← Back to context

Comment by kmfrk

13 years ago

Just sort the comments randomly, as long as their karma is >=0, and place the negative-karma comments at the bottom.

Done. :P

This algorithmic craze is too clever for its own good. It is particularly evident in the false-positive bans.

(And I swear, it's scary how HN joke comments are indistinguishable from the real ones.)

6 comments

kmfrk

Reply
1337p337  13 years ago

Well, random sorting might be a bit of an annoyance due to HN's other annoyance, the "Unknown or expired link" problem, which seems to crop up more often if I do actual work and then pop over to HN when I have to wait for tests/compilation/etc. Locating the comment you were replying to with random or date-based sorting (so that you can click "reply" again, paste your previous reply, and then resubmit) would be a serious pain in combination with that.

But you're correct in that the current algorithm (or any sufficiently transparent algorithm) does lend itself to gaming. It might be harder to game if you didn't mind penalizing comments based on the quality[1] of replies they generate, then sorting based on the thread's average quality would mean that there's less incentive to post in the top thread just to get exposure, since your new, karma-less post will drag down its average and subsequently could drag down the thread. That could get prohibitively expensive to calculate for huge threads, but would be less prone to gaming, I think.

[1] If we can hand-wave "karma" to mean "quality"; I get way more upvotes when I am flippant but technically correct than I do when I try to be thoughtful.

pseut  13 years ago

I'm not sure how much you're kidding, but locally perturbing the comments might help a lot. Similar to simulated annealing.

  • kmfrk  13 years ago

    I was being serious (I know it's impossible to know in this submission's comments). I genuinely don't like the system the way it is now.

    Locally perturbing and simulated annealing sound interesting. Maybe we could convince pg to reticulate the splines as well.