I agree it’s working fine for that specific comment thread! But it’s just not really true for most posts, which tend to have less than 10 comments, and where voting activity after 1-2 rounds of replies gets very heavily dominated by the people who are actively participating in the thread, which especially as it gets heated, causes things to then end up being very random in their vote distribution, and to not really work as a signal anymore.
The popular comments section is affected by net karma, though I think it’s a pretty delicate balance. My current guess is that indeed the vast majority of people who upvoted Said’s comment didn’t read Gordon’s post, and upvoted Said comment because it seemed like a dunk on something they didn’t like, irrespective of whether that actually applied to Gordon’s post in any coherent way.
I think the popular comment section is on-net good, but in this case seems to me to have failed (for reasons largely unrelated to other things discussed in this thread), and it has happened a bunch of times that it promoted contextless responses to stuff that made the overall discussion quality worse.
Fundamentally, the amount of sorting you can do in a comment section is just very limited. I feel like this isn’t a very controversial or messy point. On any given post you can sort maybe 3-4 top-level threads into the right order, so karma is supplying at most a few bits of prioritization for the order.
In the context of post lists, you often are sorting lists of posts hundred of items long, and karma is the primary determinant whether something gets read at all. I am not saying it has absolutely no effect, but clearly it’s much weaker (and indeed, does absolutely not reliably prevent bad comments from getting lots of visibility and does not remotely reliably cause good comments to get visibility, especially if you wade into domains where people have stronger pre-existing feelings and are looking for anything to upvote that looks vaguely like their own side, and anything to downvote that looks vaguely like the opposing side).
I agree it’s working fine for that specific comment thread! But it’s just not really true for most posts, which tend to have less than 10 comments, and where voting activity after 1-2 rounds of replies gets very heavily dominated by the people who are actively participating in the thread, which especially as it gets heated, causes things to then end up being very random in their vote distribution, and to not really work as a signal anymore.
The popular comments section is affected by net karma, though I think it’s a pretty delicate balance. My current guess is that indeed the vast majority of people who upvoted Said’s comment didn’t read Gordon’s post, and upvoted Said comment because it seemed like a dunk on something they didn’t like, irrespective of whether that actually applied to Gordon’s post in any coherent way.
I think the popular comment section is on-net good, but in this case seems to me to have failed (for reasons largely unrelated to other things discussed in this thread), and it has happened a bunch of times that it promoted contextless responses to stuff that made the overall discussion quality worse.
Fundamentally, the amount of sorting you can do in a comment section is just very limited. I feel like this isn’t a very controversial or messy point. On any given post you can sort maybe 3-4 top-level threads into the right order, so karma is supplying at most a few bits of prioritization for the order.
In the context of post lists, you often are sorting lists of posts hundred of items long, and karma is the primary determinant whether something gets read at all. I am not saying it has absolutely no effect, but clearly it’s much weaker (and indeed, does absolutely not reliably prevent bad comments from getting lots of visibility and does not remotely reliably cause good comments to get visibility, especially if you wade into domains where people have stronger pre-existing feelings and are looking for anything to upvote that looks vaguely like their own side, and anything to downvote that looks vaguely like the opposing side).