5 ms·

One thing I constantly realize is that commenting is broken on reddit, for one simple reason. Once a thread is popular enough, and reaches a high amount of comm

by jokoon 6y ago

One thing I constantly realize is that commenting is broken on reddit, for one simple reason. Once a thread is popular enough, and reaches a high amount of comments, any new comment is going to be drowned by upvoted ones. The algorithm should decrease the value of old comments even more. There's already a formula, something like position_score = score/(age^2) Unfortunately the more a comment is upvoted, the more it's visible, so it's snowballing upvotes faster than the 1/age^2 can decrease its position. Also the more a thread is popular, the sooner it should be locked.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
I think a big upgrade for both HN and Reddit would be so simply collapse all child comments by default and only show top-level comments. That way every person doesn't have to scroll past the first thread to find the second top-level discussion. I don't think threads should be locked, though. There is nothing on Reddit more annoying than not being able to reply to someone because of an arbitrary decision (like a mod locking the entire submission). There are better solutions. But it just seems silly to shut down discussion when people want to have it on a social site. Even sinking a thread to the bottom is better than locking it.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Interesting idea. If the reply chain is expanded by default, whichever top-level comment rises to the top tends to steer the direction of the discussion. This is especially troublesome on Slashdot where comments are shown in chronological order, regardless of score. > But it just seems silly to shut down discussion when people want to have it on a social site. Locking is meant to be used when a thread is filling with toxic bile and there's little chance of things improving. I don't think it's always wrong for mods to lock a thread.
- jokoon 6y ago
  you can still answer in PM
- apexalpha 6y ago
  One website that I think has nailed comment moderation is the website Tweakers.net. A Dutch tech website and forum. On Tweakers you (as a user) can apply for mod rights and it allows you to rate each comment from -1 to +3. +3 = must-read +2 = informative +1 = on-topic 0 = off topic -1 = spam / insult There's an alogrithm that gives your rating more weight if they (retroactively) allign with what the supermods (employees of the site) rate comments. On Tweakers you almost never read insults and "and my axe" repititive comments because they are hidden by default, and the +2 and +3 comments automatically get places at the top. This has so much over a simple +1 / -1 system. I wish more website would think about their comments systems and how they can achieve a good incentive and moderation structure for informative comments to be lifted up and unwanted ones down. Tweakers is Dutch but to get an idea here's a news thread with a lot of comments: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/166988/ https://tweakers.net/nieuws/166988/
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    Well that famous tech website had a similar, more granular way of voting (which made sense I guess 10 years ago), but I think I like this way better
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    I think the actual values of the upvotes should be hidden, but the different upvote types should just be names - informative vs funny, vs analytic, etc... I enjoyed the say Slashdot did it.
  - asplake 6y ago
    I think Slashdot works something like that (or at least did, haven’t been there in a while)
    - hnick 6y ago
      It did but Funny often floated to the top... same old jokes. Very Reddity before Reddit was a thing. I think you could filter though to hide all 'Funny' and only show 'Informative' or something like that. Never did make an account.
- amiga_500 6y ago
  Hacker news does the opposite. It's hard to collapse child comments thanks to the absurdly small collapse button.
- Bedon292 6y ago
  Not sure it should be all children. But maybe 2 deep or something. For instance your comment would be unseen if it was collapsed at the top level, but yours is what sparked my reply. It does get weird though, because then people would just be incentivised to reply at the top level. And end up a longer thread there. I guess if its not completely collapsed there is always going to be some attempt to reply in the right place because you will get more views there instead of a top level comment. Also curious about being able to make a web extension that collapses at a certain configurable level. Or even reordering. Not that it helps most users. But would be interesting.
