Ah, but how do you count that in a ranking algorithm? I'm 90% sure my idea is not the answer, but maybe we can think of something else.
Maybe this is naive, but there's something about a binary voting system that just strikes me as something that doesn't fit into a conversation. I often find myself agreeing with certain parts of a comment and not other parts of it. Maybe if the user could vote up the parts of a comment he likes and vote down the parts that he doesn't. Technically, that would be difficult (especially since on HN a comment is simply a text field).
I don't think it needs to get any more complicated. Paul asked for a "technological" solution, and it's not in the rankings; if the profile pages are made more prominent, then people will invest in their social reputations.
With respect to counting comment views, it's already implicit in the page views.
Comments
I think the abstain effect can be emulated by just skipping that comment :-)
Ah, but how do you count that in a ranking algorithm? I'm 90% sure my idea is not the answer, but maybe we can think of something else.
Maybe this is naive, but there's something about a binary voting system that just strikes me as something that doesn't fit into a conversation. I often find myself agreeing with certain parts of a comment and not other parts of it. Maybe if the user could vote up the parts of a comment he likes and vote down the parts that he doesn't. Technically, that would be difficult (especially since on HN a comment is simply a text field).
I don't think it needs to get any more complicated. Paul asked for a "technological" solution, and it's not in the rankings; if the profile pages are made more prominent, then people will invest in their social reputations.
With respect to counting comment views, it's already implicit in the page views.