

Fixing HN:  How to take away the incentive for irrelevant replies. - amichail

Currently there is an incentive for placing a comment as a reply to a highly ranked comment even if it is irrelevant to that comment (but still relevant to the submission).<p>One way to fix this would be to allow people to vote on making a comment be a child of the submission.  If a certain threshold is reached in the voting, not only would this be done but the comment would be downvoted as well to discourage people from doing this in the future.
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cwan
Why would this be necessary? Already, the incentive to do this is reduced
because new comments pop up to the top based on some type of vote/time decay
function (he accelerated this already right after he tried not showing the
number of votes not so long ago if I recall).

Doing this would seem to add complexity to a system of voting that seems
pretty elegant?

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amichail
You might still think your comment will be highly visible for longer as a
reply to a highly upvoted comment.

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cwan
There's another form of accountability: when irrelevant, these comments get
downvoted.

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amichail
An insightful but irrelevant comment in this situation may not be downvoted.

And even if it is, it is still ranked higher than it should be.

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brk
Sounds like a neat idea. You should download the HN source and implement it.

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amichail
Why? This is something that PG could implement rather easily if he wanted to.

