HN Explorer

3 Comments a day?

4 points by mailanay ↗ HN
I read Paul Graham's "How To Disagree" (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html) and a blog "One a Day" (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/one-a-day.html).

Would creating a scarcity of number of comments that can be posted a day (say 3 comments a day) make people think twice before commenting and probably reduce DH0 - DH3 type of responses?

3 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 18.7 ms ] thread
brentr
Creating a comment limit would, theoretically, reduce the DH0-DH3 responses. Let's examine this.

Let us assume that X gets n units of utility for every point of karma the community awards.

Let us further assume that the community only awards points of karma for insightful posts/comments. This appears to be a safe assumption.

If X knew that comments/posts were scarce, which under your proposal they would be, then X will attempt to maximize the karma earned from each comment/post by maximizing the insightful nature of each comment/post.

In a way, karma whoring would actually curtail garbage comments/posts, if comments/posts were a scarce resource.

edw519
"then X will attempt to maximize the karma earned from each comment/post by maximizing the insightful nature of each comment/post"

I think you may be overlooking one minor little detail that took me a long time to learn: We have little control of how others will judge our comments.

I have made many comments when I thought, "I nailed it!" and then no one voted or replied at all. Even worse, sometimes downmodded without replies. Other times, I made a smarta$$ remark and it got lots of upvotes. I have a suspicision that the same comment may "perform" very differently depending who else is on-line that day. I finally realized that I should just try to be myself and let the chips fall where they may.

I think the best way to "police" the site is not by limiting anyone, but by prudently using the up and down arrows.

rms
Comments tend to do best by saying something clearly correct very early in the existence of a big thread. It's easy to get +5 on Slashdot in the same way.