The argument against that is that with the collapse button so close to the vote arrow, we would be guaranteed to get misvotes, especially on mobile. The undo vote feature would no doubt help with that some, but only so much.
To be honest I would rather have the vote arrow moved somewhere else. I'm often more interested in collapsing a comment thread than voting. I'm not sure if this is something only I care about though.
It'd be hard to say what most users prefer. I would venture to guess that we're all conditioned to vote before collapsing comments simply because we've never had the option to collapse comments until today. So behavior preferences will change over time.
However, I'll hypothesize that it's preferable (overall) to have more friction on collapsing comments. A lot of great discussion happens in response to even a mediocre top-level comment, and forcing the user to take a few extra moments to skim the child-comments will increase the serendipitous discovery of these nested gems. Furthermore, the problem of a mediocre top-level comment with mediocre nested comments being at the actual top of the discussion is mitigated by the ability for people to downvote the thread, as has been done (with varying levels of efficacy) until today.
> . . . forcing the user to take a few extra moments to skim the child-comments will increase the serendipitous discovery of these nested gems.
Excellent phrasing. As a fairly long-time user who lurks more than he comments, I can concur that much of the best conversation I've read and participated in happened to be such nested gems. Serendipitous, indeed.
>A lot of great discussion happens in response to even a mediocre top-level comment, and forcing the user to take a few extra moments to skim the child-comments will increase the serendipitous discovery of these nested gems.
Is this actually data-driven or just a guess on your part? My experience is that a mediocre comment rarely ever gets good replies.
Anecdotal; comment vote scores aren't exposed so I'm not sure if an analysis is possible, even with what's been loaded on to BigQuery [0].
Maybe "mediocre" is the wrong word, as it implies an absolute judgment (on some non-existent scale of "quality"). I guess my intuition is derivative of the "don't judge a book by its cover", in that even if a submitted and upvoted story is not something I feel like reading, I still might read the comments to see the discussion.
Maybe someone internal to HN can do a quick calculation of how many child-comments surpass their parents (while accounting for the differences in visibility).
Why I agree with you, and would argue for putting the vote arrows somewhere else, is that voting should only happen after someone has fully read a comment and at least given it a second to think about it. It makes more sense for the collapse functionality to always be in the same place so you can do it somewhat "mindlessly", but for voting you specifically don't want to be able to do it mindlessly.
So why not switching these two, putting the vote arrow on the right and the collapse button on the left?
The tree controls I know all work that way that the collapse button is on the left.
The vote arrows really could use some size/distinction love on mobile.
A subreddit I was on recently (sorry, can't recall which) has styled the collapse-sensitive region to be the entire indent region of a comment block. This is actually unbelievably awesome.
> The undo vote feature would no doubt help with that some
As long as the user is aware of the misclick, I don't see this as a likely problem, personally. Awareness of the misclick is, in my opinion, quite likely, given that they will see the arrows disappear and won't observe the expected thread collapse.
If you're going with mobile in mind, would you consider replacing "-" and "+" with "collapse" and "expand"? Trying to hit one character on mobile can be frustrating.
