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As an aside, I'm disappointed too that comment scores are no longer available. I stopped crawling HN comments altogether when that happened; they became roughly

As an aside, I'm disappointed too that comment scores are no longer available. I stopped crawling HN comments altogether when that happened; they became roughly as valuable as Reddit comments, since there was no longer an easy way to separate valuable comments from not-valuable ones.

krapp 12y ago
>since there was no longer an easy way to separate valuable comments from not-valuable ones You could read them, and if you don't like them, stop reading them. Granted, it's harder to automate, but if the tradeoff is having to engage with more of the narrative of a thread then I don't know that that's a bad trade. So many variables can go into a comment score that the actual number becomes less meaningful than the sort order of the threads themselves.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  > You could read them, and if you don't like them, stop reading them. The snark isn't necessary. It's probably safe to assume I had set up a thing which would inject into my news feed comments above a certain threshold for certain users in threads I might not come across otherwise -- since that's exactly what I was doing. I don't read HN threads very often anymore. Something about too many people trying to out-snark other people without breaking the rules of decorum here made it feel too skeezy. Damn, now I'm doing it too. That's the other thing -- my mood in general has improved a lot ever since I stopped being a very active HN user a year and a half or so ago.
  - krapp 12y ago
    Apologies for the snark, but to me, pulling popular comments from certain posters out of context into a feed sort of undermines the point of the forum altogether, which is the conversation as a whole. I won't push the point though, but when people start treating a site like this as a feed instead of a forum, then I think the quality of the site is diminished.
    - NhanH 12y ago
      It doesn't have to be out of context: not all comment threads are equal, and it makes a lot of sense to pull to your feed certain threads based on the aggregate upvote count of all comments in the thread (or just pull the whole thread if it has any highly upvoted comment). That's easily a good way to de-noise any popular thread (which could be a non-productive flame war)

krapp 12y ago

>since there was no longer an easy way to separate valuable comments from not-valuable ones You could read them, and if you don't like them, stop reading them. Granted, it's harder to automate, but if the tradeoff is having to engage with more of the narrative of a thread then I don't know that that's a bad trade. So many variables can go into a comment score that the actual number becomes less meaningful than the sort order of the threads themselves.

thaumaturgy 12y ago
> You could read them, and if you don't like them, stop reading them. The snark isn't necessary. It's probably safe to assume I had set up a thing which would inject into my news feed comments above a certain threshold for certain users in threads I might not come across otherwise -- since that's exactly what I was doing. I don't read HN threads very often anymore. Something about too many people trying to out-snark other people without breaking the rules of decorum here made it feel too skeezy. Damn, now I'm doing it too. That's the other thing -- my mood in general has improved a lot ever since I stopped being a very active HN user a year and a half or so ago.
- krapp 12y ago
  Apologies for the snark, but to me, pulling popular comments from certain posters out of context into a feed sort of undermines the point of the forum altogether, which is the conversation as a whole. I won't push the point though, but when people start treating a site like this as a feed instead of a forum, then I think the quality of the site is diminished.
  - NhanH 12y ago
    It doesn't have to be out of context: not all comment threads are equal, and it makes a lot of sense to pull to your feed certain threads based on the aggregate upvote count of all comments in the thread (or just pull the whole thread if it has any highly upvoted comment). That's easily a good way to de-noise any popular thread (which could be a non-productive flame war)