a rushing river of tossed-off posts, with little or no hierarchical structure, no way to compartment or create new topics, and in which catching up - over a short or long time - is almost impossible. The breaking it into “More Comments” sections is an almost trivial gloss on the cocktail party vs. seminar difference between the forms.
Comments have their place, especially before the semiliterate ranters find them. But they don’t replace structured exchange venues like this one, and never will.
They - and the pages structured to be viewed in multiple clicks - are all about interactivity suiting the host’s needs, not the reader’s.
Long story short, most people only read the top 5-10 comments. Loading all 1000 comments is a waste of bandwidth, which on popular cites is quite the concern. Since (statistic pulled from my bum) 90% of people don’t read past the top 10 comments, “load more comments” saves on bandwidth, which means saving money.
I think the first 10-20 comments are a pretty good way of gauging how people feel about the issue in the article anyway, but I do agree with your rant.
I thought this was going to be about YouTube, where loading all comments takes you to a separate comments page, stopping the video you were watching, or possibly just listening to while trying to read comments. I would certainly second that rant.
Dynamically loading pages are the new trend that doesn’t want to go away. It used to be frowned upon, but now it’s the default. I blame the ongoing tablet-ising of websites.
It particularly annoys me because I hold my drawing tablet pen on my browser’s scrollbar, so when the page stretches longer, it throws my position way out of whack into who knows where, and I struggle to get back to where I left off.
“Load More Comments” doesn’t bother me too much, but what I really dislike is when each individual comment cuts off at a certain number of characters and you have to click “more” to see the whole thing. Review sites all seem to do this, such as goodreads.com. Why not just display the whole comment?
