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Sometimes the comments on HN are more interesting than the article. This isn't one of those times. This article is full of surprises, whereas the comments are
by pg 17y ago
Sometimes the comments on HN are more interesting than the article. This isn't one of those times. This article is full of surprises, whereas the comments are fairly predictable.
I wonder what the pattern is. Which articles tend to yield boring comment threads? Ones that involve politics? Ones that invoke identity?
What I'd really like to find are simple, automatic ways of detecting boring comment threads. I know one that works: more comments than points. Anyone have any suggestions for others?
- noodle 17y agoseems like most submissions that have more comments than points tend to be boring/predictable. not always, but its a good indicator, as controversial topics tend to have most comments fall into certain predictable buckets.
- pg 17y agoSorry, I was editing my comment to mention this while you were suggesting it. That does in fact work very well.
- noodle 17y agono worries. just off the top of my head, i'd say that there's probably some sort of relationship between the points on the submission and the average points per comment in the comments.
- rooshdi 17y agoPlus, shocking or offensive comments are generally downgraded, even though they're not "boring" due to their controversial nature. It's also difficult to define what "boring" actually is since it has such a subjective meaning.
- rms 17y agoBlockquotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859888 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859888
- Perceval 17y agoSome other HN user actually coded a Greasemonkey script to do just that: http://www.alexc.me/hnscore-another-look-at-post-quality-on-hacker-news/211/ http://www.alexc.me/hnscore-another-look-at-post-quality-on-... If you wanted to do it right, you'd need to collect a seed sample of articles you thought generated excessively boring/predictable comments. Then you could analyze them, generate grounded theory, and run the rules on the population of HN stories to look for false positives. Any other recent examples of boring comment sections?
- wheels 17y agoI suspect threads with excessively high churn (combination of up and down-votes) across the comments in the thread indicate dogmas colliding. The false-positive to watch out for would be people saying interesting things that go against the status quo. Something like: comment is interesting if (score * 2 + 5 > number_of_votes) thread is interesting if (number_of_interesting_children * 2 > number_of_children)