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Idea: show a random comment at the top of the thread
One thing that hacker news does that I really like is seemingly randomly bumping up certain comments to the top, temporarily. They are likely doing this based on the number of interactions the comment has received. Crucially, it doesn't always happen and you often can't even tell it's happening, since it looks like just another top comment.
This solves a number of problems:
- it brings possibly counter-circlejerk opinions to the top (and makes people actually read them seriously, since they are at the top where they expect a high-rated comment to be)
- it causes less "freezing" of the comment hierarchy over time
- it gives users the chance of making comments that get read and voted on, even if they are late to a thread.
- it raises the long tail of high-quality comments. Usually, there are a few high-rated comments, and a large "swamp" of both good and bad comments with little views after that. This feature would likely increase the number of good comments that get out of the "swamp", while also increasing the number of low-quality comments that get flagged as such.
I like this idea quite a bit and feel like, instead of causing a circlejerk of the most popular oppinions on a subject, would create discussions around less popular oppinions so everyone gets to be involved in the conversation!
I agree. It seems like a pretty cool idea. It allows late-comers to make a meaningful contribution, too.
It would be nice to have a comment equivalent of the "activity" sorting that happens with topics.
Yeah, I have actually talked to @deimos about this; An activity sort that somehow factors in the activity level of each child thread as a sorting method. There are so many other, more important, things to do first that it's unlikely to come about any time soon, but it is something that is being talked about.
I don't think adding a different sort is going to improve this in any way, unfortunately.
"Activity" sorting will probably show much lower quality comments on average, so people are unlikely to change to it. Besides, part of the whole point of this is to get people out of their habits of just consuming and agreeing, so requiring people to take a manual step would likely not help a lot.
You're assuming comments with the most votes are also the highest quality comments. I'm not going to claim those two aren't correlated, but from my reddit experience the top comments tend to be jokes or expressions of widely held sentiments. Of course, some subreddits are better about this than others. I think that sorting by activity will encourage more discussion because whatever people are actually talking about will get pushed to the top where it will be more visible.
I would also support having "activity" be the default comment sorting method (or some blend of activity with number of votes) for the reason you mentioned.
I think these are totally separate issues. While the joke thing is common on reddit, communities like HN don't have that. I don't think changing the sorting there is of any use. I want to see the most popular posts, and in isolation, activity tends to be more a proxy for controversialness than quality. For example, someone making some controversial and/or wrong claim will likely attract people arguing against it. If sorted by activity, more and more people will then pile on to the controversial discussion, drowning out any real discussion of the original topic.
I actually typed out a post earlier today that said this exact same thing, and listed reasons why it would be a good idea. It was pretty long and I figured no one cared, so I deleted it (I type out multiple posts or comments a day that I end up deleting because I feel like no one cares; I need to get over it). I’m glad to see someone else who feels this way, though. I think it would be a great idea, and with posts sorted by activity rather than votes, I feel like comments should be handled the same way, or at least in a similar fashion.
Votes indicate whether or not people like or agree with a comment so it’s plausible to think comments with more points are more relevant, but that isn’t always the case. Sorting by votes leaves newer comments all the way at the bottom, usually unseen by most who view the thread, and especially on large threads I feel like getting to the thread late prevents you from having a voice. I’ll take the introductions threads to use as an example. I saw one with over 200 comments. How many of those comments were actually seen by the people coming into the thread? The majority of users who viewed the thread probably scrolled through the first dozen or so parent comments, then scrolled quickly to the bottom to leave their own comment. Those first dozen or so comments were seen by nearly everyone who visited the thread, but the ones after than were seen by very few people.
Introduction threads are, obviously, not the only threads where sorting by something similar to activity would be beneficial. It would help in nearly every thread. The sorting system for posts goes by activity, meaning we can revive a two week old thread in an instant, but once it’s revived the vast majority of users don’t even see the comment that revived it because it is so far down. That makes sorting posts by activity almost pointless when the post-reviving comments are at the bottom and rarely seen.
