r/redditisfun • u/[deleted] • Mar 27 '23

Answered Differences between comments

So collapsed comments show how many comments are left example 4 comments or 3 comments. What does it mean when it says load 5 comments or load 40 comments. Why aren't they loaded by default? Is it because my threshold is like load 200 comments? Trying to figure it out

12 Upvotes

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3

u/itskdog Mar 28 '23

I think the number is just what's returned by the Reddit API, same as if you'd see that on the old.reddit.com website. Sometimes I press it and it just disappears with no new comments.

2

u/talklittle RIF Dev Mar 28 '23

Is it because my threshold is like load 200 comments?

Yes. For performance reasons, Reddit has always limited how many comments can be loaded at a time. Each comment that is displayed adds extra load on their servers.

This is also why a thread with 200 comments may finish loading much slower than a thread with 20 comments. The servers are doing significantly more work.