What’s up with these sites that list comments in reverse chronological order? It’s annoying enough when you have to scroll down to the bottom and then backtrack in order to follow the flow of comments. What’s really fucking stupid is when they not only reverse the time order of the comments, they break them into pages of 10 or so comments each. Then you have to go to the last page, read those comments backwards, then click on the next-to-last page, read those comments backwards, etc. It is to the eternal credit of the SDMB that a more rational system of displaying posts is used.
While I’m on the topic, it’s also really goddamned irritating when someone posts an obviously pre-written, generic screed that is only tangentially related to the original post and has probably been cross-posted to multiple sites. I believe many of these posts come from the political campaigns. The SDMB is thankfully free of this sort of thing; is it too much to ask for other sites to keep a lid on it? For example, in response to a story about the hurricanes, some buttplug will post
or
Comment sections are not free advertising for your motherfucking candidate or an opportunity to post your latest crackpot theory about the Bilderbergs. So stay the hell away from them unless you have something relevant to say.
This place exists pretty much solely as a comment section. The Economist apparently thinks comments are a sop to the readers and only have value if they increase ad impressions. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that spam was from The Economist’s own employees, trying to troll the people there and run up page views.
But I thought you would be commenting about YouTube comments, otherwise known as the rock bottom of moronic, offensive crap. I’ll show you the future: A racist, homophobic 14-year-old pounding his fist into a keyboard, forever.
A large number of these atrocious comment systems are perpetrated by Pluck (the Economist’s is one such). They seem to specialise in javascript-ridden abominations, preferring to display the “most recent comments” despite this inevitably presenting you with comments shorn of all conversational context. The reason sites use them is that Pluck provide a whole lot of back-end stuff that is very useful to commercial site operators; unfortunately they appear to have employed designers who have never used a comment system in their lives.
I think The Economist is actually quite keen on user interaction (they’ve actually got a surprisingly continuous community there, given the usability nightmare). It’s not just a sop, as their occasional organised debate series shows. I just don’t think they’ve got the hang of it yet, and as a result have ended up with Pluck’s most offensive implementation ever. I don’t understand how anyone could think reading a conversation backwards is a good idea, still less updating the page ajax-style, forcing you to navigate to the last page of comments and read to the top, then scroll back to the bottom and select the next page before repeating the whole stupid rigmarole. I can only assume these people converse in reverse polish notation, a bit like Yoda.
Unfortunately, the Guardian has just finished converting its enormously popular in-house blogs (which while spartan were very readable and quick) to Pluck’s rubbish, meaning dynamically-loaded comment sections (complete with loading progress bars!), javascript-dependent posting and godawful “most recent” display preferences are the order of the day. The users are not pleased.
That I have no problem with, because you’ve probably already read through the thread and are most likely replying to one of the last few posts. It makes sense to me.
Never mind the order they’re in; it’s the quality of comments on other websites that makes me thankful for the SDMB. The other day I was making fun of the half-wit illiterate children on imdb.com; then I read some comments on YouTube. Okay, God, just wipe us out and start over with the monkeys.
Is there some reason that comments need to be nested and messed up the way they are? Is there some reason they can’t all just be in a row like the posts here? Cause I’d really like to read comments just in a row, instead of all linked and nested and crapped up.