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Comment by bmm6o | Hacker News Reader

So many sites get their reputation system slightly wrong, and end up incentivizing behaviors that they claim to not want. On discussion forums with reputation systems, the "echo chamber" effect is encouraged - it's been a running joke on slashdot since before the term "online reputation system" was coined. Also, early replies get viewed and upvoted more often, encouraging quick responses over more thoughtful (but later!) ones.

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I independently observed this on slashdot and made a few bucks exploiting the psychology of readers. I wrote up my thoughts a while back: http://squareone.pheared.net/2009/10/make-money-posting-to-s...

That's awesome. I love that the secret sauce turned out to be Simpson's quotes.

Reddit has worked on this, here is a guest blog post by Randall Munroe explaining: http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...

Would a time-delayed showing of the comments help?

I don't think so. Or at least not at the cost of inhibiting discussion. I don't have any answers, and as the article discussed, you can't design a reputation scheme in a vacuum - you need to define your goals and align the incentives with them.

That said, it seems to me that sites like HN vastly over-reward early posters to popular threads. On the other hand, this is only a bug in so far that it leads to problematic behavior. I don't see people taking advantage of it (yet). I'm more concerned with the problem of under-rewarding late, thoughtful replies. I think this is a critical problem with the Stack Exchange (StackOverflow) platform.

The question is how can u get people to re-read the comments page for new comments? Maybe something like a "(5 new comments)" next to the comments link might work??

Metafilter does that, and I think that helps people continue a discussion that they are interested in, regardless of its effect on "reputation". HN does a similar thing with the "threads" link, but it only helps for conversations the user is active in (to encourage involvement?).

My thinking on late (and hence low-exposure) contributions is more along the lines of weighting. If 10 people read a comment and 5 upvote it, it should be rewarded similarly to a comment with 100 reads and 50 upvotes.

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