It has always been explicitly possible to sort comments by controversy by clicking on “sort by.” I believe that in the beginning there was a link to sort posts by controversy (discussion). At some point the link was removed, but the URL kept working. At some point I recall someone discovering it and people being suspicious that the sorting was buggy. But currently it lists posts that have received lots of upvotes and lots of downvotes. Added: read the rest of this thread for more detail about these links.
I haven’t figured out what the definition of controversial is. There used to be a paragraph here speculating about it. I previously linked to the open thread, which was not a good example to exhibit sorting. The politics thread contains actually controversial comments and thus sorting actually does something.
By default, it only lists the past three months of posts, which weren’t very controversial. Under the current system, controversial posts probably get demoted to discussion. So long ago that I forgot, I had turned off that filter and so I saw a list of posts from before the current system with scores close to 0 that had received about 50 votes total. I saw the same on discussion. The three month filter for discussion does have scores close to zero, but usually not quite so many votes.
It has always been explicitly possible to sort comments by controversy by clicking on “sort by.” I believe that in the beginning there was a link to sort posts by controversy (discussion). At some point the link was removed, but the URL kept working. At some point I recall someone discovering it and people being suspicious that the sorting was buggy. But currently it lists posts that have received lots of upvotes and lots of downvotes. Added: read the rest of this thread for more detail about these links.
I haven’t figured out what the definition of controversial is. There used to be a paragraph here speculating about it. I previously linked to the open thread, which was not a good example to exhibit sorting. The politics thread contains actually controversial comments and thus sorting actually does something.
As of now, the controversial posts page includes quite a few posts with 100% positive karma.
Thanks for the correction.
By default, it only lists the past three months of posts, which weren’t very controversial. Under the current system, controversial posts probably get demoted to discussion. So long ago that I forgot, I had turned off that filter and so I saw a list of posts from before the current system with scores close to 0 that had received about 50 votes total. I saw the same on discussion. The three month filter for discussion does have scores close to zero, but usually not quite so many votes.
Thanks; I hadn’t noticed the filter. When I set it to “All time” it does show posts I’d expect to get both lots of upvotes and lots of downvotes.