Can you make “sort by magic” the default sort for comments under a post? Here’s why:
The problem: Commenting late on a post (after the main reading peak) is disincentivized, not only because fewer people will read the post and look over the comments, but also because most people only look over the top scoring comments and won’t scroll down far enough to read your new comment. This also causes early good comments to continue to accumulate more karma because more people read those, so the usual equilibrium is that early good comments stay on top and late good comments don’t really get noticed.
Also, what one cares about for sorting is the quality of a comment, and the correct estimator for that would be “number of upvotes per views”. I don’t know how you calculate magic but it seems very likely like a better proxy for this than top scoring. (If magic doesn’t seem very adequate and you track page viewcounts, you could also get a more principled new magic sort, though you’d have to track for each comment what viewcount the page had at the time when the comment was posted. Like if the average ratio of upvotes per views is a/b, you could assign each comment a score of (upvotes+a)/(page_views_since_comment_was_posted+b), and sort descending by score.)
Can you make “sort by magic” the default sort for comments under a post? Here’s why:
The problem: Commenting late on a post (after the main reading peak) is disincentivized, not only because fewer people will read the post and look over the comments, but also because most people only look over the top scoring comments and won’t scroll down far enough to read your new comment. This also causes early good comments to continue to accumulate more karma because more people read those, so the usual equilibrium is that early good comments stay on top and late good comments don’t really get noticed.
Also, what one cares about for sorting is the quality of a comment, and the correct estimator for that would be “number of upvotes per views”. I don’t know how you calculate magic but it seems very likely like a better proxy for this than top scoring. (If magic doesn’t seem very adequate and you track page viewcounts, you could also get a more principled new magic sort, though you’d have to track for each comment what viewcount the page had at the time when the comment was posted. Like if the average ratio of upvotes per views is a/b, you could assign each comment a score of (upvotes+a)/(page_views_since_comment_was_posted+b), and sort descending by score.)
Cheers! I think we’ve thought about this but I’ll raise with the team again.
oh I thought we already changed this
Sites like Reddit and Substack and Youtube all have similar problems. And they’re surely aware of it, but none of them have fixed it. I wonder why?