

HNScore - another look at post quality on Hacker News - alex_c
http://www.alexc.me/hnscore-another-look-at-post-quality-on-hacker-news/211/

======
Perceval
Not too long ago I stumbled across someone doing visualizations of comment
threads, which seemed like it might help in sorting out what was going on:
<http://demaws.net/projects/tldr>

Also, I wrote a very long essay on the problems of web forums
(<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000>) which was covered
previously here on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515682>

In that essay, I tried to rethink what exactly moderation and
comments/conversations _meant_. I like your approach of contrasting threads
that are over- or under-moderated with threads that maintain an 'appropriate'
moderation/reply ratio. But as noodle wrote above
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794856>), it may not be able to
distinguish between certain types of commenting.

My current instinct is that moderation tells us more about the moderator than
it does about the comment being moderated. I'm just not sure how to to
operationalize that insight.

------
lincolnq
Awesome! You've written down a pattern I noticed on both Reddit and HN -- what
I called the troll filter: if more comments than points, the troll filter
fails (the link is a troll and unlikely to be worth reading).

Exceptions are the types of threads where people are encouraged to contribute,
such as "who's hiring" or "I'm <something interesting>, ask me anything"

I'll use this.

------
paulbaumgart
It works on /classic and /news, too, if you add an asterisk to the end of the
@include url. I.e.:

    
    
      // @include        http://news.ycombinator.*/*
    

Would you mind throwing it on GitHub or somewhere similar? I really like the
idea, and that way lots of people can easily contribute tweaks/improvements.

~~~
alex_c
Of course.

<http://github.com/alexcurelea/HNScore/tree/master>

(btw - for me it works on inner pages even without the second wildcard. Odd.)

~~~
rwolf
I have the same problem as the parent comment.
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/news> doesn't work while
<http://news.ycombinator.com> does).

If it doesn't break anything for you to add the wildcard, you should tack it
on.

edit: you also seem to have forgotten to add it to userscripts--that's where
all the cool greasemonkey kids hang out.

------
noodle
doesn't seem to take into account the "ask hn" types of posts. the ones that
tend to get voted up also tend to have interesting material in them, as well
as a larger number of responses.

------
endtwist
It might also be pertinent to take into account how long ago an article was
submitted. I've noticed the votes-comments quality filter myself, but I've
never really added "submission age" to that mental filter. I'm not sure how it
would affect the results, but I certainly think its something worth
researching.

