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In a flame war the ratio of the number of people who commented to the actual number of comments would be greater as usually the people who feel strongly about t
by teknas 7y ago
In a flame war the ratio of the number of people who commented to the actual number of comments would be greater as usually the people who feel strongly about the topic would comment more often. Wouldn't this be a better metric than simply number of likes to comments?
- ColinWright 7y agoSpeaking as one who has implemented such things (in completely different contexts) ... Possibly yes, but it's harder to compute, and the improvement might not be enough to make it worthwhile. This metric is trivial to compute, doesn't require crawling over the entire comment tree, and is "Good Enough(tm)". The cases where it does wrong is where lots of people chip in with drive-by comments, but don't bother to upvote the submission. If it's interesting enough to comment, why is it not interesting enough to upvote? And why are non-commenters not upvoting? Personally I find the dynamics here on HN baffling, but again, as a simple member of "the community", I suspect this metric is best "Bang for Buck". (... edit ...) As a case in point, the item about bathrooms in houses[0] has over 200 comments, but fewer than 100 upvotes. There are 144 unique commenters, and roughly half have upvoted. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22157414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22157414