I suspect HN is subject to the same "first comment effect," often to the detriment of later comments that might be more deserving of the top spot.
Does anyone here have ideas for fixing this?
Niche stories with less attention tend to have a more rounded discussion with a larger number of parent comments relative to replies.
Automatic karma deductions for 3rd tier replies? Detachment + quoting after the 2nd tier? Positioning based on the cumulative karma of the whole tree? Automatic collapse of higher tiers (a la reddit...) Super-powered collapse buttons, for when people get tired mid-tree
I wish something were done, but I bet it will be an addon, not HN, first.
Higher-voted comments will then be more likely to move up, but not guaranteed.
(You might want to consider putting a thumb on the scale to distinguish between comments which are low voted because they're uninteresting, and comments which contain flame-bait words etc.)
Have three categories: New, Best (up:down ratio is high), Controversial (up:down ratio of 1:1).
Pick one from each category and then randomly make them the top three. For larger threads you can salt them into the top 10 comments.
New comments that are truly good have a chance of being picked up to Best or Hot, and Controversial comments spur discussion and moderate the self-reinforcing circle-jerk that threads descend into.
If someone like tptacek (with 259K karma) votes my comment up, I think that's a lot more relevant than someone with 300 karma.
Using average karma per comment would be an improvement, but it still favors people who are on the site constantly (so they can be the first to make the obvious comment that everybody upvotes) and frequent the most popular (and lowest effort) subreddits.
Another problem: the last thing reddit needs is more incentive for users to improve their personal karma score. Karma is useful for readers, but that benefit is balanced against the incentives it provides for writers to optimize their karma score above all other considerations. I think HN achieves this balance better than reddit does by deemphasizing personal karma scores in various ways, and this is reflected in the user experience. It's bad enough when karma's just a driver of personal gamification. If it actually provided users with social clout and ability to frame the conversation, well, then it would be something with real world value. You wouldn't need click farms to manufacture viral content, just a few well-placed accounts with high scores. High-karma upvotes as a service. As a side-gig for a careful power user, it would be nigh-undetectable.
Think of the difference between HN and reddit, then multiply it 10-fold. I think that's what you would end up with.
If anything, I'd suggest the reverse: it should count for more to have more votes from a less tightly coupled portion of the graph. As in, cluster the set of users based on various types of interactions, and include a multiplicative factor in scoring based on the distinctness of the users upvoting something. That way, you can get a modest score by appealing strongly to a small subset of users, but a massive score only by appealing to many distinct sets of users.
I actually think this would be an interesting experiment to try. Who's hacker friendly and has a well-used comment system that we know?
Does it work? Does it seem to do a decent job at selecting submissions?
Thinking about this some more, though, I don't think I'd want to see the exact same algo on comments, though; comments don't have the same infinite-firehose problem, and you don't want to encourage spammy necrocommenting on old-but-still-popular threads just to get "new comment" karma.
Maybe something more like making vote fuzzing (which Reddit already does to some extent) inversely proportional to age, and actually sorting on the fuzzed value rather than the real one.
Basically, ant-algorithm. To stay relevant, you have constantly gather new votes. But it has one problem. Comments with higher votes already have momentum, hence they will be shown to new users most of the time, which gives it more chance to gather new votes, thus continuing the momentum.
Anecdotally, that doesn’t be the case with
Reddit’s modern algorithm; comments made
late in the thread appear at the bottom,
where they likely will not receive any upvotes
> Reddit’s ranking algorithm attempts to rectify this by determining comment ranking using both time and community voting; comments in a thread, by default, are ordered based on the points score (upvotes - downvotes) the comment receives, subject to a rank decay based on the age of the comment.
> In theory, this system should allow comments that posted later in the thread’s lifetime to rank much higher temporarily, then Redditors can vote on the new comment; if the new comment is good, it can now rise to the top and therefore the content which would otherwise be buried is now surfaced.
And then it continues on to the section you quoted. I'm not sure what to believe!