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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 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.
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.
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.