3 ms·

To be more specific, it is a heuristic for detecting flamewars and/or controversial topics and it is quite good at that.

• swyx 5mo ago
  why exactly do we want to damp flamewars by comment count? as long as an individual comment fits the rules why do we punish comments in aggregate
  • dang 5mo ago
    Because it's a global optimization problem and HN gets less optimal* when there are flamewars on the frontpage. Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead? * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
    • swyx 5mo ago
      right but feel like comment count is a poor proxy for flamewar in an age where cheap intelligence to semantically classify discussions is available, so that, as affected me in the past, an author of a post simply enthusiastically engaging with every reply is not punished. maybe to put it in a way where your values are aligned, i'm a curious person, and i learn a lot from the discussions that happen right on HN rather that only going to the source.. indiscriminate comment count damping takes away/lowers visibility of the most interesting comments that would provoke my curiosity. one could instead do any sort of basic classifier system ranging from bag of words to running a ModernBERT to rate flamewarness and differentially apply the downrank based on "flamewar score" rather than "really poor proxy to flamewar score"