The first is a veritable essay that compares how the failure of an ancient Swedish warship was directly comparable to the failure of the space shuttle Challenger. I think, out of all the comments that I've posted to Hacker News, I'm most proud of that one.
The second comment is essentially a throwaway criticism of the positioning of UI elements on the new Duck Duck Go search results page. It's not terrible, but it certainly took less critical thinking for me to write than the first comment. And yet it received 5 times as many votes.
How can we fix this? I don't know, but I do think that taking away comment scores was a mistake that exacerbated this issue. Now, when I see a long form comment such as yours, I have no idea if its score is +1 or +100. All I can tell is that the score is above zero, by the color of the text. This makes it harder for me to judge whether a comment is "underrated" (i.e. it has a score that is below what I'd expect for a comment of that quality) or "overrated" (i.e. it has a score that's unjustifiably high). I think bringing back comment scores would help fix the problem of long-form analytic comments being underrated.
What about, instead of comment scores, if the comment is among a top percentage of comments in the thread, the user's name is a different color, like orange? Kind of like how a new user's name is green.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3414355 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460773
The first is a veritable essay that compares how the failure of an ancient Swedish warship was directly comparable to the failure of the space shuttle Challenger. I think, out of all the comments that I've posted to Hacker News, I'm most proud of that one.
The second comment is essentially a throwaway criticism of the positioning of UI elements on the new Duck Duck Go search results page. It's not terrible, but it certainly took less critical thinking for me to write than the first comment. And yet it received 5 times as many votes.
How can we fix this? I don't know, but I do think that taking away comment scores was a mistake that exacerbated this issue. Now, when I see a long form comment such as yours, I have no idea if its score is +1 or +100. All I can tell is that the score is above zero, by the color of the text. This makes it harder for me to judge whether a comment is "underrated" (i.e. it has a score that is below what I'd expect for a comment of that quality) or "overrated" (i.e. it has a score that's unjustifiably high). I think bringing back comment scores would help fix the problem of long-form analytic comments being underrated.