Re:Top Stories On HN vs Reddit
by waterlesscloud on Tuesday May 11, 2010 @04:42AM
(#1337275)
I think the comment quality is quite high here given that it's such a dynamic site. I'm hard pressed to think of another site with such story traffic that matches the comment quality.
It seems the solution to that isn't really technological, it's the community peer pressure the site creates. It's cultural, in terms of the culture of the site.
One thing that could be done would be to go back to a -8 points limit for down votes which may reinforce better what are really bad comments. At the moment a comment with an unpopular stance that is decently written can go -4 along with plain stupid comments that would normally get down voted a lot more.
Re:Top Stories On HN vs Reddit
by eoin_murphy on Tuesday May 11, 2010 @09:19AM
(#1337698)
Alternatively; a two value system measuring popularity of the sentiment expressed and separately the quality of the post. So for example, a poorly written post with good ideas would be: legibility: -4, popularity: +4. This could be expressed as an rounded average or different users could filter by their own preference of legibility/popularity.
Of course this would all be a fairly major change to a system that isn't really broken so it's just speculative thinking on my part.
PG says that the comment quality is the most worrying part of the site ("Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions. ")
Perhaps a better way of measuring the difference, would be to parse the comment threads and compare length (PG: length of a comment is directly proportional to the intelligence/civility of the poster) or frequency of memes.
I suspect this would show HN to consistently score higher, but not as dramatically as your analysis of posts.