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Back when I was a regular on LessWrong and it had an active community, it didn't have that problem at all, despite using a variant of the Reddit codebase. Their

Back when I was a regular on LessWrong and it had an active community, it didn't have that problem at all, despite using a variant of the Reddit codebase. Their solution was pretty simple, just show the five most recent comments in the right hand column. People would interact with them, check out their parent comments, and threads would grow organically regardless of age. In fact people would often come back to very old threads and revive them. It might be tricky to scale that to larger communities though.

singham 10y ago
Can you comment on how comments could benefit from NLP related advances? E.g. detecting entities and using those as entry points into discussion, detecting similar topics discussed in different threads, detecting comments which are low effort and don't add much value. I hate the fact that first/top comment sets the tone for discussion overall and lot of people end up expending energy on that topic alone. People end up discussing something tangential just because the first commenter had "interesting" observation. Also I hate the pun threads which plagues reddit.
cs702 10y ago
I like the simplicity of this solution, but it might be a good idea to combine it with other relatively simple measures that dampen the "first comment effect," such as randomizing which comments show up at the top, as others have suggested in other threads here.
nagvx 10y ago
Yes, this non-linear idea seems very interesting. I have read several discussions on various boards with much hand-wringing about the best way of sorting comments - by time, by votes, by user rep, by some sort of weighted average of the above? Suddenly things get rather complicated as people try to decide how the weights should be balanced. But this idea of showing multiple different feeds side-by-side is very refreshing. Two (or even three?) feeds with different weightings and (and relative sizes!) could provide a better balance than what we are used to. (As an aside, it would be entertaining to take it to an extreme - seeing the top voted comments also shows you the bottom voted, most controversial also shows least, etc. A sort of anti-echo-chamber measure.)
- Houshalter 10y ago
  I think Lesswrong's solution only works because they have a small community, and they have a lot of comment junkies that want to read every new comment. Reddit and HN also have new comment feeds (https://www.reddit.com/r/all/comments/ https://www.reddit.com/r/all/comments/ https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments), but I don't think anyone but bots read them. Granted they could be made more prominent like on Lesswrong.
  - cousin_it 10y ago
    Many good subreddits are similar to LW in size and might benefit from a similar UI change.
  - mos_basik 10y ago
    >reddit.com/r/<subreddit>/comments/ Thanks for posting that; I'd never seen it before. As my sister comment said, for smaller subs it could be quite useful for finding active discussions - like on /r/truefilm or something. People always say "sort Reddit threads by comment age if you want the 4chan experience" and that has some merit - but that only applies once you have chosen a thread to open. A subreddit-wide comment feed gives an idea of which threads are active without relying on the blackbox thread ranking algorithm Reddit provides.

singham 10y ago

Can you comment on how comments could benefit from NLP related advances? E.g. detecting entities and using those as entry points into discussion, detecting similar topics discussed in different threads, detecting comments which are low effort and don't add much value. I hate the fact that first/top comment sets the tone for discussion overall and lot of people end up expending energy on that topic alone. People end up discussing something tangential just because the first commenter had "interesting" observation. Also I hate the pun threads which plagues reddit.

cs702 10y ago

I like the simplicity of this solution, but it might be a good idea to combine it with other relatively simple measures that dampen the "first comment effect," such as randomizing which comments show up at the top, as others have suggested in other threads here.

nagvx 10y ago

Yes, this non-linear idea seems very interesting. I have read several discussions on various boards with much hand-wringing about the best way of sorting comments - by time, by votes, by user rep, by some sort of weighted average of the above? Suddenly things get rather complicated as people try to decide how the weights should be balanced. But this idea of showing multiple different feeds side-by-side is very refreshing. Two (or even three?) feeds with different weightings and (and relative sizes!) could provide a better balance than what we are used to. (As an aside, it would be entertaining to take it to an extreme - seeing the top voted comments also shows you the bottom voted, most controversial also shows least, etc. A sort of anti-echo-chamber measure.)

Houshalter 10y ago
I think Lesswrong's solution only works because they have a small community, and they have a lot of comment junkies that want to read every new comment. Reddit and HN also have new comment feeds (https://www.reddit.com/r/all/comments/ https://www.reddit.com/r/all/comments/ https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments), but I don't think anyone but bots read them. Granted they could be made more prominent like on Lesswrong.
- cousin_it 10y ago
  Many good subreddits are similar to LW in size and might benefit from a similar UI change.
- mos_basik 10y ago
  >reddit.com/r/<subreddit>/comments/ Thanks for posting that; I'd never seen it before. As my sister comment said, for smaller subs it could be quite useful for finding active discussions - like on /r/truefilm or something. People always say "sort Reddit threads by comment age if you want the 4chan experience" and that has some merit - but that only applies once you have chosen a thread to open. A subreddit-wide comment feed gives an idea of which threads are active without relying on the blackbox thread ranking algorithm Reddit provides.