

Ask PG: Activity in comments adds to gravity - jmatt

PG, Have you considered using the activity in the comments to help weigh submissions? I think the recent submission "YC is a cult" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260017) is a great example of something that should probably be ranked higher for longer because of all the discussion.
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pg
I've considered it, and in fact you can see what you're describing at:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/active>

The problem is, number of comments doesn't seem to be highly correlated with
how interesting a story is. Sometimes a story has a lot of comments because it
raises a lot of interesting issues, but sometimes it happens because people
get onto an interesting topic only tangentially related to the story. Without
AI it's hard to distinguish between the two cases.

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Anon84
Can you give more details on this? Does the score/number of comments just add
to the total thread karma? Or is the formula a bit more complex?

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pg
Here's the source:

    
    
      (= active-threshold* 1500)
      
      (def active-rank (s)
        (apply + (map [max 0 (- active-threshold* (item-age _))]
                      (cdr (family s)))))
    

A story's score is the sum of the difference between the age of each comment
and 25 hours.

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Anon84
Great. Thanks!

