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I may be off base here, but perhaps HN isn't being designed to make skimming easy. Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content, and then vot

I may be off base here, but perhaps HN isn't being designed to make skimming easy. Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content, and then voting on that content, is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding. PG wrote an essay which discussed the 'fluff principle' at work in other voting-based aggregator communities, in which the most superficially sensational content usually rose to the top, beating out longer-form but more intellectually substantial content: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html I think this move by PG is aimed at reducing the herd mentality of voting, and reducing the ability of readers to engage in voting without having engaged the content first. However, I think your scheme of highlighting comments by quintile is probably a good one. It gets us away from thinking about raw scores, but also serves to reward and reinforce good commenting contributions/behavior by setting an example for others to follow. In order to stave off the herd mentality of 'piling on' upvotes or downvotes, perhaps votes made subsequent to highlighting (or greying out in the case of negative comments) should have half the weight.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content... is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding. If you think that the secret to encouraging engagement is to flatten out the structure of the information, and ask everyone to read everything in order to discover the influential, popular, or insightful bits... ... you desperately need to read The Paradox of Choice: http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/0060005688 http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000... There is nothing engaging about thirty screenfuls of undifferentiated choices. When presented with that, I'll just leave. If I wanted a firehose of undifferentiated, recent, quality content, presented in a way which made it very difficult to nucleate a conversation or form a community, I'd be using Google Reader. [EDIT: Incidentally, if not illustratively, I should point out that I haven't actually read the entirety of The Paradox of Choice myself. I listened to the author lecture about it for an hour in a podcast, and I started to read it, and I appreciated the concept, but I felt that the book kept repeating the same point too many times and I had other uses for my time... ;]

mechanical_fish 17y ago

Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content... is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding. If you think that the secret to encouraging engagement is to flatten out the structure of the information, and ask everyone to read everything in order to discover the influential, popular, or insightful bits... ... you desperately need to read The Paradox of Choice: http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/0060005688 http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000... There is nothing engaging about thirty screenfuls of undifferentiated choices. When presented with that, I'll just leave. If I wanted a firehose of undifferentiated, recent, quality content, presented in a way which made it very difficult to nucleate a conversation or form a community, I'd be using Google Reader. [EDIT: Incidentally, if not illustratively, I should point out that I haven't actually read the entirety of The Paradox of Choice myself. I listened to the author lecture about it for an hour in a podcast, and I started to read it, and I appreciated the concept, but I felt that the book kept repeating the same point too many times and I had other uses for my time... ;]