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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   7822 thread views

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Part of what's making comment nesting difficult to visually parse is that your brain includes the expand/collapse control in the "box" occupied by a comment when you're looking at the top of the comment (because the control is at the top), but not when you're looking at the bottom of the comment. Since you're judging nesting by looking at the bottom of one comment vs. the top of the subsequent comment, the visual effect of this is that there's barely any indentation.

This image demonstrates the issue, with red lines drawn to show the edges your brain is paying attention to when judging nesting. Visually, there's only 4-5px of indentation.

This could be fixed by indenting more, by greatly reducing the visual weight of the expand/collapse control (e.g. by making it light gray), or by explicitly drawing boxes around comment bodies, which your visual system will latch onto in place of drawing its own boxes. Here's an illustration of the last approach, as implemented in my current custom CSS.

(New Reddit incidentally has the same problem, except with its avatar images instead of an expand/collapse control.)

Any opinions on whether this is better?

Yeah, that's definitely an improvement.

Huh, that's a good point.

I want to avoid boxes because boxes are a lot of visual clutter, but I agree that this is a problem and I'm not totally sure how to solve it. I'll work on it.

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