Uhm, I don’t know if this is relevant, but how soon after publishing the article you make the comment? If it is two days or more, most people probably just don’t read the discussion anymore. (Or even if they read, they may feel that it’s too late to start an interesting debate there.)
I think this might be the most salient point of all.
What would the data look like if we were to look at the correlation between the timing of a comment (compared to the timing of the original post) and it’s vote rank?
I’d guess it is likely that the first “good” comment drives the discussion, as it will be read by more people, voted on more often, responded to more frequently, etc.
What if no comments were displayed on articles for 48 hours after publication of the article? At the 48-hour mark, all the comments recieved would be displayed simultaneously and made available for vote rank & response...you have ~20 comments, displayed in random order (is it possible to code for unranked comments to display in random order on a per-login basis?) Would this help remove the (hypothesized) early-comments-win bias?
This sounds wonderfully non-useful, but the thought came to mind upon reading your post:
There could be an option to flag a post as, “I really think I solved this.”
The immediate objection is that it will be overused. However, the comments just on this post indicate that many LWer are unwilling to be outgoing, giving a strong indication that it very much would not be overused. I myself am finding several reasons I would hesitate to select that option, even if I were very much of the opinion that I was posting the kind of definitive reply on which this topic is built. For one, I would expect an excessively critical eye would be applied to my post and I might be downvoted even further than I might be had I posted without the “audacity” to think I had “solved the debate.”
While writing this reply, I further abstracted that there are two distinct types of discussion happening in comments: Idle thoughts and attempts at definitive resolution. To further help understand this issue, I will be replying to the comments that appear to me to be of the latter variety.
Re-reading this comment, I realize that I didn’t specify why the initial thought I considered worthy of sharing was thought in the first place: I was trying to think of ways to increase time-unbounded discussion. It seems to me that the time-bound nature of discussion here is a primary hurdle to overcoming this issue.
Uhm, I don’t know if this is relevant, but how soon after publishing the article you make the comment? If it is two days or more, most people probably just don’t read the discussion anymore. (Or even if they read, they may feel that it’s too late to start an interesting debate there.)
That’s definitely a factor, but not always (e.g. it wasn’t the case with the Wei Dai article I gave as an example).
I think this might be the most salient point of all.
What would the data look like if we were to look at the correlation between the timing of a comment (compared to the timing of the original post) and it’s vote rank?
I’d guess it is likely that the first “good” comment drives the discussion, as it will be read by more people, voted on more often, responded to more frequently, etc.
What if no comments were displayed on articles for 48 hours after publication of the article? At the 48-hour mark, all the comments recieved would be displayed simultaneously and made available for vote rank & response...you have ~20 comments, displayed in random order (is it possible to code for unranked comments to display in random order on a per-login basis?) Would this help remove the (hypothesized) early-comments-win bias?
This sounds wonderfully non-useful, but the thought came to mind upon reading your post: There could be an option to flag a post as, “I really think I solved this.”
The immediate objection is that it will be overused. However, the comments just on this post indicate that many LWer are unwilling to be outgoing, giving a strong indication that it very much would not be overused. I myself am finding several reasons I would hesitate to select that option, even if I were very much of the opinion that I was posting the kind of definitive reply on which this topic is built. For one, I would expect an excessively critical eye would be applied to my post and I might be downvoted even further than I might be had I posted without the “audacity” to think I had “solved the debate.”
While writing this reply, I further abstracted that there are two distinct types of discussion happening in comments: Idle thoughts and attempts at definitive resolution. To further help understand this issue, I will be replying to the comments that appear to me to be of the latter variety.
Re-reading this comment, I realize that I didn’t specify why the initial thought I considered worthy of sharing was thought in the first place: I was trying to think of ways to increase time-unbounded discussion. It seems to me that the time-bound nature of discussion here is a primary hurdle to overcoming this issue.