- evgen 6y ago
  Such a bad idea. A set of comment threads is going to be a tree of some type and you need to decide if it will be deep or wide. This promotes wide with very little justification beyond 'I didnt get in early on the discussion but still want a high-ranked comment' while the idea of allowing people to necro old threads is so bad it does not even merit discussion (seriously, go try out some forum that allows this and it will take you no time at all to realize that this is a phenomenally bad idea.)
  - Hnrobert42 6y ago
    I think both ideas are good, and I don’t find your dismissive objection persuasive. The point of hiding all but top-level posts wasn’t about making comments. It was about reading them. Specifically that with fully expanded comments, users have to scroll past even downvoted, flagged responses to the top comment before seeing the second-highest voted top-level response.
- omniscient_oce 6y ago
  They have some form of that already as it is, but I'm not 100% sure how it works. Some comment replies have the first few replies and then it shows a 'Show 43 more comments' button to expand that depth level, but some comments go 3,4,5 levels deep. Maybe if it was more predictable and shallower it would be good, the problem is its annoying to keep clicking show replies to load more levels
someguyorother 6y ago
One thing I'd like to see would be a comment section that uses a multi-armed bandit algorithm based on upvotes, or by something like Thompson sampling. So each time you refresh, comments that have more upvotes tend to be shown earlier, but the fewer votes in total they have, the more it's up to chance where they appear. If it uses a deterministic MAB algorithm, it would put unvoted posts at the very top. The MAB algorithm is constructed to find the best choices (here, most liked posts), and it can't know what the true score of a comment is if nobody has voted on it yet. Thus the need for exploration would push those posts/comments very high.
saadalem 6y ago
What about medium comments then xD
blackearl 6y ago
There also seems to be an uptick in threads being locked, usually with some lame excuse like "you people can't behave" but is more likely that the mod doesn't agree.
guerrilla 6y ago
So, another instance of "rich get richer." I wonder if your fix or something like it would work in other systems like twitter (e.g. the more followers you have, the less I hear from you), in science (see Sabine Hossenfelder's critique of voluntary peer review), traditional media and even capitalism itself.
bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
Some subreddits (certainly not any of the popular ones) set their comment threads to sort by new to combat this.
colinmhayes 6y ago
Reddit has a feature called contest mode which orders comments randomly for the first few hours or so.
NoodleIncident 6y ago
This is way less of a problem than you'd think, as long as the default "best" sort is used. Also, I don't think age is taken in to account on reddit, are you thinking of this site instead? https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/ https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sortin... As someone who browses both reddit and hacker news (obviously), I'm regularly frustrated by the way this site hijacks your attention to ask you to judge some recent comment, rather than showing you the ones worth reading at the top. It's still never going to get enough votes to keep that position, and it makes more sense to ask people who've scrolled to the bottom to judge comments with few votes, once they've already read the current frontrunners. When you see big subs with old comments with a lot of votes at the top on reddit, it's probably because there's nothing else worth showing towards the bottom. I scroll further than I probably should, and the more the subreddit appears to have the early-replier problem, the less I care how those comments are ordered.
OGWhales 6y ago
https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...
rightbyte 6y ago
I would like an option of defaulting subreddits for all users to chronological order and bumping threads to front page as soon as someone posts in it. Reddit is really bad for actual discussions. It was designed for link sharing not a forum and incidently algorithmic feeds have since becoume standard due to advertising for some reason.
nialv7 6y ago
score = upvotes/view_count is probably a good metrics that takes popularity into account. But there is certainly some statistically trickery needed to compare a popular post with lower score and a less popular post with higher score.

