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Ask PG: Activity in comments adds to gravity

2 points by jmatt ↗ HN
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.

6 comments

[ 7.7 ms ] story [ 28.0 ms ] thread
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.

jmatt
I think providing an active page helps. It seems like a good compromise. Thanks for the link.
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?
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.
phr
I remember reading a great post somewhere about using the visual shape of usenet discussion threads (as rendered by common news readers) to spot patterns like trolling, political tangents, etc. This was only proposed as an NI (Natural Intelligence) method, not AI, but I wonder...