Comment by modeless
20 hours ago
It's really a shame that comment scores are hidden forever. Would the admins consider publishing them after stories are old enough that voting is closed? It would be great to have them for archives and search indices and projects like this.
I wrote to hn@ and asked for this as a feature request:
"1. Delayed Karma Display. I understand why comment karma was hidden. I don't see the harm in un-hiding karma after some time. If not 24 hours, then 72-168 hours. This would help me read through threads with 1300 comments."
This was last January. While I asked for a few more features, it is the only one that seems essential as HN grows with massive threads.
Fear not. I have a collaborative project designed to address this.
They're referring to scores on individual COMMENTS - this information isn't available via the HN Firebase API.
The only way you could theoretically extract everyone's comment scores (at least the top level ones) would be like this if you're a complete madman:
1. Wait 48 hours so the article is effectively dead
2. Post a new comment using an account called ThePresident
3. Create a swarm of a thousand shill user accounts called Voter1, Voter2, etc.
4. Use a single account at a time and upvote ThePresident
5. Recheck the page to see if ThePresident has moved above a user(s) post
6. Record the score for that user and assign it to the tracked story's history
7. Repeat from (4)
I know that! I have a collaborative project to make it sort of available.
But the idea I have is not like that at all - it's much nicer on everyone's ethics. Stay tuned! :)