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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

That's a very interesting observation. I noticed that too. Short comments are occasionally very useful. Occasionally they're the pin that pops the balloon. "What happens when x = 0?" But usually they're short on length because they're short on ideas.

I wonder if there is some way to discourage short comments? I could for example bias the comment sorting algorithm to put longer comments higher among siblings.

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I think that bk has an excellent point with putting a small "If your comment is just a witty remark, please don't post it." note under the comment box.

The psychology of such a note might help a lot, besides not all recent posters would necessarily know that thoughtless witty comments aren't highly valued here.

I already put an invitation to read this

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

under every comment box for the first day of a new user's account.

Maybe I should add an additional confirmation step for short comments.

You probably should.

I hardly ever read EULA's (which this in some ways is), and I'm probably not alone in this behaviour.

Unfortunately this idea isn't going to increase the quality of commenting, it is just going to encourage stupid people to pad out their nonsense, Steve Yegge style. It's also going to punish people whose witty remarks are actually witty.

I think that one of the things that holds people to very high standards here is their respect for the community and the many members that have something interesting or insightful to say.

I have (almost) never experienced a comment that was an obvious digg-user unwittingly passing by, but many comments from new users that want to join the conversation but haven't been here long enough to get a feel for the unwritten rules, and thus post comments that may not go well with the rest of the community.

These users will definitely be helped by a small reminder that they should contribute in a meaningful way. The challenge, as you hint at, is of course what this reminder should be.

Maybe something short and witty like "Remember: if it isn't worht reading it isn't worth posting"

"Remember: if it isn't worht reading it isn't worth posting"

Most people think everything they have to say is worth posting. I'd rather something specifically aimed at short comments, as mentioned above. Something harsh aimed at something under, say, 100 characters, and a brief little reminder towards something under 100 words?

I wouldn't prevent people from posting short comments, just ask "are you sure?" I don't think anyone would go to the trouble of making their comments longer just to avoid an "are you sure?" screen.

I think I only made one comment on my first day. Perhaps this should be something that appears for an account's first X comments, where X is a sane limit. Perhaps a karma-limited reminder would be more effective for those who tend toward lurker. Then again, perhaps for the lurker class, that's ultimately unnecessary

I think there is a place for a bit of whit every now and again, what we want to avoid is having threads devolve into long lists of one-sentence banter. If you study the structure of these sorts of threads on reddit, I think one of the best tweaks we could make to avoid that sort of rot would be to auto-collapse any reply thread that has x% of replies that are under a certain character count unless the parent comment has a relatively high karma value. As you pointed out, sometimes the pithy statement is needed to break the ice, but rarely would and valuable discussion involve 6-7 one-sentence replies in a row, which is what you get when a conversation on reddit devolves to a joke-fest.

Auto-collapsing threads for comments that are below a certain karma threshold seems like a nice tool as well - it still allows access if you want to parse the thread, and trolls still have a place to do trollish things, but it moves the behavior into an opt-in situation where you have to actually click on the thread in order to see it.

I think there's a place for small comments and witty remarks.

My appreciation of them is like a bell curve, with the optimum ratio of wit[1]/serious comment probably about 1:20. Higher than that, and it starts to get a bit like reddit. Lower and it's taking itself a bit too seriously.

[1] This completely excludes bad puns, memes etc. They have no place here.

Edit: replaced the asterisk after wit with a [1]. Anyone know how to escape an * that's not preceded by whitespace?

Wouldn't the change of algorithm be a variation on the LOC metric that's universally despised? People would simply write longer comments with possibly as little worth.

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