
The best HN comments - zachbeane
http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments?newsToMe
======
BRadmin
Is "best" really the proper defining word to use? More eyeballs are viewing
the RIP Michael Jackson thread, thus resulting in more potential up-votes --
based on that, I'd be hard-pressed to establish it as the "best" comment...
maybe "most up-voted" is more fitting.

~~~
johnnybgoode
> More eyeballs are viewing the RIP Michael Jackson thread, thus resulting in
> more potential up-votes

That suggests an idea to take that into account, but I think PG said he'd
rather not complicate the algorithm.

Edit: Huh? I'm being downvoted, which is fine, but why? I meant that there
might be an interesting way to take eyeballs into account to weight a vote,
but IIRC, PG wanted to see how long we could go without vote weighting.

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jodrellblank
"How is this even remotely hacker news?" is _not_ one of the best HN comments.

~~~
mkyc
This is because many people here still vote by agreement, rather than for
comments that are interesting, insightful, contradictory, terse, and so on.
This happens on a much larger scale with lower-rated comments. I once saw the
word "no" with a score of 50~, which made up for the contributor's running
streak of -5~. It wasn't that their contribution quality became better, it was
that their comment hit that major "upvote when you agree" fault in our system.
It's infuriating and seriously reduces our quality. I try to upvote even
poorly composed devil's advocate comments just to counteract this, because
even reckless disagreement is often a gold mine of those little bits of
information that you didn't take into consideration, but should have.

Vote for what you think others should see, not for what you agree with.

~~~
jodrellblank
(I just voted you up because I agree with you. Hrm.)

~~~
mkyc
It's not that you should avoid upvoting what you agree with, just that it
shouldn't be the only reason you upvote. A lot of the posts that violate this
simply bait existing divisions, which contributes nothing. Perhaps I should
add "and people don't need to see that which they already agree with."

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10ren
It seems that most of the highly voted comments are about how
something/someone is bad/wrong, but there are some positive ones in there too,
like those by ktharavaad, lutorm, kirse, patio11 (x3), jbr, plinkplonk,
chriseppstein. Actually, 11 out of 30 isn't bad! I tend to forget that
Hacknews is a public forum on the internet.

I think I just need to focus on the worthwhile comments, and ignore the
negative ones (but it's hard: <http://xkcd.com/386/>). If everyone did this,
the problem wouldn't exist.

BTW: On the homepage (not this one), see the "lists" link at the very bottom,
on the left. It's: <http://news.ycombinator.com/lists> The 3rd one,
"bestcomments" is what been submitted here, but with an argument "?newsToMe"
appended (presumably to avoid hitting the last story about it, 544 days ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93526>)

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quizbiz
I would be interested to see a list of the best HN comments as judged not by
raw karma points but as:

    
    
      karma points of the comment / karma points of the post

~~~
kqr2
To correct for karma "inflation", how about:

    
    
      karma points of comment / total HN karma points at time of comment posting

In other words, rank comments as a % of total karma points at the time.

~~~
froo
Agreed, this would be closer to a correct outcome. Especially for users like
me who generally comment in offpeak times (being on the other side of the
world) and usually come to a discussion many many hours after it has long died
down, so his comments remain at the bottom of the page, ignored.

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zimbabwe
Either this has a cutoff of a few weeks (likely, since I've seen higher-rated
comments than the ones here), or HN suffers from insane inflation.

~~~
projectileboy
It's the latter. A comment with 30 points, say, a year ago would have been
very unusual, but now that's a pretty typical score for the highest-rated
comment of any link in the current top 10.

Unfortunately, this seems to coincide with HN following the same trajectory as
early Reddit, and that makes me sad.

~~~
misterbwong
While I do share your sentiment fearing that the community will change, I
don't think that the karma totals are really a good gauge of content/comment
quality on HN. Just because more people are here to upvote does not mean the
comment is of lesser quality than before (the opposite is also true...)

A quick fix to this could be a sort of weighted comment score. Maybe the karma
points / by the number of karma points added that day to give an idea of scale
in comparison to the overall size of community. I'm sure others could come up
with something more precise, but it's a start.

~~~
projectileboy
I agree that it's a lousy gauge, but it does seem to serve as a rough
barometer, indicating bad weather.

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physcab
I know this post is about the "best" comments, but that doesn't necessarily
indicate quality. I'm not sure what might be a good algorithm to judge
quality, but popularity is most certainly not it. To all you natural language
processing nerds out there...maybe there is a way of looking at word choice,
with weights also given to amount of karma but relative to the other karma
distributed to other comments.

~~~
mkyc
This is insane, not because you're wrong, but because popularity and quality
should be equivalent for us. We have some of the very best natural language
processing algorithms going over most of our posts - and several comments in
this post are suggesting that they're failing miserably (in many important
cases, I agree).

This is a problem with the community, not with the software.

One thing I dislike about the simple arrows is that they give no indication of
on what basis posts should be upvoted. If, when clicking, we were forced to
select from a menu vote types [+1 insightful, +1 clever, +1 informative, +1
antigroupthink, +0 I agree, +0 funny, -1 rude or troll], even if we did not
track these, this would be giving people feedback on voting expectations and
force them to pause for one second to put a bit more consideration into their
vote.

~~~
jongraehl
"About time... I can't be the only one who thinks Experts-Exchange is lame..."
- I don't mean to impugn the author of that comment, but I think the amount of
approval for it indicates that some people are voting on agreement more than
quality.

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RiderOfGiraffes
I'd like to see karma points per view. As there are more and more people on
HN, the views go up, and hence the upvotes. More, any comment posted at an
unpopular time gets overlooked and sinks without a trace. Having karma per
view would help to offset that problem, if not fix it.

Currently the time factor is doing a similar job, but I think page views would
be a better value to use.

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tptacek
Searchyc has a much more interesting top-list than News.YC does. PG should
pull a Summize with Searchyc.

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joshu
How about removing the voting widgets on that page?

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nudded
comments on comments, hacker news takes the y combinator to a whole 'nother
level

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joubert
best-ness in the mouse-hand of the voter

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erlanger
The list is not accurate.

