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Comment by ZachPruckowski | Hacker News Reader

If we're using stars, why not base stars on comment percentile? Every night at midnight, take all the comment scores for the last week, and determine the 90th, 70th, 50th, and 30th percentiles. So every comment in the top 10% gets 5 stars, every comment in the top 30% but not in the top 10% has 4 stars, etc.

Also, I think we should switch it up so that comments are dimmed at more like -1 or -2. Otherwise, if the first vote is a downvote, people might overlook an otherwise decent (or controversial) comment.

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> Also, I think we should switch it up so that comments are dimmed at more like -1 or -2. Otherwise, if the first vote is a downvote, people might overlook an otherwise decent (or controversial) comment.

This is needed. I'm constantly upvoting valid, neutral things even if I don't really have an opinion on them simply because their first vote was down, likely by a disgruntled parent post.

>likely by a disgruntled parent post.

You've never been able to downvote replies to your own comments.

Oh wow 3 years and I've never noticed. Haha tells you've I've never tried to then. ;)

Unless they have a friend or a second account who can do it for them ;)

The karma threshold for downvoting comments is 500, iirc. That would make socking a fairly laborious prospect. As for meatpuppetry, if you're going to go through that much trouble just to downvote someone, then I'd suggest you have deeper issues.

I'm often drawn to greyed things, as they're different...not sure how prevalent that reaction is, but its at least a counterweight to overlook.

Comment's should only reflect the current thread (well, everything underneath a news story). Not all stories receive the same traffic. A quality comment in one story might receive far less votes than a less quality comment in another story that is far more popular.

However, that is merely the method, and the idea of identifying quality stories is still sound.

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