HNScore - another look at post quality on Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

HNScore - another look at post quality on Hacker News

alexc.me

31 pointsalex_c7 comments

Not too long ago I stumbled across someone doing visualizations of comment threads, which seemed like it might help in sorting out what was going on: http://demaws.net/projects/tldr

Also, I wrote a very long essay on the problems of web forums (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000) which was covered previously here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515682

In that essay, I tried to rethink what exactly moderation and comments/conversations meant. I like your approach of contrasting threads that are over- or under-moderated with threads that maintain an 'appropriate' moderation/reply ratio. But as noodle wrote above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794856), it may not be able to distinguish between certain types of commenting.

My current instinct is that moderation tells us more about the moderator than it does about the comment being moderated. I'm just not sure how to to operationalize that insight.

Awesome! You've written down a pattern I noticed on both Reddit and HN -- what I called the troll filter: if more comments than points, the troll filter fails (the link is a troll and unlikely to be worth reading).

Exceptions are the types of threads where people are encouraged to contribute, such as "who's hiring" or "I'm <something interesting>, ask me anything"

I'll use this.

It works on /classic and /news, too, if you add an asterisk to the end of the @include url. I.e.:

  // @include        http://news.ycombinator.*/*

Would you mind throwing it on GitHub or somewhere similar? I really like the idea, and that way lots of people can easily contribute tweaks/improvements.

Of course.

http://github.com/alexcurelea/HNScore/tree/master

(btw - for me it works on inner pages even without the second wildcard. Odd.)

I have the same problem as the parent comment. (http://news.ycombinator.com/news doesn't work while http://news.ycombinator.com does).

If it doesn't break anything for you to add the wildcard, you should tack it on.

edit: you also seem to have forgotten to add it to userscripts--that's where all the cool greasemonkey kids hang out.

doesn't seem to take into account the "ask hn" types of posts. the ones that tend to get voted up also tend to have interesting material in them, as well as a larger number of responses.

It might also be pertinent to take into account how long ago an article was submitted. I've noticed the votes-comments quality filter myself, but I've never really added "submission age" to that mental filter. I'm not sure how it would affect the results, but I certainly think its something worth researching.

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