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The Slashdot moderation system is still fantastic. One thing I noticed recently: As a popular story gets more and more comments, it gets more useful on Slashdo
by morsch 14y ago
The Slashdot moderation system is still fantastic. One thing I noticed recently:
As a popular story gets more and more comments, it gets more useful on Slashdot and less useful on Hacker News.
This is due to the overall UI and the moderation system. Slashdot had to implement functionality to deal with low S/N. Browsing on +5 lets you quickly get shallow overview of the interesting discussion in a short time even for stories with hundreds or thousands of comments. At the same time, you can easily burrow down on threads that seem interesting to you, e.g. see a +5's post (grand-) parent, its siblings and rebuttals. The moderation also makes it more feasible to find new ideas for a story you read in the past, and of course you can easily sort by date.
On Hacker News, when I visit a popular story, I usually read the first couple of screen pages, depending on my interest, that is the most highly ranked posts and their replies, which are sorted inline with them. I'm sure I miss a lot of content further down the page, not to mention on the other pages, which I never read.
And when I revisit a story that seemed interesting to me -- something I often did on Slashdot --, I am completely lost on HN. Finding posts that are both high-quality and new is way too much work. Sometimes I still do it, but I spend a lot of time seeing posts I had already read. Really, the only way I end up keeping up with previous discussion is when I keep track of replies to my own posts (which works better on HN than it does on Slashdot).
As HN's S/N is going down, finding good posts will continue to be an increasing problem. I know there are user scripts that both enable collapsing threads and hiding/marking read posts on Hacker News. I guess I should look into those. But for a truly effective solution, you'd need to know how the posts score. (I think Slashdot's system of capping comment score at 5 is also much superior to HN's solution of hiding the score.)
- terhechte 14y agoI agree, the Slashdot comment system really excels at high amounts of comments.
- starpilot 14y agoI've noticed that top comments on HN are frequently meta (about the article's writing or author, not the article content) or flat-out disagree with it more often than on Slashdot. Readers here also tend to actually RTFA much more often before commenting.
- colmvp 14y agoI remember one recent popular link (can't remember which one) whose top comment was how the commenter couldn't view it in Opera.
- Evbn 14y agoSo HN commenters do RTFA but don't comment on TFA?
- chris_wot 14y agoThat's not necessarily a bad thing. If you read the article and have nothing to add, then best say nothing. Better than saying something about an article you haven't read, that's for sure.
- undantag 14y agoI recall pg initiating a discussion highlighting the declining quality (S/N) of comments at HN, and struggling to find a scalable approach of tackling it. Afaik slashdots approach has been published and works for them, so maybe that would be a good place to start looking? See http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml and http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml
- YouWontSeeThis 14y agoI'm surprised your account hasn't been shadow banned. HN usually doesn't allow meta-HN conversations. I suppose it's on topic here, but watch what you say.
- chops 14y agoYou don't get hellbanned for meta comments. You get hellbanned for being grossly offensive, overly aggressive, or other similar kinds of postings.
- YouWontSeeThis 14y agoI got hellbanned for that comment, so obviously you're wrong.
- guelo 14y agoBefore HN hid the comment scores it was possible to skim popular threads by looking for the well ranked comments, basically doing the +5 thing mentally. Now, popular stories becoming daunting with no clue if a particular long subthread has anything insightful.