What I'd like to see are average upvotes of buried comments. Comments that were highly rated based on their content rather than their exposure.
It feels to me like the comment sorting is actually dictated by a rough calculation of impressions / votes rather than just raw votes, which is why this sort of thing can happen.
I find HN strikes a really good balance here, occasionally putting new comments at the very top, but not enough to flood the top comments. It's much better than Reddit at least. HN also seems to give additional weight based on the length of the comment which filters out many of the joke/quippy comments and gives preference to comments which add a lot to the discussion.
I guess the difference is I don't make these types of posts on software-engineering heavy discussions. I've been a Wikipedia editor for a few years and I have a lot of niche interests in botany, evolutionary biology, anthropology, microbiology, etc.
There are certain non-software/hardware topics HN seems to really like (phages, the gut microbiome, and nootropics come to mind). It seems that making a long comment with a bunch of citations related to one of those topics is more likely to get you upvotes. Probably because its something a lot of people will be interested in but you're much less likely to be disagreed with given the lack of community expertise around the topics
Maybe my posts wouldn't do as well on a botany forum haha
This has happened a couple of times with my comments. Once there were at least 200 comments on a hot button issue but my comment rose to the top anyway.
I think it helped provide a gauge to help people decide between leaving valuable comments vs. just leaving as many comments as possible.
Additionally, I think simple 1-scoring comments don't contribute to your karma - it's when they get upvoted that they count. So spamming a bunch of useless stuff won't help, and to be honest people are likely to see and start downvoting/flagging you.
It's probably not worth caring about the points you get, as long as you're not saying a bunch of abusive stuff and getting flagged or shadowbanned :D
Edit: confirmed my suspicion re "1 point" comments not adding 1 point to your karma: I was on 8700 before hitting "reply" and I'm still on 8700 immediately after.
People click on threads which are interesting to them, according to their topic. If you're interested in a topic, you most likely view it positively, or as you would put it, you're part of it's echo-chamber. If you then see a positive, reaffirming comment, you'll probably like it.
Doesn't seem that bad to me, especially because I frequently see that the most upvoted reply to the top comment are often contrarian, starting discussions etc.
Echo chamber is such an overused word. In other words, you define that people are part of an echo chamber because you personally don't agree with the majority, which makes you a bit of a contrarian, reactionary hater ;) (exaggerating a bit here)
e.g. - that feeling of having to respond to the person that responded to you, rather than giving the community a chance to respond.
worked for me at least.
Do not get me wrong, there is some very interesting stuff there but half of gathering chunks of upvotes is not rocking the boat and saying anything that goes against the echo chamber.
I think there may be something in that.
My most-upvoted comments have been (a) comments to the root article, not sub-comments; and (b) generally rather short and 'flip'. Apart from that, I can't find any pattern in which comments get upvoted and which don't.
I don't (I hope) post echo-chamber comments; if everyone already agrees with me, there's no point in posting.
I post what I think are insightful comments, that stick on 1 forever; and comments that I know are controversial, that scoop 20 upvotes in 10 minutes. I also occasionally post vacuous, "witty" one-liners that, to my surprise, garner lots of upvotes.
I don't post for karma; I post for sub-comments, i.e. I want to discuss stuff. I don't like long comment threads on HN though; so I never post more than one or two replies to my own thread.
EDIT: just as I'm being downvoted. The echo chamber cannot be called out.
EDIT: the guideline of not discussing downvotes hardly applies here!!
>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
edit
>the guideline of not discussing downvotes hardly applies here!!
Why? Your entire post was "You'll be downvoted for saying this."
EDIT: If you look at historical influential figures most of them were controversial.
That's not surprising... "leading" society means leading it to a new place, not keeping everything as it is.
On a side note, I wonder how many people on HN have actually met someone they recognize from HN?
As someone with that much karma, have you became friends with any one on HN? I realize it is exceedingly difficult to do without private messages and such.
Most things wouldn't happen if the creator asked ahead of time what they should do. This is the dark side of peer review and relying on peers. It leads to a kind of mental / creative vetocracy situation where ideas are killed in their most fragile state by casual comments.
Science advances funeral by funeral. Science advances one funeral at a time. Science progresses funeral by funeral. Knowledge advances funeral by funeral. [1]
The quote is attributed to economist Paul A. Samuelson[1].
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetocracy
- Notable prior HN coverage of topic:
Four days ago I was reading a thread I did have interest in about hiring freezes at Google and Facebook, and there was a tangential thread, which was even more insightful, between the Linux maintainer for ext4 (the Linux filesystem probably 99% of Android devices use, and a high percentage of Linux servers too), and another Googler/Xoogler about whether the Google storage engineering team could make non-incremental contributions, and which contributions were worthwhile and which weren't ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32323734 ).
One percent[1] of crazy-arse conspiracy theories will probably turn out to be true: Conspiracies do exist. But since you don't know which one percent that is, dismissing them all is still the rational thing to do: If one percent[1] are true, that still means ninety-nine percent[2] of them are total tinfoil-hattery.
___
[1]: Or two percent... Or 0.1, or 0.01.
[2]: Or, correspondingly to [1], 98 %. Or 99.9, or 99.99.
The exception to this is links to personal blogs, where links to domains of well known people immediately rise to the top. This is a simple question of time - it takes time to evaluate full articles and people are more likely to invest that time if the name seems familiar.
Other social networks focus too much on following influencers, which naturally narrows your horizon to whatever the influencer thinks. People who follow influencers to criticize them are still narrowed to the direct opposite of what the influencer thinks. It's the monetization of bugs in our psyche.
Sometimes it is a bit disappointing that some bland platitude or parroted opinion of the week is rated as the most insightful thought our collective brains could muster.
Basically, you followed users and it would create a "news feed" which would show posts from users and comments (with links to context). It would also highlight interesting comments from those users on pages I visit. Similarly, I could block users. Let's me follow people I find interesting. Looks very similar and with some tweaks could be public.
Information is like food for your brain. But with information, you can't tell what's nourishing, what's junk food, or what will make you sick until after you've consumed it.
Certainly for me, it is.
