This is the discussion thread for wiki: Wiki for SX Anti-pattern: Comment-first
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The mitigation section there makes an assumption I would like to challenge.
For example, there is the indie game website called itch.io which hosts competitions regularly (so-called jams). After participating there is a voting period which allows to comment on entries. The design decision here: you can only see other comments once you submitted your own. This way there is less likelihood to be influenced by what others have written before you.
Speaking of design decisions: I came to notice that the mentioned examples (Reddit, Hacker News) prominently display a textarea below the link to comment on. Moreover, the presentation of the links is hardly different from the rest of the text. I conclude that the intention is to get to comment as quickly as possible.
TL;DR: Comment-first is a conscious design decision. It is possible to introduce friction to alter the behaviour.
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I noted this ‘anti-pattern’ on Hacker News many times. And also people discussing it. There are a lot of people saying “I am not here for the article submission, but for the discussions”. Some people come for the link aggregator experience, where article submissions are discussed, while others come purely for the discussion platform experience, where any discussion forks in many tangent where people are inspired to discuss other (mostly related) subjects.
HN is an example where they made a deliberate choice as @Ryuno-Ki mentions. In its guidelines Hacker News has a rule that states:
Please don’t comment on whether someone read an article. “Did you even read the article? It mentions that” can be shortened to "The article mentions that
During my time at Humane Tech Community I met the CEO of Readup, a social reader app that is designed to deal with the anti-pattern. The platform once had a paid subscription, but is now open source and it looks no longer actively used. But the landing page shows one of the UX patterns of social reading… upvoting an article is only possible once the article was fully read.
I remember an older version of their webapp that then tracked the percentage of text read based on scrollbar movement. The current app requires installing browser extensions to deliver the social reading UX. As you can see on the site there’s also
Pattern name and behavior?
I wonder whether a different name would be more descriptive. “Comment-first” is not direcly indicative of an anti-pattern. The pattern itself can be said to cause a form of context collapse by both shallow comments and tangentials subjects that are introduced.
Maybe: Premature Reply anti-pattern?
Expressing the impatience to listen / consume input, and the resulting premature haste to react. Wdyt, @d3v0 about renaming?