Comment by pfarnsworth
9 years ago
>A lot of great discussion happens in response to even a mediocre top-level comment, and forcing the user to take a few extra moments to skim the child-comments will increase the serendipitous discovery of these nested gems.
Is this actually data-driven or just a guess on your part? My experience is that a mediocre comment rarely ever gets good replies.
Anecdotal; comment vote scores aren't exposed so I'm not sure if an analysis is possible, even with what's been loaded on to BigQuery [0].
Maybe "mediocre" is the wrong word, as it implies an absolute judgment (on some non-existent scale of "quality"). I guess my intuition is derivative of the "don't judge a book by its cover", in that even if a submitted and upvoted story is not something I feel like reading, I still might read the comments to see the discussion.
Maybe someone internal to HN can do a quick calculation of how many child-comments surpass their parents (while accounting for the differences in visibility).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502