Context: Interesting & creative comments get pushed down on Hackernews due to popularity-based sorting. Reddit offers sort-by-controversial which highlights more creative & stimulating comments. I would like to see that applied to Hackernews threads.
Is it worth asking the team to add this feature?
I'd be curious to know what comments you're thinking of that you believe are highly controversial and should be boosted. My guess is there are some, but they are massively outweighed by comments on topics that are inherently controversial.
It seems to me as if using Reddit is the simplest thing that might work.
Also, you might like a curated version of HN: https://hn.build-your-own.org/
How would you measure which comments are creative and stimulating?
"controversial" on reddit sorts by comments with lots of up & down votes.
I'm usually reading comments from bottom up for this reason.
Also, since we are on this topic, I always thought someone would execute better on slashdot's karma system, where you upvoted on different axes for humor, insight, etc.
Having said that, I would leave hn as it is. It is nice to have a stable platform on the web.
In my opinion, Hacker News would have been even better without the karma system. The only thing karma promotes is echo chamber thought, people playing it safe because they love the karma hit, and people playing the troll because they get off at seeing their comment greyed out.
That said, I can't fault pg for adding karma because in 2000-something when he wrote HN the Reddit model was seen as a fancy improvement over forums. Today we know karma systems just cause the signal-to-noise ratio to decrease massively as the user base grows, but is excellent for engagement metrics. I don't think pg wanted to optimise for engagement, but thoughtful discussion.