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There's an aspect of it that's a ratio of comments to upvotes, which seems to work pretty well from what I've observed.
by waterlesscloud 12y ago
There's an aspect of it that's a ratio of comments to upvotes, which seems to work pretty well from what I've observed.
- JoshTriplett 12y agoNow that makes more sense. A story that generates a large number of comments and a large number of upvotes very quickly seems likely to be a good story. A story that generates many quick comments without upvotes seems likely to have produced comments negative about the article; if you posting a comment but you don't want to upvote the article, that does seem like a good sign of controversy and possible flames.
- slg 12y agoBut it doesn't just penalize flamewars, it penalizes all conversations. For example, I have now posted two comments in this discussion and only upvoted the article once. Does that mean this is a worse article than one that I only upvoted and never commented on or a better article than one I upvoted and commented on three times?
- JoshTriplett 12y agoKeep in mind that HN also has a "deep thread" mechanism, which hides the reply button for a while on sufficiently deep comment threads to discourage rapid-fire posting without thought. (Slashdot used to have the same thing; if you posted comments too rapidly, you'd get a "whoa, slow down there".) I'd also hope that more weight goes to "more commenters than upvotes" rather than "more comments than upvotes", though as vague heuristics neither seems too far off.
- krapp 12y agoI think it's mistaken to assume that not upvoting and downvoting are each implicitly negative, though. There is a neutral dimension to subthreads as well - conversations which are neither praiseworthy nor trolling.