Comment by leeoniya
13 years ago
"Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. I can probably piggy-back off a top comment, though, those comment threads aren't long yet..."
actually, this text in the reply box highlights a huge problem with threaded (and voted) discussions in general: there is little incentive to reply to any already-huge thread, even with valuable content.
i've been thinking of how to solve this issue for the past week and have some ideas, working on a prototype.
I generally agree, however, your comment would be more valuable if you would include verifiable information instead of anecdotes and personal opinion, and you would actually analyse the problem instead of throwing around vague criticism.
My take on the subject is:
This effect can be mostly attributed to the fact that a top comment means more exposure, and given that the upvotes outweight the downvotes on the response (which is true, since that's why it is at the top), by deductive reasoning we arrive to the obvious conclusion that more exposure will further cement the position of a given post.
Also we must not forget about the effect of peer pressure[1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_pressure
For those with a lack of humour, I include a smiley here: :-)
Obligatory xkcd comic related to peer pressure - http://xkcd.com/1170/
I'm curious what you came up with. I used to work on Google Moderator, which was a project created to solve this problem for non-threaded discussion (which is even worse), and we had some neat solutions. We displayed comments to users to be voted on, and ended up using a variant of wilson confidence intervals not just to rank, but to figure out which comments we should display to users to be voted on.
where i ended up was, it cannot be solved within a single view. there needs to be some form of split side-by-side view for the discussion, each prioritizing replies differently - by freshness, votes, weight or other metrics. another idea was to create a heat-map based on reply velocity to give a third dimension to the whole thing.
replies need "simmer" time at the top to aggregate enough votes. if there is one huge reply thread that dominates, few will scroll through pages looking for new content.
just the ability to fold comments on HN would help a lot already.
Why not push really long threads to the bottom? People will find the long discussions by scrolling to them. Indeed, they will know that they are there, just like now we know that the long discussions are at the top. The effect though is that now readers have to get past other discussions first. Basically, the order should be short-good, long-good, all-crap.
Also, while this may be a problem here, HN still has the best comment sorting system I've seen (but not measured). Comments have time to stay at the top and simmer down and if they are good they gain enough momentum. The only time this seems to be come a problem is when you get to a really popular thread after hours/days of discussion. Then you cannot get a word in edgewise.
An alternative solution could be that for every comment you make, you give up a bit of karma and you gain it back through comment upvotes (but not article postings). That way people will watch what they say. This may give some positive feedback to posters that harvest huge amounts of karma, but it will also prevent bad comments. On top of that, you could make your post stick up top longer by paying a blood price: for every 50 points of karma you get another minute guaranteed at the top of your discussion thread, or some such. Or just free market FTW: the person that bids the highest amount wins the top spot for that many minutes.
Another site that I was on had the ability to fold up everything that you'd already read, and only show you the new content. It made keeping up with active discussions utterly trivial. Of course a first time user still sees everything.
I think they changed the underlying code, but http://forum.iwethey.org/forum/main.iwt still looks the same. So you can experiment with the idea there.
There seems to be some level of encouragement for letting old discussions fall away, though. The ranking algorithm specifically has it built in.