← Back to context Comment by phpnode 2 months ago it's about the comments / votes ratio. 4 comments phpnode Reply CWwdcdk7h 2 months ago To be more specific, it is a heuristic for detecting flamewars and/or controversial topics and it is quite good at that. swyx 2 months ago why exactly do we want to damp flamewars by comment count? as long as an individual comment fits the rules why do we punish comments in aggregate dang 2 months ago Because it's a global optimization problem and HN gets less optimal* when there are flamewars on the frontpage.Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead?* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... 1 reply →
CWwdcdk7h 2 months ago To be more specific, it is a heuristic for detecting flamewars and/or controversial topics and it is quite good at that. swyx 2 months ago why exactly do we want to damp flamewars by comment count? as long as an individual comment fits the rules why do we punish comments in aggregate dang 2 months ago Because it's a global optimization problem and HN gets less optimal* when there are flamewars on the frontpage.Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead?* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... 1 reply →
swyx 2 months ago why exactly do we want to damp flamewars by comment count? as long as an individual comment fits the rules why do we punish comments in aggregate dang 2 months ago Because it's a global optimization problem and HN gets less optimal* when there are flamewars on the frontpage.Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead?* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... 1 reply →
dang 2 months ago Because it's a global optimization problem and HN gets less optimal* when there are flamewars on the frontpage.Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead?* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... 1 reply →
To be more specific, it is a heuristic for detecting flamewars and/or controversial topics and it is quite good at that.
why exactly do we want to damp flamewars by comment count? as long as an individual comment fits the rules why do we punish comments in aggregate
Because it's a global optimization problem and HN gets less optimal* when there are flamewars on the frontpage.
Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead?
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
1 reply →