I disagree with this sentiment, because I think while votes are indeed not a flawless indicator of usefulness, activity is a much much worse one. Imagine an article on a fun story about windows development. Two groups of users noisily disagreeing about an old and tired topic (e.g. Windows sucks!) in a huge comment tree, while another user writes a long post with some kind of interesting story of their own experience working on Windows.
Most people would agree the latter comment is more useful, however the activity sort would disagree. This infighting would never get many upvotes, as most users will just skip over it, however this kind of noise really affects the activity sort. Sort by activity also encourages users to comment on posts with useless comments like "this is a great story" so it gets bumped to the top.
I actually made a post about this and @cfabbro and I had a short discussion about exactly what you are saying, if you’re interested at all in reading it. Really one of the only negative aspects of sorting comments by activity is this exact thing, which wouldn’t be an issue in every thread but would be an issue in enough threads to make it necessary to find a way to combat it before putting this way of sorting into action. Comment tags, which were a tool on this site but have been disabled for the time being, would be a good way to counter this sort of thing, possibly even the only way short of making the mods scan every comment. Tags would have to be re-worked in some fashion to make it more difficult to abuse them the way they were previously abused, but I think with the right implementation they could work.
Sorting by activity, or at least some other way than the amount of votes, is a must if you’re going to sort posts by activity. We need to be able to see the comment that revives a post, for example, rather than the same highly-voted comments we saw last time it hit the front page. It’s just necessary to find some way of preventing the flame wars, rude comments, or general arguments that occur in comment sections from being on top before implementing that way of sorting. I agree with everything you’ve said and I know it’s an issue, I just think rather than entirely brushing off sorting by activity we should find a way to implement it properly and prevent comments like those from being included in that.
Edit: I also don’t think it would encourage low-effort comments such as the “this is a good story” one that you gave as an example because sorting by activity doesn’t give any incentive to do so. Just because their comment will be on top briefly doesn’t mean it will get votes, so there’s not a reason for low-effort comments. People will see it, but they aren’t going to vote on comments that aren’t adding anything. I think comments being sorted by vote count does more to incentivize the low-effort posts, as people are trying to come up with any witty remark to gain points. I don’t think having a chance to be seen will do anything to make people want to leave short, crappy comments. They won’t gain anything, votes or otherwise, without a comment that makes people want to reply. If anything it will promote discussion as people who want their comment to remain close to the top will leave more meaningful comments to prompt further discussion and ensure it stays active and on top.
Second response to your edit:
The issue is that the kind of discussions this promotes are usually not the good ones. From experience a lot more people will respond to a "windows sucks" comment than a highly qualified comment about the details of some internal OS subsystem. The latter posts, if anything, usually just receive a load of "Wow, that's really interesting" verbal upvotes, which are noise.
I think it's useful to draw parallels to the concept of "bikeshedding", and the "Law of Triviality", which states that the more trivial a question is, the more it will be discussed (because everyone will feel qualified to weigh in).
Similarly, the least insightful replies will likely be the most responded to, for the same reason.
You can see that isn’t the case here right now, and there is no reason to believe it would become the case just because comments are sorted differently. People don’t like short comments like “windows sucks,” and even if it was on top of the comments list for a time that doesn’t mean it’s going to get commented on. Ideally a low effort comment of that nature would be removed, regardless of the method used for sorting comments, as low-effort posts are highly frowned upon here. Even if it wasn’t, aside from maybe a few replies, most people are going to just scroll on by it. Just because a comment is on top doesn’t mean people are forced to reply to it and it doesn’t mean people aren’t going to scroll and read other comments. This site is not Reddit and is trying to become something different, something better. The drawing point of this site is that it offers real discussion rather than noise and low-effort garbage. There is going to be some of that, there’s no way to avoid it, but in general this is not the site for that stuff and it will be moderated accordingly. It’s also up to the users to help filter that stuff out and to maintain a sense of maturity, not making low-effort comments or posts. People will, inevitably, but overall there will be less on this site than others.
