Comment by lazystar
13 hours ago
the biggest issue with reddit/digg/hackernews style comments is how top comments can be gamed for profit. old forums had the problem of "first" and "bump" comments, but steering the conversation was harder.
13 hours ago
the biggest issue with reddit/digg/hackernews style comments is how top comments can be gamed for profit. old forums had the problem of "first" and "bump" comments, but steering the conversation was harder.
This sounds poetic, but makes no sense to me. I've been here for a few years and I regularly post comments. I still have almost no idea which ones will be up-voted. However, I do know which ones will be down-voted. So tell us, how do you write a comment that can be "gamed for profit"?
1. I comment "I love my new <Ninja Creami>!".
2. Ninja Creami is my own company, or company I have a financial association with, either shareholding or I'm a paid employee of them.
3. I pay a lot of bots/people to upvote my comment from 1.
4. Lots of people see Ninja Creami at the top of the comments, apparently with lots of grass-roots support, and go and buy one. (Something that would be less possible or less effective if votes didn't move threads to the top).
[Or, instead of buying one, when I saw a Reddit thread suspiciously full of Ninja Creami endorsement, went to look what it is and found it was a combination of bench drill and food processor that screechingly grinds a pre-frozen block of flavoured cream into an icy slush, and from what I can tell apparently doesn't "make ice cream" in any ordinary sense of the word].
There's another option. Combining both threads and chronological order.
BYOND forums used tree comments in chronological order with an unread marker
IMO that should be an option (twitter style, reddit style or chronological style). Wonder if there is browser extension for it.
That said discord kinda does it and I just can't stand it. Unusable to me.
Reddit lets you sort by Best (default), Top (highest raw score), New/Old (chronological), and also Controversial - no add-on required. It's right above the first comment.
"Best" is a time-weighted blend of scoring, so that well-voted but late contributions are more likely to be visible despite fewer overall votes. Certainly not perfect, but helps bias away from "first to comment wins"
1 reply →
Discord threads are just an addon on top of a chat. It's not really a real discussion. And the discord discussions (or whatever it is called) are again flat IIRC? Slack threads are flat. Both are chat platforms first and foremost I would say.
Exactly. The "tree" part you can argue whether it's good or bad. The "upvote" part is universally bad. The fact that upvotes bump comments while downvotes will completely hide then... It's just terrible for discussion, and the reason reddit consistently devolves into echo chambers with everybody agreeing with everybody and piling on whoever doesn't.