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
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.