Web Design/Comments

Having conversations through comments is more convenient, if comment replies are structured as a subsidiary of a parent comment.

It is also strongly recommended to make comments referable through the URL.

Case studies

Twitter, Reddit

Ever since, Twitter and Reddit supported both structured threads and direct comment linking.

Instagram

From its creation in 2010 to 2016-12-06, Instagram comments were sorted purely chronological.

There was a support for pinging user using the “@” sign, but no support for threaded, structured replies.

Additionally, as of 2019-10-12, there is still no way to refer to a specific comment using a comment Web Design/IDs in the URL.

YouTube

YouTube comments have undergone many incremental technical changes over the years, including AJAX comment loading instead of HTML preclusion, changes related to Google Plus, comment structung, comment ID formats and mentioning users, including distinctions from the new “Polymer” website layout/design and the legacy website layout that is accessible throuh the “disable_polymer=1” or “disable_polymer=true” URL parameter.

When YouTube introduced direct comment linking and comment searching circa 2010 or 2011, it was possible to link to comments by using only the comment ID in the video URL. Now, the parent video ID is also required.

The direct comment URL can be retreived by copying the hyperlink on the relative posting time indicator (e.g. 3 months ago)-