zlacker

>>pg+(OP)
Cap the score that is displayed with a comment e.g., past 10 points, just display "10+". Don't display karma and average scores of users, again, past a certain point: this prevents (subconscious) game incentives which lead to e.g., posting comments that say something stupid or mean but which tend to agree with general tendencies of the site.

For example, I can post a comment decrying Blub with a snide remark (e.g., "You wrote a 1,000 line Blub program? Was it 500 getters and 500 setters?" in a thread discussing software projects) that is both information free and mean (perhaps Blub wasn't the author's preferred choice, but chosen for him or required in order to build an application for the iBlubber). People on this site generally dislike Blub, so the comment will get upvotes without adding any value to the discussion (an example of adding value would be saying you were able to do this in 100 lines of Flub using its cool new hygienic macros with a link to a paper on hygienic macros in Flub).

That's not to say all comment score data should be gone. Comment scores can still be kept and comments could be displayed on stories in the other in which they're displayed now (a mix of comment score and how recently it was posted). Generally, what I've found is that comments showing up _first_ tend to be of higher quality i.e., overall algorithm works more often than not.

[NB: I work at LinkedIn and we do this for connection counts-- we want users to network with each other, but we don't want to make it a "who has the most connections" game, that's why when you have over 500 connections (which is perfectly legitimate and allowed), only "500+" is displayed as the count on your profile]

>>strlen+h3
Actually, you just gave me a great idea (I think). The problem is mainly snide remarks, right? So make it impossible to make snide remakrs. How?

Minimum comment length of ~50 words.

This would A) get rid of casual snideyness, as those sorts of people wouldn't put in the effort to formulate a longer post; B) discourage crowd-pleasing one liners, which while enjoyable have a long term negative effect; C) still allow jokes, they'd just have to be asides to actual substance; D) encourage longer, better thought-out posts in general, and backing up of claims.

>>Tycho+b7
I downvoted you because I have found this to not be the case in practice, and I find that setting some minimal comment length is not correlated to increasing the quality of submission. Casual snideness will still occur, and one-liners are not a problem in and of themselves. The context of that one-liner is, and a minimum comment length should not considered a judge of quality or context.

>>dolins+49
Have you seen this actually implemented somewhere? Note that I'm not contending that none of the short comments are valuable: far from it, sometimes they're the best thing in the thread. But having a limit would not necessarily deter that content from appearing. The authors would just share a bit more info/insight with us before hitting 'reply.' Meanwhile the timewasters really would be deterred. And while it's great to have sharp, witty remarks now and again, the problem is that loads of unfunny jokes appear, trying to emulate.

However, I suppose you could argue that valuable content would be blocked to some extent, it a knowledgeable contributor was put off because s/he didn't have time for a longer comment. Still, 50 words isn't much, or 30, 25... anything above the average sentence length I suppose would start to have the desired effect.

>>Tycho+B9
We implemented this on zootoo.com during a contest where posting rewarded the user with points (I understand 100% how ridiculous this is as a concept, how awful it is at achieving any kind of 'quality' by itself - and if I was the one who had been allowed to make the decision on this then it never would have been implemented - but karma is a kind of never-ending contest). Not only did the minimum length limit not work DURING the contest, but even after the contest was over and we had kept the comment length requirement in place, the quality of comments did not increase, and if someone wanted to say something that was below the minimum threshold they would simply add 'foobar-like' content to their post to meet the threshold.

The problem with time wasters is that it's no big deal for them, they're already wasting their time. It's always going to be up to users who care like you, me and others to try to mitigate the exposure of those time wasting comments while not penalizing legitimate contributions by users who care, and that's why I don't think a hard comment length should be implemented.

>>dolins+qb
To be honest, you're probably right. Unless comment padding was universally down voted, there'd be lots of it going on, defeating the point. And sometimes valuable things like corrections are at loggerheads with a minimum word count.