Truncating Comment with 'Read More' link

Totally possible. Something we'll consider doing soon.

@strypey I'm moving this stuff to "Feature Ideas" Can you post new feature requests there?

2-3 sentences is not a lot, especially if the first sentences are short (e.g. Robert's previous comment). How about 600 characters (rounded to the nearest sentence)? For reference, the original post here is 494 characters, and this comment is 259 characters.

Oops! Sorry, willdo.

Love it. Another possibility would be to fade off after a few lines, with a click to reveal. Perhaps if it were new content you'd have it expanded by default, and only collapse when returning to a discussion.

Apologies to @gregorycassel :)

A character limit might be good, as @naught101 suggests, but I would set it at about 300 rather than 600. Remember, we're not talking about a Twitter-style limit on comment length, just an interface tweak to encourage brevity, and make threads easier to scroll through on small screens.

I like @matthewbartlett 's suggestion of a fade off approach. I would be ok with new comments being displayed in full the first time a user sees them, but I would prefer to see even new comments truncated. This would serve users who are reading without logging in, or browsing a public group they haven't joined yet. After all, the rest of a longer comment is only a click away ;)

I like the idea of a mechanic which subtly but constantly encourages people to either be brief or to provide a TL;DR overview at the start of long comments.

This is 300 characters:

I like @matthewbartlett ’s suggestion of a fade off approach. I would be ok with new comments being displayed in full the first time a user sees them, but I would prefer to see even new comments truncated. This would serve users who are reading without logging in, or browsing a public group they

I don't think that many good points can be adequately made in that space, especially if they require any kind of nuance. I like the idea of encouraging concision, but I don't want to have to click on every second comment to expand it, and I don't want to encourage people making short comments lacking nuance because they don't want to be truncated.

LET'S CUSTOMIZE IT

I'm thinking I would love to start moving more onus of experience onto the coordinators and away from the Loomio core team. What if there was a group setting, defaulting at 300 characters (or something), which would start comment truncation?

Wish I could get you a raise @jameskiesel for that idea alone. Please make it so.

I take your point @naught101, but my experience is that Loomio discussions work best as a conversation, not a series of lectures. I suspect many people glaze over and miss the nuances buried in walls of text anyway. Remember, you can always link to a blog post, wiki page, or other external document, where you can go deeper, in more words, for those who have time and motivation to read them.

I favor dialogues, not monologues, However, some ideas and "arguments"-- in the sense of logical constructs, or integrated perspectives-- are so complex that they can only be effectively introduced to another person by indicating (and at least somewhat describing) the parts which (supposedly) add up to an integrated, emergent whole.

With that in mind:

1. Sometimes our complex, integrated views are probably too complex to effectively introduce within the serial 'stream' of a typical discussion forum.
2. When we write long comments, we're often tempted to throw in more than one subject, or replying to more than one person. I think it's helpful to separate our subjects and responses, even if that means we'll be posting more than one comment in a row.

With all these things in mind, I do favor truncation options, and noncoercive group norms of providing preliminary "TL;DR" summaries when we comment at length (anywhere).

One imagines it wouldn't be hard to whip up a Javascript snippet that you could paste into the console to add a fade-out or Read more link to all long comments — just to see how it feels. You would, however, have to understand Angular better than I do.

It would be kind of cool to have a default/minimum read-more limit of a few lines (300ch would be fine for this), and then have that expand a little bit each time the comment gets liked (or has some other good reaction). You'd probably still want a maximum limit, or diminishing expansions for each subsequent (eg. 300 + 400∙log(x+1) = 300 default, ~500 for 2 likes, ~700 for 10 likes, ...). :)

I like @naught101 's idea of longer comments getting more exposure in the discussion column as they get more 'likes' (or whatever positive reactions might be added later). This would reward long-but-helpful comments, and bring them more to the group's attention, while people whose long comments didn't get the likes would be getting a silent hint at the need for either brevity or clarity.

The idea of expanding comments based on positive peer feedback is wonderfully inventive-- haven't heard it before; thanks @naught101 . I'm not 'sold' on it yet personally, but I'll certainly be thinking about it!

There's a rich discussion about this idea from a year ago here. I still think it's a good one.