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Comment by tbonza | Hacker News Reader

Using page rank as suggested by OP, would provide weird incentives like frequent comments, or higher volume, could rank a person higher than if they had occasional comments further down the thread. If OP is interested in the most influential commenters, people who write frequently and have a posse, then PR would be a good way to do it. What would happen to a helpful comment from a throwaway account?

If there's more of a ranking algorithm, identifying who is most likely to have actually read the article could be neat.

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What would happen is that the old accounts would accumulate "CommentRank" and the new users would always be sorted to the bottom. This is good for search, since we are looking for "the" answer, the site, a limited number of best pages for a topic etc., but it's quite bad for discussion; a bad take from Animats would forever be above a good comment from a greenhorn.

I thought about it while writing this post. It would be useful to have a decay factor for PageRank. In simple words, if someone wants to maintain their PR score, they need to actively engage in the HN community.

You can put epicycle around epicycle, but there's a lot of computational efficiency in a score which can be calculated from an integer and a timestamp.

> if someone wants to maintain their PR score, they need to actively engage

Wouldn't that encourage people to "actively engage" even when they have nothing to say just to keep their score?

Goodhart's law comes into mind here. People who want to stay relevant on this site will take your measure as their target. There's no system that can't be gamed if you know the rules. But the more "rock solid" you try to make those rules, the more you embed intrinsic discrimination between participants. You put "Proof of Work" in the rules and you alienate newcomers while all the rest do "busywork".

Your own comments and submissions would sink like a stone because you didn't engage enough, regardless of how interesting your points are.

I think this part of the post answers your question.

> Will I ever publicly write about how HN ranks posts if I am Dang (HN moderator)? No, because Pagerank can be manipulated by people despite its reputation. In fact, Pagerank is being exploited for years. Moreover, there are financial incentives for companies to get on the first page in HN.

> Will I ever publicly write about how HN ranks posts if I am Dang (HN moderator)? No

Lack of transparency is not a solution, and certainly not one that will sell well in a place where "security by obscurity" is disdained and open source cherished. It's particularly bad when you're dealing with a high profile site filled with intelligent people who would most likely make short work of reverse engineering just enough of the algorithm to understand how it works.

With 100% certainty dang ("Dang") read this comment.

I would be really happy to know his thoughts.

This: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... https://archive.ph/V9z3G is as close as you're likely to get.

You can write hn@ycombinator.com . I’ve chatted with dang on that email address several times.

"…would provide weird incentives like frequent comments, or higher volume, could rank a person higher than if they had occasional comments further down the thread."

I know I'll be out of step with most who comment on HN but I question the necessity of having a ranking/voting system at all. All it seems to do is to act as an ego booter for commentators and it messes up orderly discussion when people insist on posting replies to the first commentator.

As a news aggregator, no doubt HN needs some method of ranking stories to set their listing lifetimes and their importance (page ranking) but that could be accomplished by the number of clicks a storey receives and or how long a visitor/commentator stays on a story (or the time between link clicks).

I also question aspects of the voting system as currently implemented. It's not unusual for me to receive down-votes on comments to controversial stores but not receive a comment from the down-voter. Why bother with this system if the voter hasn't the gumption to say why he/she disagrees with one's views? (One could discuss the psychology and social philosophy behind this but here is not the place).

Another annoyingly aspect of the voting system is the lack of stats. The time I take from posting to checking to see if someone has replied varies wildly—from minutes to days to never. This wide variation is significant when I post to controversial stores. Days later I can check back to see if there's been any votes or replies only to find there has been none.

At other times, I've monitored the incoming votes almost in realtime and watched them oscillate around 0 or 1, that is I've received many up and down votes but the long-term average is zero. Come back and check days later and one hasn't a clue from the stats if anyone at all has actually read one's comment let alone the fact that it was equally controversial to both sides of a polarized audience. HN should allow users access to these long-term stats.

Not having an explicit ranking system means that things are ranked by submission time. This too incentivizes certain behavior (frequent posting). Maybe one can get around that with certain guardrails like rate limiting submissions/comments but that's yet another can of worms to open.

I agree with you mostly (and will give you an upvote). I think we've seen enough to understand that upvotes and downvotes are dolled out based on how well a comment agrees or disagrees with the voters preconceived notion of whatever the topic is.

I also question the concept of 'hiding' comments. Are my eyes so delicate that I can't see certain comments by default? It seems like just a feature that exists to bias subsequent viewers against comments.

It'd be really interesting to see a system where voters have both one upvote/downvote for the submission and the ability to upvote one comment and downvote one comment.

I believe hidden comments can be seen if you enable showdead, and if you do so you'll learn why they are hidden (they add virtually nothing to discussions).

Author here. Yes, reading time will be a helpful indicator. In fact, I already mentioned this in the post.

> Reading time for the article.

I see where you included metrics as a starting point like how long an article takes to read. Maybe like a word count approach as a starting point.

Thinking about understanding the content of an article and seeing who's most likely to be referencing that content in their post is more of what I had in mind.

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