It really isn’t much different from sorting by new. Essentially it is the same thing, the only difference being whole threads getting bumped to the top when there is a reply to one. Sorting by new doesn’t inspire “shitposting” or attention-seeking behavior, and I fail to see how activity sorting would be any different. Vote counts inspire attention-seeking and vote farming, but not people seeing the newest comments. Your comment being at or close to the top of the list for a short duration after you post or get a reply does nothing to incentivize low-effort replies. We’re already sorting posts by activity and there aren’t low-effort posts. There are a number of discussion posts that aren’t necessarily brain wracking and made just in the spirit of getting replies and conversation, but that isn’t always a bad thing. Comment sections wouldn’t be any different. As long as a comment is on-topic and actually promotes conversation, it’s fine.
If someone responds to a parent comment with something kind of low-level, that’s fine, too, even if it does bump that parent to the top. It’s fine because the parent comment promotes discussion and brings it back to visibility. Content of the child comments underneath it aren’t as important as the content of the parent comment. Let’s say there’s a parent comment with a legitimate on-topic reply that promotes discussion and someone replies to it with a child comment saying, “That was an insightful post, thanks for sharing.” That thread gets bumped to the top. There is no problem there because the parent comment is the important part; one of 15 (for example) child comments doesn’t really matter, even if it was just one sentence saying they liked it.
There would be a standard for parent comments. Even if someone did respond with a one-sentence comment, people don’t have to reply to it and most likely wouldn’t. There are people who love to argue, but again, with the right moderation or even tag system those arguments will be excluded from reaching the top. There’s also the expectation of the users to not provoke arguments and to just move on.
There’s just no reason to believe the discussion would change for the worst with this system, or even any at all. It’s essentially sorting by new, with minimal differences. That isn’t something that will make people start posting low-effort trash. It gets them nothing except having a comment on top for a short time, which would be the case for anyone sorting by new, anyway. Being on top doesn’t matter if it gets them no votes or comments, and with no point total in our profiles, people aren’t as eager to farm votes. I just think it’s unreasonable to think discussion would go downhill with a very slightly modified version of sorting by new, and the only modification being parent comments are bumped when they receive a reply. I know there are flaws, but there are also easy ways to deal with them and there’s not nearly as serious of a chance it will degrade conversation as you think there is.
I'm not sure saying "it's like sorting by new" is a particularly good thing for suggesting a default sort, when you consider that on reddit, the only times I've seen people refer to sorting comments by new, it's to complain about their content and obnoxiousness.
Existing sites with the bump system, like forums and imageboards have suffered from the problem of seperating useful from non-useful bumps themselves for nearly decades, so I'm not sure if such a simple bump system will really work or scale. 4chan has a limit on how often a thread can be bumped and old threads are removed, which helps a lot, but it still does suffer from large signal noise issues.
I think perhaps there is something to be said for a somewhat hybrid model. It's obvious both models have their drawbacks.
I believe however that you'd get better results by using a relatively stable and high signal to noise ratio sorting method like votes and deliberately injecting some some targeted noise and chaos, than by trying to take a chaotic, low s/nr sort like "activity" and try to somehow make it less noisy.
Another issue with tagging as solution to lots of comments is, well, if there's lots of noise comments, nobody will go through and tag them. Besides, at that point, they would have already bumped the thread, so it would be too late.
I dunno, this solves the "swamp" problem, but sounds like this might encourage people to spam top-level comments for visibility instead of replying to existing ones. Then you lose the benefits of a comment tree and end up with more-or-less a traditional web forum in the extreme case.
Another downside would be that an important comment providing insight/context/updates on the OP may get buried just because it's older or highly active.
Totally on board with this. Bright be sensible to the this on with tags when they are implemented. For example to avoid off topic or noise comments from rising to the top.
Yes, this is part of the idea. If a comment gets bumped up and hit with a few bad tags, the sorting algorithm would no longer consider it for bumping up and it would be at the bottom again prematurely.
So long as it is open source and such a mechanism won't be altered to permit certain comments to be selected by a moderator or admin for special promotion without it being clear that that is what is going on.
Yes, this would be an automatic system, and temporary, just long enough to get the comment some consideration. Not like the Pinned comments reddit has now.
I like this idea a lot, it lets people who don't get to the thread right away still make a contribution that means something.