I have to confess that the idea is clever: but ultimately does not fix the problem.
The issue, as I see it, is not so much the posts as the voting. Which varies wildly and is fairly indescriminate. A worthless but sensationalist message might get lots of upvotes whilst a shy but informative message will get missed.
I suggest it is the voting practices that need to be addressed. I vote very rarely on messages (maybe once or twice a day): making my approval something "to be gained". I know others use that approach too - and I think it makes things worth much more.
Ideally (IMO) a good situation should be one where a post with 5 votes should be stunningly good and 20 votes a "once in a lifetime" achievment.
Some ideas...
- Vote weighting (Karma or average Karma effects the weight of your vote)
- Include "Downvotes" next to the total. This helps identify messages with a lot of disagreement (i.e. something with a 1 might have 20 downs and 21 ups - that is worth taking a look at).
- Im not sure how you position the comments (never tracked them in depth) but I think you could try
- - New comments stay at the "top" of the page for a set time (an hr perhaps?) before being ranked properly.
- - Ranked posts: push all negative marked posts below -1 to the bottom. All positive stuff to the top marked on activity (a combination of the direct replies and the number of up&down votes)
That doesn't totally fix the problem but I suggest it might have an impact :D
I've wondered for a long time whether the following system would work:
Everyone can vote posts up or down if they like. There is a feature which statistically analyses how your votes correlate with other votes, and you can choose to see votes that the analysis predicts you will find interesting and worthwhile based on what you have liked seeing in the past.
Ugh. Count me out. I'm not a fan of how the trend online is towards algorithmic recommendation rather than on editorializing. I mean, I understand why a user-based moderation system is good. I like that content is pruned out a bit. At the same time, I think that public points mean ultimately ignoring complexities of a topic, thread, or person for the sake of easing consumption. I'm not a fan of that.
A recommendation system is even worse. That actively encourages people to look only at the path of least resistance for them. It means less emphasis on people who argue valid points that you don't want to hear and more emphasis on groupthink.
If anything, the trend should be reversed, and people should feel freer to give their opinion without a chance of whiplash.
I understand your reluctance, and I'd love to see strong editorializing on some site on the internet. It seems, though, as any site becomes reasonably large the editorializing disappears and is replaced with algorithms.
Has the idea I proposed (essentially the Netflix recommendation system) ever been tried before for a comment/story posting system? If not, why not go the whole hog and try it? Let's see if it works.
That's why I'd propose a forking. Create mini-HN communities and slowly thin out the userbase. That's if the site ever gets too big. It's perfectly manageable right now for me - I don't think new systems are necessary.
Ask yourself: has content recommendation ever worked? I've never seen an "If you liked X you'll like Y" work for any original content. Even for movies/books it's shady at best. Working with something as complex as comments is too tricky to make worse. How do you measure tone versus stance versus wit versus writing style? They're all elements of what I look for in comments.
Just because it's never worked as a movie recommendation system doesn't discourage me from trying it for a commenting system! (Especially since the idea is so trivial, and ought to be easy to implement).
Well, how would you display these recommended comments? How would you analyze the content of comments to determine recommendation? If I downvote every anti-Linux comment I see, does the algorithm stop showing me anti-Linux comments? Because that detracts from the debate going on. What if I downvote based on poor spellings - or even more, if I downvote solely based on how well the writer forms sentences? How will the algorithm figure that out?
The easiest solutions are the simplest ones. Complexity only serves a purpose when there's a simple cause behind the complexity. Adding algorithms when there's no need will only make things less reliable.
You could take that farther and create a "pool" of good users who vote and comment in keeping with the HN style (a pool that could, of course, grow over time) and if your voting habits correlated to them your vote began to be worth more.
Thanks! I think you're right, that in order to avoid fragmenting the site into a lot of different subclasses with different tastes that there could be a pool of "good" users who determine what the default "good" story and "good" post are.
I think you're subconsciously reinventing k-means clustering with random starting points.
Subclasses might not be such a bad idea at all actually, after all there are different coffee shops for different tastes as well. If a site could be made to automatically appear as a place that caters to your 'taste' that would be a pretty awesome development. Everybody would feel right at home.
Some people are here for startup stuff. Some people for codign/programming stuff. Yet others (though probably a smaller demographic) are here for social stuff. And more.
Plus others are here for a mix.
Some way to tailor what you see would be awesome! not too much that each "genre" is different but enough that the posts or articles you want to see are at the top :D
I know very little about statistics so I wouldn't have much of a clue about the right algorithm to use, but I do have a good idea of the behaviour I would like.
I think the behaviour I want is exactly that required by the Netflix Prize:
I agree with tptacek - if you're going to indicate that some commenters are better than others, make them darker rather than orange.
And here's a theoretical underpinning to explain so it doesn't come across as simply a subjective design choice: coloring objects darker or lighter with different shades of the same base color to show intensity is one of the few principles I remember from an Edward Tufte workshop from a few years ago. Varying levels of saturation indicate a shift in degree, whereas different colors altogether imply that the objects are of differing qualities.
Applied to the new commenting feature, darker colors would imply more "solid" feelings of trustworthiness, similar to how trolls already get washed out with the lighter shades.
Similarly, that explains another thing wrong with the highlighting - "alarm" colors like orange, red, yellow etc indicate that something's wrong, whereas bolding or darkening the names wouldn't imply that at all.
Trying to suss out good and bad comments reminds me of the 37signals Troll Cap and the "Good Comment" crown:
The comment which I am replying to by tptacek currently demonstrates undesigned behavior which I have seen on other pages: to the best of my understanding, highlighting is done on a per-poster not per-comment basis, yet highlighting behavior is inconsistently applied to highlighted posters. You can see tptacek's comment earlier in the thread which is highlighted, while the parent comment of this comment is not. (Further, the parent comment is actually highlighted on the reply-to screen.)
Not too important but, to quote our house dev motto, "behavior contrary to specification mandates a bug report no matter how minor the deviation is".
[Edit: I refresh this page and am seeing it sometimes highlighted and sometimes not highlighted, so I'm not sure if my bug report is accurate or not. Apparently the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to bugs: attempting to describe one changes its behavior.]
I think this is explained by a previous news item on the linked page. pg talks about introducing lots of caching to speed the site up. Sounds like you're seeing cached bits and pieces.
i'd say the line is minimally important. flag might be crucial, though i've never personally had to use it. the link and parent links, as well as time, are convenient.
i bet discussion interestingness improves by removing the username and points.
Not username. That would make it harder to know when you're having a back-and-forth, and that changes the nature of the discussion. Removing points would be a good idea, though - is there any advantage to having that visible beforehand?
knowing you're having a back and forth with the same person is one cause of long flame wars. not knowing who you're talking to keeps things less emotional and more polite. i think.
the advantage of seeing points is the same as seeing orange usernames. it allows people to decide which comments they want to read.
No, but that gets rid of the really clean feel! I like that this site's only got 4 (5, now) colors. It feels so minimal that way. (Then, I enjoy the feeling when I discover something like clicking a user name and finding that it's a link when it's the first time; perhaps that's not the attitude pg wants?)
It'd be cool if it was = topcolor*0.8 or something so it fits in to everyones prefs. Each time I see orange I think I must have accidently logged out :)
Yeah, I have to admit that it's really unhappy with my (admittedly spartan) sense of style. A nice underline or just regular black would've been preferred.
We've seen the Arc code for this site and know you didn't need to spend all day in the repl. More likely you spent all day in a comfortable chair with a hot cup of tea thinking about how the feature should work.
