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> This presupposes some kind of universal value function.

Sorry, I did not mean to suggest that some comments are intrinsically more valuable. But we do want to sort comments so that, on average, the distance between the "ideal" order for any given reader and the actual order is minimized, don't we?

> This is like perfect is the enemy of good counterargument.

I'm not trying to argue anything here, I just wanted your thoughts on how this could be implemented effectively.

> I have never browsed a journal or arxiv by the number of citations or the hindex or whatever.

I don't know if arXiv is a very good comparison — the posts are much fewer, the range of interests is much narrower, and the site itself is very heavily moderated.

>But we do want to sort comments so that, on average, the distance between the "ideal" order for any given reader and the actual order is minimized, don't we?

why? who cares? do you not know how to skim and skip irrelevant text?

>I just wanted your thoughts on how this could be implemented effectively

you could think of any number of ways to vet comments. we live in the future after all; you could require a minimum length, you could classify comments according to sentiment and reject those that have unwanted overtones, you could use topic modeling to see whether in fact the comment was on topic, etc etc etc. ranking algorithms have had thousands of labor hours invested in them across all social media sites - apply the same fervor to this problem and there will be an adequate solution.

>the posts are much fewer, the range of interests is much narrower, and the site itself is very heavily moderated.

you're wrong that there are fewer submissions to arxiv

https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2018_by_area

you're also wrong that it's moderated - the only thing that you're required to have to submit is endorsement. but i also don't understand how heavy moderation is a counterpoint? yc is one of the most successful vcs in the world - they can't afford moderators? i also don't know what the relevance of arxiv's narrow range of topics is.

> why? who cares? do you not know how to skim and skip irrelevant text?

Ignoring inflammatory content can be more taxing to people than you pretend, and moderators and flagging are too slow to act. It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying enough that I would consider alternative services.

A forum is nothing without its users, and a forum that puts its users first shouldn't irritate its users with off-putting content without good reason.

> you could think of any number of ways to vet comments.

Alright, I was just checking whether you had any new ideas, and it seems that you do not.

> you're wrong that there are fewer submissions to arxiv

HN receives at least twice as many submissions per month, and an order of magnitude more comments. This makes the arXiv a very poor analogy for HN.

> you're also wrong that it's moderated

From [0] (see also, [1]):

> All submissions are subject to a moderation process that verifies material is appropriate and topical. Material that contains offensive language, non-scientific content, or is plagiarized may be removed.

Looks a lot like they have moderation to me.

> i also don't understand how heavy moderation is a counterpoint

If you already heavily filter by quality, then the order in which posts are presented obviously becomes much less important.

> yc is one of the most successful vcs in the world - they can't afford moderators?

HN does have an excellent moderation team. They just aren't anywhere near as stringent as the arXiv, on quality, on politeness, or on any number of other characteristics.

If HN was as heavily moderated as the arXiv, then they wouldn't need a voting system either. It'd be a much colder place, though, which is probably why they don't do that.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/help/submit

[1]: https://arxiv.org/help/moderation

So long as people's value functions have a directional bias in hyperdimensional value-space, the averaged value function embodied by the upvote-downvote tendencies is useful.

(If there were no bias- if people's opinions/tendenfies varied equally likely between all possibilities- all comment scores would be 0. Of course, practically survivor bias soon sets in, as radical suicide advocates wouldn't stick around long enough to like/dislike much.)

Academic journals have a barrier to entry and the content is already judged, the journals decide what information they publish. It is not a random collection of every single article submitted, so you are already starting out with above-average content.

> This presupposes some kind of universal value function.

Yes: "a majority of HN readers of this comment found it useful / not useful". That's the best you're going to get.

But for the most part, it does actually work. If 80% of people on the site agree that a comment is useful, that's good enough; it's unreasonable to expect any evaluation of subjective matters to be universal.

And that's why moderators will step in and do some manual tweaking if things get very divisive. If that 80% number (that I made up) drops too low, getting too close to 50%, then that means that the discussion just isn't likely to be productive. HN is not a homogeneous group, and sometimes the there isn't a clear majority in agreement.

> Here's what I'll say though about modern forums: they fixed a system that wasn't broken as far as discourse goes. When I was in high school the were forums where responses were ordered in time rather than by popularity

I don't agree with this.

One reason is the lack of threading. phpBB and its contemporaries just had a list of posts, and all replies linearly under each post link. Digging through for the bits you actually care about was a huge pain in the ass, and it's one of the reasons why I never enjoyed fora like that.

The other reason is just scale. I'm not sure how old you are, but I was in HS in the late 90s. Back then the internet was much smaller, not as commercialized, and people generally behaved decently well toward each other. We didn't have the spambots we do today, and every forum site wasn't under constant attack by people who want to destroy online communities just for fun. I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was a lot easier to manage communities back then and keep discourse civil and on-topic, with very few automated tools at hand.

These days it's pretty much impossible to create high quality discussions at any scale without a ranking system. Sure, you see smaller communities of a few hundred, maybe even a thousand, people where these things work sorta like they did 20+ years ago (but I guarantee you the board itself is doing a ton of automated spam filtering to get you there).

HN has... what? Tens of thousands, or likely more than a hundred thousand users. If you enabled showdead in your profile page, you'll see a lot of garbage that gets through the automated filters and ends up flagged out of existence. And even regardless of that, with a community this size, you're going to have enough disagreement on the fundamentals of any complex topic that you're going to get a ton of disagreement. Voting and flagging is far from perfect, but it can help it from devolving into a cesspool of low-effort comments and outright name-calling.