Currently user relationships do not play a role in comment sorting. However, we plan to change that in the next couple of days. Specifically, if you ignore or mute a user, their comments will sort towards the bottom of a comment thread. This seems a reasonable mechanism, based on clear and specific user input.
However, we have been discussing another method of comment sorting, and I thought it would be worth getting your thoughts: The idea is that if you follow someone, they might sort a bit higher than normal in comment threads that you view.
The rationale is that as Hubski grows, it might be nice to preferentially see those folk that you actively rely upon for content. I wouldn't want to make it a strong bias if we did implement it, perhaps give those comments the added weight of one extra share.
The obvious downside argument is the creation of an echo chamber. Of course all the comments will still be there, however, the top ones are probably the most read, and any sorting bias might make the conversation a tad more insular.
At any rate, I am not married to the idea, but I could see it becoming useful if the average number of comments grows substantially.
I've been thinking on it, and I thought it would be worthwhile to see what the general consensus is, and/or if there is anything we haven't considered.
No, I think that the downside of creating an echo chamber / filter bubble is far greater than the benefit of nudging a post up a bit. Posts from people I follow are already clearly marked with the colors. A thread as big as the who are you isn't going to be much more readable with different sorting, I think. I've been thinking about comments, and a bigger problem I have right now is about returning to posts I've already read. When I read a post and it has 5 comments, it might create a good discussion after I've been there. But there is no way for me to tell if I'm missing new comments on a post I already read, unless I remember how many comments it had. I've read the above post at least five times because the number just kept on growing, but it's the exception. Maybe a number next to the comments indicating new comments, or giving the comment logo a soft color?
Well, I think we need to be careful with collapsing comments. It promotes top comments too much and dampens further conversation. I actually like uncollapsed comments. I would never had read kleinbl00's comment down here if comments were collapsed as easy as on most other sites.
I'd like to see collapsing. Uncollapsed could be the default though. Even though there are 200 comments on "who are you," only 30 of them might be answers to the question. I'd like to know that without having to scroll through the sideline conversations -- not that kleinbl00's diamond ring opinions are uninteresting -- but they are not answers to the main question. It's a hard call. It would be interesting to see what the majority feel about the collapse option. EDIT: 29 not 30 - What does that say about this community? 29 introductions and 171 riffs on the theme.
I'm not sure if the comment system currently works like this or not, but I think having it work similar to the regular feed would be useful. That is, comments that have been shared by people you are following will be more towards the top. Not necessarily comments by those people, but the comments they share. That way the user would be doing essentially the same thing with comments as they are with submissions: curating what their followers see. As it stands, the current system shows me comments that are shared by anyone and that's not necessarily what I want to see. In threads like the "what are you listening to" I might want to see comments by people who like the same type of stuff I do and as such would like to see who they decided to share (rather than just a general consensus).
That's an interesting idea. Thanks.That is, comments that have been shared by people you are following will be more towards the top. Not necessarily comments by those people, but the comments they share. That way the user would be doing essentially the same thing with comments as they are with submissions: curating what their followers see.
All my posts and comments should be in puce, and they should be at the top of the page and blinking at a rate that picks up speed ... but then suddenly stops blinking. Then they should become engorged with font thickness but not kerning until they all become a blob of black pixels on a white screen. All other posts will be relegated to the "pay-per-view" section. Or perhaps not. I've yet to see a discussion arena online that really captivates me like a human discussion. I don't think it is the threading ... or the sort order or number of rings its rings have ... There is a cadence that text disengages while voices carry it. We don't write in dactylic hexameter or iambic pentameter because it is cool to do it ... we do it because our code does it. Language carries more than just insertions into a database can do. That is why I can't carry on digital conversations here. I'm too unsophisticated or perhaps too old to find a esprit de corps online.
I think that personalized ways or algorithms to sort comments could be a really good thing, if only for the fact that experimentation in this area could possibly lead to something new and interesting and a competitive advantage for hubski. In order to compete with already existing websites (i.e., reddit), hubski has to differentiate itself in some significant way. No one's going to switch from a really popular site (because simply being the largest community gives it network advantages and more diversity, more ideas, more everything that's a draw) without a significant reason to. What the comment sorting system needs to do is not just highlight comments that the user agrees with, but, rather, ones that interest the user. I think a successful implementation has to recognize that users follow other users for different reasons: some for the links they share, the comments they make, sometimes because their interests completely align, and sometimes because they make controversial or unusual, but high quality, comments. A system that only bumps up the comments of people you follow a bit is probably going to be too simplistic- it might not work because it doesn't differentiate these motivations finely enough. Development of a significantly more robust recommender system would be required. It would be significantly more complicated, and harder to do, but would be the real competitive advantage hubski had towards making it a superior place to discover content, and effectively, the only real incentive to draw users away from established sites. -- I mean, hubski was built with this idea in mind anyway, otherwise why do we even have a "following users" feature? It's founding idea on some level had to have been that content aggregation can be made better by better personalizing it, by better utilizing a user's evaluation of other users when we choose to implicitly vouch for the content they bring by following them.
These are good points. That's one reason why I think Kafke's idea below is particularly interesting. It applies the appointed curation mechanism to comments, which is a recommender system of sorts. You don't select the people who's comments are featured, but you appoint them to select the best for you. It is also significantly different than chatter in that regard. It's something that I would be interested in testing.
I kind of like the current comment structure as it facilitates exposure to new voices. I'm worried that if all the people I follow sort at the top of any discussion, there'll be less of an incentive to dig around for new contributors. Especially as the site gets bigger. As it is, there's a nice distribution of friends to strangers- see a few friends' comments, which then spur me toward strangers, who then might get responses from friends... If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Weighing in against, mk, for a slightly different reason. I don't follow people for their commenting ability (because until now that hasn't had anything to do with following) -- I just look at what they post. So there might be a user whose opinions and comments I respect a lot, but I don't follow because they share a ton of stuff I don't care too much about. So suddenly I have to follow him/her in order to get the comments at the top, and I potentially sacrifice the "integrity" of my feed. Not a huge deal, but maybe something to consider. Following for comments and following for posts don't equate at the moment, necessarily, so if you implement a policy that assumes they do it may not work well. So unless I read this too quickly, I'm against this for the reason outlined above. I may be jumping to conclusions; I'm at a meeting.
I don't follow people for their commenting ability (because until now that hasn't had anything to do with following) -- I just look at what they post.
Indeed, reasons for following are many. I follow to build self-esteem (but don't tell that to the people I follow).
What if you could easily click the follower icon and automatically it sorted the comments/threads with everyone you follow to the top?
i'd like people i follow to be rated higher. sometimes i follow people simply because i want their name to be highlighted in comment threads. as for everyone whining about echo chambers: that's already what following does for submissions, so what's the problem? if you want to avoid echochambers you don't have to build one. if i want to construct an echochamber that should be up to me.
I seem to lean more to the nay side. EDIT: typo correction
It would be cool if you had the option of turning on comment sorting that could either weigh down or uplift the comments of people you follow in a thread.
That's an interesting idea. I have a question though, about tags. I wonder if anyone else might be interested in a system where we could choose to add weight to certain tags. If that would be a pain in the ass to do or there is no interest, then I'm good without it, but there are some days when I'm really interested in reading about politics or art or whatever.