When to hide comments under the “show comments” button?

Question

I’m designing a comment system for a magazine site. What is the best solution for showing comment section for newspaper / magazine?

My current structure of the article is like this:

• Header
• Content
• Share post
• Author
• Comments
• Related

Current options are:

Show comments after the post in full

Pros:

• no additional action to show comments section is needed
• user won’t skip comments

Cons:

• takes a lot of space: you must show related before the comments
• comments loading time adds to the page load

Partly hide comments under the button

This solution shows 1 or 2 (generally up to 5) comments, and then shows button

Pros:

• Takes considerable amount of space
• Not as easy skippable as a single button
• Allows to load other comments asynchronously later

Cons:

• You most likely need to use some voting system in place, otherwise visible comments may not be that interesting
• Requires additional action to view other comments

Completely hide comments under the button

Show only button “Show n comments”, then load comments after the click.

Pros:

• Takes less space of all
• Allows to load other comments asynchronously later

Cons

• Easy skippable - may be no noticed at all
• Doesn’t invite user to participate

Are there any other pros and cons to these approaches? Second seems the best for me for now, but maybe I’m missing something?

Answer 1

I would suggest to make like Facebook do with their Comments social plugin : shows 1 or 2 (generally up to 5) comments, and then shows button.

I think Disqus makes the same too.

Answer 2

Put a "Jump to comments" button in a good place. "The Guardian" has a nice (not perfect) solution to this, which is similar to your second option.

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