Ask HN: Most helpful/useful/interesitng comments and commenters | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Most helpful/useful/interesitng comments and commenters

6 pointsdzink3 comments

HN rewards most up-votes to users who have posted interesting articles on the site (it makes sense, as up-voting articles is key to surfacing the best content). However, it's harder to find the users who have made the best comment contributions over time, especially if they have commented as replies to another comment or don't bother to post content as often.

Would it make sense to show the up-vote counts on comments that have some high threshold of outstanding number of up-votes?

Another, even more helpful feature would be to be able to bookmark users we consider thought leaders and see their usernames highlighted when we peruse HN and they've contributed somewhere.

We can already read through all comments made by a person, so this is not a follow feed idea. And the goal is not to do some kind of popularity contest (the up vote points and leader-board already has that). Instead I suggest this to enable all of us on HN to discover who we find most insightful and prioritize/reward more insightful comments as a community (vs just article sharing and relative value of top level-comments to each-other on a thread).

I can easily build a browser extension/bookmark-let to enable all of this as an add-on and proof-of-concept, but I'm suggesting it here, in case HN deems fit to build some or all of it right in and capture the data (Maybe you could prioritize YC applications from the most insightful commenters too.)

I guess you could compute "comment karma" for a user by subtracting the karma from their submissions from their total karma.

Also I suspect that votes on comments are a noisy signal of quality. A lot of those votes are driven by positive or negative dogpiling. Somebody who doesn't know what they are talking about but sounds like they know what they were talking about will always beat somebody who knows what they are talking about but doesn't sound like it.

It was a formative experience for me when there was a discussion on Slashdot about what was going to happen when Network Solutions was about to lose its monopoly for registering domain names. I didn't know exactly, but I knew enough that I was conspiring with a domain investor to register 1000's of domains as soon as they came available as we knew they would.

On the forum there were people speaking authoritatively who didn't know anything. Had I tried to school people on the truth I would have been shouted down... Any if anybody believed what I told them and took it seriously they'd be our competitors for registering domain names. So it was a case of "Those who talk don't know and those who know don't talk."

I've also seen vindictive behavior, where someone who doesn't like one of your comments goes down to your profile and down-votes all of your comments on HN. That said, statistically dog-piling would pump the numbers of a comment here or there, but would not raise rankings of people who others consider thought leaders based on multiple valuable comments. So in a way, the thought leader ranking would more objectively surface people worth asking for advice or interviewing for YC.

It's recently dawned on me that the best way to use HN is the search bar at the bottom of HN. HN is like The Matrix in Doctor Who, the collected wisdom of the ages.

There are many here who deliberately start over once they reach a certain karma, to prevent the corrupting influence of imaginary internet points. I'm starting to see the wisdom of that.

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