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If the Hacker News API actually returned comment scores it would be relatively easy to build an app that surfaces good comments, ahem.
by minimaxir 4y ago
If the Hacker News API actually returned comment scores it would be relatively easy to build an app that surfaces good comments, ahem.
- metadat 4y agoThere is also: https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
- capableweb 4y agoIf only "good" correlated with the number of upvotes :)
- Firmwarrior 4y agoYeah.. the upvote counts are probably more useful here than Reddit, but you still end up with a lot of wacky groupthink I think Slashdot had the best voting system ever when it was still popular, but maybe that's just rose-tinted goggles
- karpierz 4y agoHow did Slashdot's voting system work?
- maxbond 4y agoNever used it but afaik you could vote along different axis. So you could vote "+1 insightful" for instance, so if a comment had a lot of votes, you had a more idea why it was upvoted.
- notacoward 4y agoThere was also meta-moderation, which allowed the community to deal with bad upvote/downvote behavior - brigading, stalking, etc. It wasn't perfect, but it did avoid the near-universal ills of moderator bias (including unconscious/cognitive bias), burnout from over-exposure, and flat out anti-empirical theories about how to do moderation properly. I wish more experiments like that had been tried (kuro5hin also made some efforts and Advogato took it even further) instead of basically reverting to a Usenet-era model.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoI think the really valuable part was that you only got a few upvotes to hand out, and only once in a while, so you'd treat them with a lot more reverence