He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
To help along the thinking process here, as we digest our own personal experiences (each from a different subset of threads, I suppose, unless several participants here read HN exhaustively), let's think about those issues:
a) After the change, are mean comments less likely to be upvoted?
b) After the change, are dumb comments less likely to be upvoted?
c) What is the general character of highly upvoted comments after the change? Are comments with the highest number of upvotes after the change usually helpful, thoughtful comments, or flippant comments that don't gratify intellectual curiosity?
Over the next few days, it should be possible to look at some highly upvoted examples. The bestcomments view of HN content
still shows highly upvoted comments, although right now it shows them without explicit comment scores. How do those comments look to you?
P.S. There is a lot of speculation in this thread about how comments are weighted, how users gain karma, etc. As far as I know, except for possible details of the current experiment, the source code for this site in ARC,
tells any code-literate user most of the story about how karma is allocated and how users gain karma. (Please note that I am NOT a code-literate user here, not in ARC, and I have never attempted to reverse-engineer any aspect of the karma system here. I simply empirically observe what happens to my own submissions and comments after I submit them, which I can still do during this experiment by viewing my own followed threads.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
To help along the thinking process here, as we digest our own personal experiences (each from a different subset of threads, I suppose, unless several participants here read HN exhaustively), let's think about those issues:
a) After the change, are mean comments less likely to be upvoted?
b) After the change, are dumb comments less likely to be upvoted?
c) What is the general character of highly upvoted comments after the change? Are comments with the highest number of upvotes after the change usually helpful, thoughtful comments, or flippant comments that don't gratify intellectual curiosity?
Over the next few days, it should be possible to look at some highly upvoted examples. The bestcomments view of HN content
http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
still shows highly upvoted comments, although right now it shows them without explicit comment scores. How do those comments look to you?
P.S. There is a lot of speculation in this thread about how comments are weighted, how users gain karma, etc. As far as I know, except for possible details of the current experiment, the source code for this site in ARC,
https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc
which was mentioned in an HN thread a while back,
http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307128
tells any code-literate user most of the story about how karma is allocated and how users gain karma. (Please note that I am NOT a code-literate user here, not in ARC, and I have never attempted to reverse-engineer any aspect of the karma system here. I simply empirically observe what happens to my own submissions and comments after I submit them, which I can still do during this experiment by viewing my own followed threads.)