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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

That's an interesting question.

I think you'd want a comment ranking system that rewarded people for voting according to the thought that went into a comment rather than whether you happen to agree with the comment.

Maybe a two dimensional voting system, one for "quality" and one for "agreement" (literally a 2D voting arrow widget? up-right means "high quality and I agree", down-right means "low quality but I agree", etc).

It would then be pretty simple to see who's "quality" and "agreement" votes don't strongly correlate, as well as who writes quality comments, and weight their votes more heavily.

If you only had 1 dimension voting like everywhere else, then I'm not sure how to do it, but maybe it's possible.

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I've always thought Slashdot's old moderation system was pretty well designed. It's been years since I've been there, but as I recall, there were several categories of upvote -- Interesting, Informative, and Funny come to mind. There was a meta-moderation system to calibrate the moderators. The site was better than HN at showing only upvoted comments by default, in case you just wanted to see the highlights. (Oh, and I think it would send email for belated replies, making it better for ongoing discussion -- something I've definitely missed here at HN.)

Although the site is pretty dead now -- it doesn't have HN's advantage of a wealthy benefactor keeping it ad-free -- its original incarnation had some good ideas.

High quality but I disagree.

There are users who don't care about the voting system the same way the designer of the voting system intended. The only way to enforce this would be by appointing a team of moderators that read every comment and rate it themselves. Obviously this is problematic because users might perceive the moderators to be authoritarian and the potential for abuse is pretty high. However, this could definitively increase the maximum size of a high quality community to something like 10000 users but it's still far away from 1 million or more users.

I think that can be solved if a majority of early users use the voting system in the way it was intended. Say there's a cluster of 75% "good" initial users who vote similarly on quality. Any new users that vote similarly to them on quality would also be classified as "good" and be given more weight.

Even if the majority of new users don't use the voting system correctly the system could be weighted more heavily to the group of existing and new users who agree on what quality is, even if it ends up being a minority of users.

Actually, I think even if a majority of users don't vote in the way that was intended from the beginning you might still be able to handle it because you can throw away users whose "quality" and "agreement" votes are most correlated, which I think is the most likely way users would deviate from the intended voting system.

Now, if you had a majority of users who all voted the same but were not correlated with "agreement" (e.x. "vote according to the day of the week" or something), or if only very few users were voting correctly, then it might be difficult to distinguish, but that seems unlikely.

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