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Ask HN: Activity as a Factor in Post Scoring?

4 points by zackmorris ↗ HN
I'm curious if the volatility of upvoting/downvoting is (or could be) used to rank comments. I've posted some musings that I thought were rather insightful and was surprised to see them settle on a score of 1. I suspect that they were being endorsed and denounced repeatedly because they were controversial.

But it hit me that the most relevant or thought-provoking posts may run counter to one’s worldview or deeply held beliefs, so in effect could be catalysts for moving the conversation forward and avoiding groupthink. I know that those are the sorts of pearls of wisdom that attracted me to Hacker News and Paul Graham’s essays initially (though I realize that he no longer decides these things).

Would it be possible to visually indicate the total number of +/- votes per post, or use that as a weight in the scoring formula? This would be separate from the controversy penalty (that prevents flame wars due to too many comments).

3 comments

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0942v8653
Of course it's much more up-front about vote counts, but Reddit has a "controversial" sort option. It might make sense for HN to do the same.
dang
Would privileging such comments make the threads accord better with HN's values of reflective, civil discussion? Rapid-fire controversy is not really what we're going for here.

If you want to mention some links to comments you think the idea would apply to, we'll take a look.

zackmorris
Hey thanks for responding. I looked through my comments and they generally score well if they are technical. I suppose some of the political ones didn't do so well, and those are the ones that I think may have gotten an equal number of up and down votes (topics like copyright infringement, private vs. public healthcare, etc).

So I guess I'm mostly just trying to throw out an idea here. I understand if you don't want to encourage political comments, but in the end, it seems that anything people are passionate about devolves into politics. For a specific example, I've noticed some very heated posts regarding things like imperative vs. functional programming that are practically as ideological as libertarianism vs. progressivism. It's kind of like, both sides have merit, I don't think there will ever be compromise, but I'm hoping to find a "third path". It's an incredible hard problem to solve though, so if the current scoring system is working, great, don't fix it if it's not broken.

To get to the gist of it, I think what I am requesting is that the scoring somehow distinguish between posts that receive no points and ones that receive a lot of activity but settle on the same points. I think that the latter could be gems that are currently falling below the fold.