Can we get a button to hide a comment?

May 9, 2021 9:33 AM

Occasionally in a thread someone posts something offensive, derailing, or monstrously long. It would be helpful if there was button next to the comment which one could click to hide said comment and said hiding would be remembered in Recent Activity and across devices. In place of the comment would be a single line of text that says "hidden comment", with the hide/unhide button next to it. This would, in theory, make it easier to skip derails, obnoxious, and/or long comments. The ridiculously long comments are particularly problematic in Recent Activity, where they repeatedly appear for a while. What say you?
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) to Feature Requests at 9:33 AM (11 comments total)

That would add a whole lot of overhead to the page generator and moot the page cache which right now saves the site a bunch of money in CPU.

If it was done on the browser only, in Javascript with cookies, it wouldn't bother the server, but it also wouldn't be shared across your devices.

Just a technical review. I'm agnostic on the idea.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:08 AM on May 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

If it's obnoxious, a derail, or offensive isn't flagging it more effective in that in potentially removes the troublesome content for all?

For just long winded comments I guess I don't see the need... Perhaps I am misunderstanding the issue but I'm not a huge fan of adding this feature.
posted by chasles at 11:03 AM on May 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Tie it to flagging. Flag something, it goes away and/or you block everything by that person for the rest of the day/week so you don’t have to read any more of their shit today.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 1:43 PM on May 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

Problem with flag as fantastic there, Huffy Puffy.

I've asked for the ability to compress RA threads in the past, the long comment thing is annoying when you are coming back to a long thread. Long comments can be really good, it's just when you come back after a while it's hard to skim the thread.

Agree that if something is terrible it should be dealt with by moderation practices.
posted by freethefeet at 1:43 AM on May 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is a thing that grays out comments from particular users, with an extension for Firefox...Mute A Filter. Very helpful, although not quite what you are asking.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:45 AM on May 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

Eh, flag as fantastic is vestigial anyway.

(...or is it?)
posted by Huffy Puffy at 9:10 AM on May 10, 2021

I'm in favor of anything that will enhance an individual user's MetaFilter experience across multiple devices that does not require downloading/installing external scripts on each device.
posted by kimberussell at 10:49 AM on May 10, 2021 [3 favorites]

I know we're not going to get this pony basically ever, but I still want to say "heck yes." The ability to block a particular comment/post/tweet is pretty common these days. And while we're at it we should have the ability to hide a comment, the ability to hide a post, and the ability to mute a user entirely. I'd prefer if hidden comments were replaced by a placeholder with a "show anyway" button so you can read them if you want (e.g., you muted a user months ago but one particular thread makes no sense unless you can see one of their comments.)
posted by Tehhund at 4:29 AM on May 11, 2021 [6 favorites]

If it's obnoxious, a derail, or offensive isn't flagging it more effective in that in potentially removes the troublesome content for all?

I flagged a racist comment last week and it took the better part of the day before it was deleted. I don't expect the mods to respond to every flag immediately, and I don't expect them to always agree with me on whether a comment is racist (or some other -ist). Huffy Puffy's solution (tying blocking to flagging, giving me an immediate remedy to an aggravation) would have been welcome. I don't know if it's technically possible, but count me as one person who find this feature potentially useful.
posted by creepygirl at 11:13 AM on May 11, 2021 [8 favorites]

Mod note: Following up to say we've talked a bit about this on the mod team in the interim but didn't come to any easy conclusions on whether or how an implementation would work; it's both a philosophical change for how the site works and something that'd require some technical infrastructure to make work well. It may be a change worth building into the site at some point, so we'll continue to consider it, but we don't have an active plan for it at this point.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:38 AM on May 23, 2021

*quietly weeps while rocking self to sleep*
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:19 PM on May 23, 2021 [1 favorite]