Sort top-level comments in ascending chronological order
B
Blue Gopher
To get a full understanding of a post and the discussion occurring after it, a user must first read the very top of the page for the original post, scroll all the way down to the bottom, and begin reading the page backward from bottom-to-top. Then, for any replies to top-level comments, the user must read from top-to-bottom, and then scroll backward until they find where they previously left off. This design makes for a very awkward reading flow. Instead, by sorting top-level comments in ascending chronological order, it'd be familiar and consistent and the user would simply read the page top-to-bottom.
S
Sapphire Coyote
I and a lot of users on our canny feedback site found this behavior confusing too. Most issue tracking systems (Jira, Freshdesk, Zendesk, Clickup, etc), general commentary systems, message boards and social networks put the newest comments at the bottom. The overwhelming preponderance of websites have new comments at the bottom. So while Canny's bucking this trend may make sense conceptually it doesn't match the behavior most people expect. I'd love to see this either be changed or, as suggested in a post below, sites be given a sort order preference.
B
Blue Gopher
Checking back in to say that we've been rolling with Canny for about 6 months now, and I'd say that more-often-than-not, our users use the main comment box instead of the "reply" feature, leading to the situation where comments are sorted out of logical order.
This may be due to the fact that a lot of our users are not as tech-savvy, but being tech-savvy shouldn't be a requirement for a product as widely-used as Canny.
B
Blue Gopher
As I consider this more and chat with Canny's team about their reasoning, I want to share some additional thoughts I've had on this topic.
First, so that others can follow along, Canny's team reached out and explained that their reasoning behind sorting top-level comments first was to prevent having to scroll too far to see the newest comments. Or looking at it the other way, they wanted to make it easier to see the newest, presumably most relevant information.
In addition, Canny's stated assumption and expectation is that all discussions that relate to a top-level comment should happen as replies to that top-level comment. I agree that that should happen, but in practice, it simply does not. Take, for example, the following discussion threads:
These are just the first few posts I clicked on. Looking through additional posts, you'll notice that quite a few discussion threads on Canny's own feedback portal demonstrate that users are consistently misusing top-level comments to reply to other top-level comments. This causes the awkward reading order.
Even if Canny's assumption were true, I would argue that reading from top-top-bottom in ascending chronological order is still the most natural. Most major social media platforms sort comments/messages in ascending order (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), along with many major business tools (GitHub, GitLab, Intercom, etc.).
But these social networks and business tools also care about displaying the newest information first... so how do they do it? Almost exclusively by collapsing or hiding older comments when a certain threshold is reached, but allowing those comments to be expanded/loaded with a click. Facebook does this with comments, Gmail does this with email threads, GitHub does this with similar comments, Instagram does this with comments... the list goes on.
That's the de facto standard for making it easier to see newer content without sorting the content in an unnatural reading order. For that reason, I propose this as a much better solution than the solution implemented now.
Sarah Hum
Thanks for sharing these thoughts Blue Gopher!
I took a look at the examples you shared and, in most cases, I don't think they read awkwardly. To be fair, the cases where replies are misplaced were from before we even implemented replies!
I agree that collapsing would be nice to have. I think a good alternative might also be making the newest/oldest toggle sticky. So for your account, if you prefer oldest first, it'll stay that way.