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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

You just inspired an idea from me regarding HN comments. I think Slashdot still has one of the most elegant commenting systems around, even if the quality of the comments (due to the site's ownership) is worse.

I would love to tag HN comments with certain attributes and be able to filter them out. For example, this comment and the parent could be tagged "meta-discussion". Then those who want to discuss the content of the article could filter them out quickly.

/. tags are pretty accurate - "funny" "informative" "insightful" "trolling" - though trolling is a delete-level offense here.

Likewise, metamoderation (peer review, or moderation of tagging) was a brilliant idea.

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I have been thinking about this for a while with Reddit. If users could mark why they think something is worth upvoting then everyone else could just filter to find the insightful or informative comments and get rid of the funny ones, or vice verses depending on what they were looking for at the time. Distilling down the comments to stuff you are much more likely to be interested in could improve the site quite a bit, it works on Steam fairly well for games even with a somewhat free tag system but I can't help but think that perhaps not many people would bother.

The simplification to up and down hurts discussion on Reddit (and probably on hacker news too) because it promotes widely comprehended and accepted content. This is why on Reddit pictures do so well unless they are banned, they are very quick to review and choose to up or down vote. However a 10k document will be reviewed by a lot less people, it could fit exceptionally well with the content and get 100% upvotes but be completely buried by all the pictures because a lot less people had time to view it and upvote it.

There is a deeper challenge here with how comments and upvoting and content filtering via users is done. It isn't just the lack of information from tags but also once a document is reviewed will an upvote occur. Much of Reddit shows users will widely upvote on the basis of the title of say news without ever reading it. The longer the article is the less people will return to Reddit to upvote it. Both HN and Reddit promote popularity over fit because low numbers of upvotes on content equates to low engagement and that isn't valuable to them, but it might be the singularly most important piece of content for that audience its just long and badly titled.

There are a bunch of unsolved issues that Reddit and HN have surfaced around the model for content and comment voting and where these two sites differ is mostly only in the rules to try and mitigate the problem with the chosen model. The problem is only more complicated models can improve it and the moment you do that you potentially lose customers, but at the same time you potentially don't want those customers either.

That is my unfinished thought chain on this.

>The problem is only more complicated models can improve it and the moment you do that you potentially lose customers, but at the same time you potentially don't want those customers either.

Therein lies the key paradox. Statistically, content quality usually has the shape of the the lognormal distribution, with community size on the horizontal axis and quality on the vertical. Content below a certain margin of popularity is usually unpopular for a reason--the ideas of the community are not very good! When content quality is high, the popularity of a community rises because the ideas are good! After a critical threshold though quality goes down. Once you've reached that threshold, number of users is inversely proportional to quality. I really like HN vetting process for voting: you have to have spent enough time on the site, and commented in a way that gained sufficient approval from the existing community in order to get the right to vote in that community. Keeping barriers to entry high is critical to this, but marketing people can only see $/user.

Reddit has become increasingly intolerable for me except for a few niche subreddits.

I'm getting the feeling I'm not being complimented here but I've upvoted anyway.

This is probably solvable with Hypothesis and a custom browser extension.

More generally, third-party annotation of web (especially hypertext) resources is an underexplored opportunity. I suspect it’s at least partly because integration isn’t a first-class concern for these sorts of apps (if it were, they’d build it themselves and own the feature and the data), so the experience isn’t that great and the marketing is significantly diluted.

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