

Ask pg: Have the comments improved? - crasshopper

Several weeks ago, PG lamented that comments had gotten worse. PG asked readers for suggestions of what he should do to make comments better.<p>Now at least some changes have been made. Would you say the comments have improved?
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pg
I got rid of points to decrease contentious back and forths. I feel like that
may have happened. At least, I feel like I've gotten dragged into fewer such
threads.

Has anyone else noticed a trend either way?

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gleb
I no longer read comments. Points acted as an editor's cue on high quality
content to read. Maybe more good comments are produced now, but it's no longer
possible to find them without reading everything.

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dglassan
This exactly. I've found that I read less comments and skim over them because
it's hard to differentiate the good view points from the rest. I know the most
voted comments should float to the top but not having points just makes the
discussions less interesting to me.

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mvalle
Would ordering the comments based on points solve this? Ie. highest scoring
comment at top.

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weaksauce
They are in part. The comments are ranked by votes and time and probably some
other mechanisms pg implemented. I think the reddit hot method might be
better.

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Zakuzaa
Can't we have something like this? -- Those who want to see points, could
enable it, but then they would not be allowed to upvote/downvote. OR they
could still vote, but their votes won't be counted (or given less weight-
age?).

Does it serve the purpose for both the sides? What are the potential caveats
in this?

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sorbus
Potential problems: 1) people would set up two accounts, one to look at points
and one to vote (and then log into both of them on separate browsers). It
would be possible to modify the site to detect this, but that would be extra
work for pg. 2) It would take less than a week for a browser extension that
did this automatically (putting points into a page) to be released - there's
already one attempt to build a database of points with an extensions (it
records the score of points of anyone who has it installed and makes that
information available to others).

It's a good idea on its face, but it wouldn't work.

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olegious
I think that as HN becomes more popular it is only natural for the quality of
the comments to decline.

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ansy
Pretty much. According to Hacker News News [1] unique visitors tripled between
April 2009 and February 2011.

[1] <http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html>

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Mz
While on the topic, I've been wondering today if there is any concept in place
concerning how to measure the desired improvement. If not, how does one
determine "are we there yet?"

