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Question about how votes affect comment placement
Sorry if this has been discussed already, I wasn't sure how to find it. I'm curious if votes on child comments affect the placement of their parent comments. Imagine this scenario:
- Comment 1 (25 votes)
- Comment 2 (2 votes)
- Comment 3 (150 votes)
In this example, would the popularity of #3 cause #2 to be positioned above #1?
Edit: Oh the nested list formatting looks weird. Comment 3 is meant to be a child of Comment 2, if that wasn't clear.
Not currently, but it's a possibility. It's hard to say if this would be a good thing or not though. For example, if someone makes an extremely misleading/inaccurate comment but a reply explains the issues with it and gets highly upvoted, should that really give more visibility to the bad top-level comment? I'm not sure.
Perhaps if that top level comment could be put in better context somehow, labeled as 'corrected - see reply' or somesuch. That could also trigger the collapse of the inaccurate/incorrect parent comment. The reply would still be on full display/fully expanded. Maintains the context, highlights the 'right' reply much like stackexchange does with the 'right' answers to a thread.
I personally do not think it should because, even if the child comment did a good job explaining things them, the parent is not contributing anything to the discussion as a whole.
You are right, but there's an issue with sorting it that way that I've seen happen in bigger threads in reddit. When an inaccurate or wrong comment is heavily downvoted, it falls to the bottom even if it got a very good reply explaining why it is wrong. Since the thread got too big, newcomers don't get to see it and many times end up posting the same wrongful or incorrect replies and people who have seen the correct answer start "spamming" comments such as "this is wrong, see [here]" or "you missed [this]", and the thread starts to become people just repeating the same thing over and over again.
I don't think an incorrect comment that received a correct reply should be placed on top, above a correct one, but neither should it be placed at the very bottom where nobody can see the correction.
Do you plan highlighting new comments? Something like "show youngest (at most 1-hour-old) comment at top" or something like reddit with bumping young commets? This could promote discussion, especially at popular threads. I find myself not commenting (unless I'm replying to someone) if there already is lot of comments. I think a lot of users feel it simmilar, especially as the site is growing rapidly and 80 comment topics are not uncommon.
I'd definitely like to try it, yeah. I'm not sure exactly how to do it yet, but I think it's a reasonable thing to do. You probably shouldn't hesistate to comment in larger threads though, a lot of users have the "mark new comments" feature turned on along with collapsing old comments, which means that when they come back to a thread they're only seeing the new ones, so they're still usually very visible even if there are already quite a few comments.
Overall, I think it's also a bit funny to consider a thread with 80 comments as "too big to bother commenting in", when that would be considered a pretty small/routine thread on various other sites like reddit and HN.
I could be wrong, but I believe they are sorted by most votes on top-level comments only.
Thanks for the answers, everybody. 😎