I agree with your point about 2. Perhaps subthreads with a comment average above a rather moderate limit should stay in recent comments.
Intuitively, I’d go with 1.5.
I wonder what the average karma for comments is in the past year or so. Now I wonder what the monthly average is—that might be a way of getting a sketchy view of cultural changes in LW, though it wouldn’t tell you whether it’s a change in the quality of comments or the culture of voting.
Now I wonder what the monthly average is—that might be a way of getting a sketchy view of cultural changes in LW, though it wouldn’t tell you whether it’s a change in the quality of comments or the culture of voting.
Or the number of voters. People seem in general to be more likely to vote up than to vote down. If people act roughly like a biased coin then we should expect the average karma to go up as the number of new users increases. Although there are other complicating factors such as the fact that comments can accumulate karma over time. Does the system keep track of when a comment was upvoted or just that someone has been upvoted?
I agree with your point about 2. Perhaps subthreads with a comment average above a rather moderate limit should stay in recent comments.
Intuitively, I’d go with 1.5.
I wonder what the average karma for comments is in the past year or so. Now I wonder what the monthly average is—that might be a way of getting a sketchy view of cultural changes in LW, though it wouldn’t tell you whether it’s a change in the quality of comments or the culture of voting.
Or the number of voters. People seem in general to be more likely to vote up than to vote down. If people act roughly like a biased coin then we should expect the average karma to go up as the number of new users increases. Although there are other complicating factors such as the fact that comments can accumulate karma over time. Does the system keep track of when a comment was upvoted or just that someone has been upvoted?