I actually find issues with the "best" comment sorting, in some cases. I think it generally is the "best" sort, but in very popular posts it tends to break down.I often find comments with 5x or more upvotes buried down below the top few comments.
I think as comments get higher to the top, people start voting them down more, which might not be the cases for comments which are rising (theory: people reading further down in the comment section are possibly more thoughtful and more likely to upvote, while at the top the ADHD crowd might be more likely to knee jerk downvote?).
In any case, i've recently changed my default sort to "top" and feel it's an improvement.
There is also a strong bias toward upvoting more visible content. Higher-voted comments appear first on the page, getting more exposure. For that reason I’ve made it a habit to read comments in bottom-to-top order, in order to artificially make my votes more fair.
One thing I notice sometimes is that insightful, well-written comments will sink to the bottom of a thread (presumably from posters without a high karma), leaving less interesting comments percolating at the top of the discussion (presumably from posters with high karma). That's a shame and I don't really know how it could be resolved. But it's also a problem on many discussion sites (Reddit, Slashdot etc)
In long threads, I suspect many posters will never scroll towards the bottom of the discussion. Thus, the comments at the top of the discussion continue to accumulate upvotes while good quality comments further down never get a chance to rise up. But I guess that is more due to user behaviour rather than some algorithmic logic.
I think this is probably exacerbated by the comments with most votes being at the top of the page (but that's also the value of the system). For stories with lots of comments, I'm sure many people only read the top few and are hence more likely to further vote up an already highly voted comment.
I guess the solution is to find someway of giving emphasis to new comments that have not yet had chance to be voted up. I like the simplicity of the current voting system though.
It would make sense if your comments were weighted higher having a higher karma, but I think all of our comments start at the top to make sure that at least someone sees them and that they can get upvotes if they are insightful/interesting.
Right, and that's part of the problem -- the top comment usually has a lot of replies, and so the 2nd-top comment isn't seen as much. So even people who might agree with the 2nd-top comment a lot more than the top comment might not even see it, and not upvote it.
(And especially if you see the top comment, and disagree with it vehemently, you might dig through the replies to that comment and start posting rebuttals. You might get tired of the topic before you get down to the 2nd-top comment, and leave the submission or the site entirely.)
Being the top comment is self-reinforcing, even if other comments actually do reflect the majority opinion better. I don't think we can say that the top comment is the majority/prevailing opinion. That's just the opinion that, due to lucky/random circumstances, got the most initial views and upvotes by people who agree, which then feedback-looped itself into staying the top comment.
I didn't get the impression that the upvoting of lesser comments, to the level of 'the best comments' is a primary concern? The mere existence of the comments is the major problem, even when they aren't upvoted?
In any case, I do think the set of 'the best comments' is usually a subset of 'the comments with the highest points' and especially in submissions with many comments/threads, the amounts can be helpful.
> HN discussions very often have input from experts.
Who are predictably downvoted!
I think the upvoting/downvoting mechanism by itself makes discussions unnecessarily competitive and hostile. Here's a crazy alternative: make the order of comments random and rotating. Of course you could still have flagging and moderation to remove bad comments, but otherwise get rid of the voting. You could still have nested conversations (though the UI for this is really bad on HN when the conversations become long), but the comments at each level would also be randomly ordered.
The theory is that the "best" comments rise to the top and the "worst" to the bottom. In reality, that rarely seems to be the case. It's typically a combination of popularity, controversy, accidental timing (some variation on "first!"), and the existence of replies to the comment.
That theory makes sense, though it's unfortunate, IMHO. Personally, I'd prefer for comments to rank higher based on quality (irrespective of which way they lean) than hivemind inclinations. Seek well-roundedness and all that.
That's a good observation. I've noticed it happening too, since I have a similar upvoting pattern: I tend to read a whole subtree, and then go back up, rapidly upvoting comments in it I considered insightful. I've noticed that the votes sometimes don't register, which is why I periodically reload the comment thread and reupvote comments.
> when people make comments that aren’t just reasonable sounding but are actually correct, those comments tend to get upvoted
For a while, I found that on pages with lots of comments the most interesting ones were to be found at the top––and, buried between actual dross, at the bottom.
That might have changed, I don't see it that much anymore. But that could be a side effect of something even less desirable. I think some people may have started flagging whole articles when the discussion has "too many" comments they dislike. I can't prove this, of course.
It'd be interesting to separate upvotes from downvotes somehow. I've observed that many of my most-upvoted comments receive a lot of downvotes as well - usually for questioning HN conventional wisdom. And I find most of the comments that I really like, that I think are really outstanding, are at odds with the groupthink as well.
Voting mechanisms sometimes help drown the worst comments. Often voting doesn’t help the best comments float to the top, because the best comments are often replies to other low-vote comments.
Brainstorming, perhaps highly upvoted comments might be darkened or otherwise highlighted, analogous to how the downvoted are lightened? Upvotes moving a comment upward, within its parent's node, is a quality signal that is weakened when there are few siblings. So outside of root and big nodes, it's hard to scan/skim for high-quality outliers. Which incentivizes making bulk judgments about whether chunks of the hierarchy, or even entire article discussions, are of a quality to be worth reading. And reduces the incentive for creating quality outliers in parts of the hierarchy where they will remain low visibility.
What you find by scanning for high-point comments is not necessarily insightful stuff but rather, most upvoted stuff. Then you upvote it, making it feature even more prominently on the page. The comments that you didn't read, no matter how insightful, get no points from you so they fall further down the thread. I've seen this happen, joke comments positioned very high while truly good comments are very low because nobody had the patience to reach the bottom of the page, read them and vote.
"Why does everyone want to voice their opinion so loudly on a product that doesn't even meet their needs?"
It's a reflection of HN karma and sorting system: if anyone else posted the remark (and indeed, there are multiple people doing so), it would have seen the normal trajectory down the page. The current algorithm seems to favor remarks from certain people even if they aren't the highest voted remarks.
I think as comments get higher to the top, people start voting them down more, which might not be the cases for comments which are rising (theory: people reading further down in the comment section are possibly more thoughtful and more likely to upvote, while at the top the ADHD crowd might be more likely to knee jerk downvote?).
In any case, i've recently changed my default sort to "top" and feel it's an improvement.
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