Hacker News Reader

Comment by hendzen | Hacker News Reader

The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting.

Generally, very successful people don't spend large amounts of their time commenting on online forums. In this manner, the biggest 'losers' in the real world, with the most time to waste on the internet, become the biggest 'winners' in the online community.

The end result is that the cultural norms of the online community end up being set by people who are the least qualified to create or enforce any kind of healthy norm.

edit: just wanted to say that I recall reading something similar on a blog a long time ago, although I cannot remember the name of the writer.

View on HN

> The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting.

I remember a claim of a similar but opposed problem: that low quality short content is much more rewarding that long, thoughtful responses. See a funny cat pic? I chuckled, upvote. See a long answer that doesn't quite fit your opinion? Downvote, or ignore at best. Short and funny trumps long and thoughtful.

This is not a problem in HN thanks to moderation, but it happens a lot in other communities.

Too black and white. Why not be funny, short AND thoughtful? Why does everyone here have such tunnel vision?

Because often points cannot be made in a short manner and still be understood. Just like in this very post some points need some explanation of their context and the thought chain leading to them, or people will not understand how the poster arrived there and simply voice their disagreement, instead of sitting down for a while and thinking about the post and trying to recreate that chain of thought on their own.

From a gross accumulation of points, yes. From a 'most likely to go viral' standpoint, we've noticed quite the opposite.

In the several communities my team and I manage, those most likely to go viral / frontpage / call it what you will, are members of one of two camps: Great curators or trolls.

Trolls will generally go viral almost immediately based on the sheer volume of interaction with their posts (think, nude selfies posted as 'fashion').

Being pretty proactive with the banhammer will enforce the norm reasonably well, as people will pretty rapidly figure out that in order to make it to the leaderboard, you need to not be banned. It's more Hunger Games than Cocktail Party.

Also as a bit of a tangent - those who spend the most time on site are overwhelmingly not top commentors, contributors, or voters. They're consumers. We have several thousand users who spend an average of 4 hours on site /per day/ who've interacted with a post less than ten times.

> The real problem with online communities is that the people who are upvoted the most are the ones who spend the most time commenting.

To the extent that this is really an issue, its quite easily addressed by using the average net upvotes rather than total net upvotes for whatever weighting, if any, the comment display system gives to poster score/karma/etc.(If you want to also give some weight to engagement without encouraging post frequency, you could accumulate a score using the average in each day or week, so duration of regular engagement would be rewarded, but high frequency would not.)

Of course -- I think that to the extent that excessive influence by frequent commenters is an issue, its more because most of the volume of comments is going to come from them, independently of any reward system.

Yeah. One imperfect step towards addressing this is having hard limits on the number of comments that can be made in a given time range.

Of course, nobody wants to do this because then they would lose some of their traffic.

Occasionally a user is particularly invested in an online conversation for really valid reason, e.g. area of expertise, Show HN, etc. So having a hard limit in a large scale (x comments in an hour or y comments in a day, as opposed to z comments in 60 seconds) may actually abruptly lock-out a particularly valuable contributor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com