by jokoon 6y ago

hombre_fatal 6y ago

I think a big upgrade for both HN and Reddit would be so simply collapse all child comments by default and only show top-level comments. That way every person doesn't have to scroll past the first thread to find the second top-level discussion. I don't think threads should be locked, though. There is nothing on Reddit more annoying than not being able to reply to someone because of an arbitrary decision (like a mod locking the entire submission). There are better solutions. But it just seems silly to shut down discussion when people want to have it on a social site. Even sinking a thread to the bottom is better than locking it.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Interesting idea. If the reply chain is expanded by default, whichever top-level comment rises to the top tends to steer the direction of the discussion. This is especially troublesome on Slashdot where comments are shown in chronological order, regardless of score. > But it just seems silly to shut down discussion when people want to have it on a social site. Locking is meant to be used when a thread is filling with toxic bile and there's little chance of things improving. I don't think it's always wrong for mods to lock a thread.
jokoon 6y ago
you can still answer in PM
apexalpha 6y ago
One website that I think has nailed comment moderation is the website Tweakers.net. A Dutch tech website and forum. On Tweakers you (as a user) can apply for mod rights and it allows you to rate each comment from -1 to +3. +3 = must-read +2 = informative +1 = on-topic 0 = off topic -1 = spam / insult There's an alogrithm that gives your rating more weight if they (retroactively) allign with what the supermods (employees of the site) rate comments. On Tweakers you almost never read insults and "and my axe" repititive comments because they are hidden by default, and the +2 and +3 comments automatically get places at the top. This has so much over a simple +1 / -1 system. I wish more website would think about their comments systems and how they can achieve a good incentive and moderation structure for informative comments to be lifted up and unwanted ones down. Tweakers is Dutch but to get an idea here's a news thread with a lot of comments: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/166988/ https://tweakers.net/nieuws/166988/
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Well that famous tech website had a similar, more granular way of voting (which made sense I guess 10 years ago), but I think I like this way better
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I think the actual values of the upvotes should be hidden, but the different upvote types should just be names - informative vs funny, vs analytic, etc... I enjoyed the say Slashdot did it.
- asplake 6y ago
  I think Slashdot works something like that (or at least did, haven’t been there in a while)
  - hnick 6y ago
    It did but Funny often floated to the top... same old jokes. Very Reddity before Reddit was a thing. I think you could filter though to hide all 'Funny' and only show 'Informative' or something like that. Never did make an account.
amiga_500 6y ago
Hacker news does the opposite. It's hard to collapse child comments thanks to the absurdly small collapse button.
Bedon292 6y ago
Not sure it should be all children. But maybe 2 deep or something. For instance your comment would be unseen if it was collapsed at the top level, but yours is what sparked my reply. It does get weird though, because then people would just be incentivised to reply at the top level. And end up a longer thread there. I guess if its not completely collapsed there is always going to be some attempt to reply in the right place because you will get more views there instead of a top level comment. Also curious about being able to make a web extension that collapses at a certain configurable level. Or even reordering. Not that it helps most users. But would be interesting.
evgen 6y ago
Such a bad idea. A set of comment threads is going to be a tree of some type and you need to decide if it will be deep or wide. This promotes wide with very little justification beyond 'I didnt get in early on the discussion but still want a high-ranked comment' while the idea of allowing people to necro old threads is so bad it does not even merit discussion (seriously, go try out some forum that allows this and it will take you no time at all to realize that this is a phenomenally bad idea.)
- Hnrobert42 6y ago
  I think both ideas are good, and I don’t find your dismissive objection persuasive. The point of hiding all but top-level posts wasn’t about making comments. It was about reading them. Specifically that with fully expanded comments, users have to scroll past even downvoted, flagged responses to the top comment before seeing the second-highest voted top-level response.
omniscient_oce 6y ago
They have some form of that already as it is, but I'm not 100% sure how it works. Some comment replies have the first few replies and then it shows a 'Show 43 more comments' button to expand that depth level, but some comments go 3,4,5 levels deep. Maybe if it was more predictable and shallower it would be good, the problem is its annoying to keep clicking show replies to load more levels

someguyorother 6y ago

One thing I'd like to see would be a comment section that uses a multi-armed bandit algorithm based on upvotes, or by something like Thompson sampling. So each time you refresh, comments that have more upvotes tend to be shown earlier, but the fewer votes in total they have, the more it's up to chance where they appear. If it uses a deterministic MAB algorithm, it would put unvoted posts at the very top. The MAB algorithm is constructed to find the best choices (here, most liked posts), and it can't know what the true score of a comment is if nobody has voted on it yet. Thus the need for exploration would push those posts/comments very high.

saadalem 6y ago

What about medium comments then xD

blackearl 6y ago

There also seems to be an uptick in threads being locked, usually with some lame excuse like "you people can't behave" but is more likely that the mod doesn't agree.

guerrilla 6y ago

So, another instance of "rich get richer." I wonder if your fix or something like it would work in other systems like twitter (e.g. the more followers you have, the less I hear from you), in science (see Sabine Hossenfelder's critique of voluntary peer review), traditional media and even capitalism itself.

bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago

Some subreddits (certainly not any of the popular ones) set their comment threads to sort by new to combat this.

colinmhayes 6y ago

Reddit has a feature called contest mode which orders comments randomly for the first few hours or so.

NoodleIncident 6y ago

This is way less of a problem than you'd think, as long as the default "best" sort is used. Also, I don't think age is taken in to account on reddit, are you thinking of this site instead? https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/ https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sortin... As someone who browses both reddit and hacker news (obviously), I'm regularly frustrated by the way this site hijacks your attention to ask you to judge some recent comment, rather than showing you the ones worth reading at the top. It's still never going to get enough votes to keep that position, and it makes more sense to ask people who've scrolled to the bottom to judge comments with few votes, once they've already read the current frontrunners. When you see big subs with old comments with a lot of votes at the top on reddit, it's probably because there's nothing else worth showing towards the bottom. I scroll further than I probably should, and the more the subreddit appears to have the early-replier problem, the less I care how those comments are ordered.

OGWhales 6y ago

https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...

rightbyte 6y ago

I would like an option of defaulting subreddits for all users to chronological order and bumping threads to front page as soon as someone posts in it. Reddit is really bad for actual discussions. It was designed for link sharing not a forum and incidently algorithmic feeds have since becoume standard due to advertising for some reason.

nialv7 6y ago

score = upvotes/view_count is probably a good metrics that takes popularity into account. But there is certainly some statistically trickery needed to compare a popular post with lower score and a less popular post with higher score.