Make constantly updating threads on Reddit more accessible

If you have followed Reddit's coverage, or shall I say discussion - of the Boston incident you may have noticed that a post on the site could easily accumulate thousands of comments in no time at all. The same is true for many other items that become popular on Reddit, and if you happen to follow the comments you may have noticed that it is cumbersome at times to do so.

The core reason for that is that the comment thread is not auto-updating. You have to refresh the page manually so that newer comments get loaded which may break your comment reading flow.

The site Reddit Stream has been designed exactly for that purpose. It improves Reddit's comment page in a couple of ways, but the most important one is the auto-updating nature of it.

So, instead of having to refresh pages manually all the time to read newer comments, you can access new comments as soon as they get posted on Reddit as the comment threads on Reddit Stream adds comments to the discussion automatically.

So how are you using the service? It could not be easier. All you have to do is to add -stream to every Reddit url. If the page you are interested in is reddit.com/r/news/ you modify it so that it reads reddit-stream.com/r/news instead. The page will load the comments automatically and display the main post - the textual contents - on the right so that they are always visible on the screen. This makes sense if the thread starter is updating the post in real time or at least sometimes.

You can however switch to a one-column mode instead if that is not the case. This does not really change anything else though on the screen, as it only removes the starting post from the right side of the page.

Reply and refresh buttons are displayed next to each comment. The refresh option looks for new replies for a specific comment, and reply, well, it lets you reply to the comment. The feature is currently disabled because of the traffic spike the site experienced during the Boston events.

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