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Ask PG: Activity in comments adds to gravity
PG, Have you considered using the activity in the comments to help weigh submissions? I think the recent submission "YC is a cult" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260017) is a great example of something that should probably be ranked higher for longer because of all the discussion.
- pg 18y agoI've considered it, and in fact you can see what you're describing at: http://news.ycombinator.com/active http://news.ycombinator.com/active The problem is, number of comments doesn't seem to be highly correlated with how interesting a story is. Sometimes a story has a lot of comments because it raises a lot of interesting issues, but sometimes it happens because people get onto an interesting topic only tangentially related to the story. Without AI it's hard to distinguish between the two cases.
- jmatt 18y agoI think providing an active page helps. It seems like a good compromise. Thanks for the link.
- Anon84 18y agoCan you give more details on this? Does the score/number of comments just add to the total thread karma? Or is the formula a bit more complex?
- phr 18y agoI remember reading a great post somewhere about using the visual shape of usenet discussion threads (as rendered by common news readers) to spot patterns like trolling, political tangents, etc. This was only proposed as an NI (Natural Intelligence) method, not AI, but I wonder...