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Comment by treeface | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever considered giving people the option to register their abstinence from voting on a comment? Right now we have up and down, but a lot of the time I feel like I wish I had an "abstain" button. This would be reserved for the comments that aren't mean-spirited, but don't add much to the conversation.

Then perhaps a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral would rank lower than a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral. The idea being that, all things being equal for two comments, the one with more indifferent voters is considered less valuable, and is thus ranked lower. Maybe a neutral vote simply works by increasing n when judging the size-weighted score that HN uses to calculate rankings now.

I'm sure there are flaws in this line of reasoning..perhaps someone would be so kind as to point them out?

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A flaw: I might vote neutral as "I agree with this comment's current point value." In that light, 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral is a fairly confidently ranked 16-point comment, but 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral is not. However, the less confident one should be "floated" to a small portion of users to get more votes.

> I agree with this comment's current point value.

That would be a really cool feature. I would often use it for comments at 0 - something that's factually wrong and needs to be voted down, but without nasty pile-on downvoting that sometimes happens, that to me looks a bit mean-spirited. If the comment in question went below zero, my 'stay' vote would count as an upvote. If it went higher, as a downvote.

I like this idea as well. It also would be easier to implement than my idea :-]

I think the abstain effect can be emulated by just skipping that comment :-)

Ah, but how do you count that in a ranking algorithm? I'm 90% sure my idea is not the answer, but maybe we can think of something else.

Maybe this is naive, but there's something about a binary voting system that just strikes me as something that doesn't fit into a conversation. I often find myself agreeing with certain parts of a comment and not other parts of it. Maybe if the user could vote up the parts of a comment he likes and vote down the parts that he doesn't. Technically, that would be difficult (especially since on HN a comment is simply a text field).

I don't think it needs to get any more complicated. Paul asked for a "technological" solution, and it's not in the rankings; if the profile pages are made more prominent, then people will invest in their social reputations.

With respect to counting comment views, it's already implicit in the page views.

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