Ranking posts from best to worst in folks who remain I don’t think is that helpful. People will know quality without numbers.
Ranking helps me know what to read.
The SlateStarCodex comments are unusable for me because nothing is sorted by quality, so what’s at the top is just whoever had the fastest fingers and least filter.
Maybe this isn’t a problem for fast readers (I am a slow reader), but I find automatic sorting mechanisms to be super useful.
This. SSC comments I basically only read if there are very few of them, because of the lack of karma; on LW even large discussions are actually readable, thanks to karma sorting.
Over the years I’ve gone through periods of time where I can devote the effort/time to thoroughly reading LW and periods of time where I can basically just skim it.
Because of this I’m in a good position to judge the reliability of karma in surfacing content for its readability.
My judgement is that karma strongly correlates with readability.
Ranking helps me know what to read.
The SlateStarCodex comments are unusable for me because nothing is sorted by quality, so what’s at the top is just whoever had the fastest fingers and least filter.
Maybe this isn’t a problem for fast readers (I am a slow reader), but I find automatic sorting mechanisms to be super useful.
This. SSC comments I basically only read if there are very few of them, because of the lack of karma; on LW even large discussions are actually readable, thanks to karma sorting.
That’s an illusion of readability though, it’s only sorting in a fairly arbitrary way.
As long as it’s not anti-correlated with quality, it helps.
It doesn’t matter if the top comment isn’t actually the very best comment. So long as the system does better than random, I as a reader benefit.
Over the years I’ve gone through periods of time where I can devote the effort/time to thoroughly reading LW and periods of time where I can basically just skim it.
Because of this I’m in a good position to judge the reliability of karma in surfacing content for its readability.
My judgement is that karma strongly correlates with readability.