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I would add that while it's plausible, it's by no means obvious that Reddit is leaving business value on the table. Imagine that they seek to minimize the bounc
by cjlars 10y ago
I would add that while it's plausible, it's by no means obvious that Reddit is leaving business value on the table. Imagine that they seek to minimize the bounce-rate on any thread such that they maximize overall time on site for each user. In this case, the important part could be that the top comment is 'not wrong' rather than 'right'. If the first thing users see is too factually incorrect, controversial, or emotionally upsetting, people could be driven people away from the site. Essentially this is the same mechanism that helps cause the Facebook news bubble effect -- people leave if you tell them what they don't want to hear, so you write an algorithm that underweights anything that might do so.
To put it into economic terms, if users have high loss aversion (from being upset, etc.) relative to their thirst for knowledge gained from great comments, you would expect exploitation to be overweighted vs exploration. The business value maximizing solution would then be that once an appropriate top comment is found, the thread should tend to stay in that equilibrium.
- choicenotchance 10y agoThat was a great take on it. I absolutely loved the last paragraph, so concise. Can you recommend some books you read?
- Houshalter 10y agoI really doubt there is any conscious decision by reddit to do this. For years there was a major bug in their ranking algorithm that hid posts with negative scores. People invented reasons why this was intentional and why reddit might want to do that. But eventually they fixed the bug and admitted it wasn't intentional. The current comment sorting algorithm was just copied off the internet from some popular HN post. I don't think there was that much thought put into it. Showing a few new comments closer to the top is not going to hurt anyone. I think if anything the massive improvement in comment quality would make users more loyal to the site. At the moment you can only see the good comments posted by the first 20 people or so, imagine if it was the best comments out of 1,000? There are vastly more voters than commenters. If only one out of 5 people sees a new comment and votes on it, that would be more than enough to improve the comment quality 3 fold.
- jxramos 10y agoIndeed you see the bigger picture my friend.