Do you use reddit? As cookingrobot says, gmails threading is one dimensional and...

Kiro · on July 25, 2012

I thought reddit and HN were using the same system. What's the difference?

Samuel_Michon · on July 25, 2012

Hacker News is written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

Reddit used be written in Lisp, but they switched to Python early on: http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html

I do agree that they look alike, Hacker News was inspired by Reddit.

sp332 · on July 25, 2012

Not the same exact software, just the same way of representing comment threads.

andrewflnr · on July 25, 2012

Collapsing threads, for one thing.

wisty · on July 26, 2012

It's like, one line of javascript different (the equivalent of if score < threshold: thread.collapse())

andrewflnr · on July 26, 2012

I don't care about the code. Collapsing is a significant change in UX.

samstave · on July 28, 2012

EXACTLY!

No one seems to get this, not HN, not Quora, Digg (though that doesn't matter any longer...)

Its about increasing the information consumption rate and navigation rate. Collapsing is critical to navigating threads with thousands of comments, even tens of comments!

Any UX designer who does not see this, is, in my book, worthless.

shock3naw · on July 26, 2012

Inspect the source for both sites. I have to admit, I felt a little nauseous when I first read HN's markup & styling.