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> "The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive." > "Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago." Upvotes/downvotes are not productive, ye

> "The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive." > "Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago." Upvotes/downvotes are not productive, yet you want to replace it with a system that places extra emphasis on that type of metadata? > "People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to downvote other "siblings" in the tree." I'd suggest a better fix is to allow for collapsing comment threads. It's easy to tell when a thread has passed the point of no return when it comes to substance. You might miss the odd one or two interesting comments, but it'd definitely add to the overall HN experience.

gue5t 11y ago
Metadata is useful! The problem is that 1D "good/bad" being used to order comments is not a reasonable approach. In a more nuanced system there's less incentive (other than wrecking) to inaccurately mark comments as being "informative" or "technical" or "political", because instead of changing global comment visibility you're only changing it for the subset of users who are using that attribute to guide their reading. There are honest differences of opinion as to whether a comment fits in certain categories, but these are more specific and less contentious than "good/bad" and so I'd expect a much better SNR on them. Collapsing threads is nice but the importance of defaults to the user experience is hard to overstate. At each step of an interaction chain more users will fall off and not end up at the goal. Lots of people will never use comment collapsing if they have to manually do it.