Comment by jonathanstrange

15 hours ago

That's weird, I'm reading HN every day and never felt a need for something like that. In my experience, the quality of comments is very high and really bad ones tend to be downvoted or flagged fast. Could this be a time zone issue such that people in certain time zones are less fortunate than others?

I think it frequently depends on the thread you're reading and your expertise in that area? There are a few things I'm intermediate to expert in - frequently the quality of comments in those threads is quite poor, but the noise & upvote-y memes look like signal in those areas, so it may not look as bad from the outside.

On the other hand, there are a number of things I'm not very informed about, and I do frequently find a few posters in those threads who seem to have very insightful things to say, but I'm not sure if they actually are (sometimes you can tell from replies) or if it's just because I'm a neophyte.

Which all goes to say I don't know if this system would really help, or would just turn into bad opinions getting even more support because the crowd-sourcing is coming from others who don't have the necessary expertise to evaluate what's worth listening to.