Bias towards older comments

joelthelion
2018-06-09T09:49:09Z

Older comments have an unfair advantage on Tildes if you sort by votes: they have had more time to collect votes.

What's interesting is that Reddit is less affected by this problem: since the default sort is "best", which sorts by expected (in a statistical sense) upvote/downvote ratio, newer comments with a good ratio can quickly move to the top.

I don't see a straightforward way to extend this to Tildes, since we don't have downvotes. Any ideas? Of course you can sort by newest first, but then you lose the benefit of votes entirely.

Maybe we could compute the expected final number of votes, based on age, current score, and a model of how comments gather votes as they age? Is there a way to download tildes data somewhere? I could try to investigate.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tildes/1zd/bias_towards_older_comments

Votes: 17

Comments: 23