I'm now experimenting with changing the function used to rank comments. I'm hopeful this will both help users find the good comments on a thread, and solve the problem of good but late comments getting stuck at the bottom of the page.
The ranking changes you just made completely eliminated whatever mental model of thread dynamics I had left. It's not clear that you understand the degree to which you're playing with fire here.
A 'good but late' comment won't be seen by anyone anyway, due to your front page ranking algorithm that prevents even the most active threads from spending long enough on the front pages.
One suggestion: the point ranking could be merely probabilistic -- for each comment set its "page-sort" score by selecting a random number between 1 and the comment's score. (For negative comments, between 0 and their score?) Then sort the comments by their page-sort score. I've looked at this mostly on reddit, since their threads are much more popular than on HN, but finding late wheat in the chaff of low-voted comments can be a problem when threads get large.
Comments
I'm now experimenting with changing the function used to rank comments. I'm hopeful this will both help users find the good comments on a thread, and solve the problem of good but late comments getting stuck at the bottom of the page.
The ranking changes you just made completely eliminated whatever mental model of thread dynamics I had left. It's not clear that you understand the degree to which you're playing with fire here.
A 'good but late' comment won't be seen by anyone anyway, due to your front page ranking algorithm that prevents even the most active threads from spending long enough on the front pages.
I think HN has always been an experiment. Playing with fire sounds almost like a compliment then.
One suggestion: the point ranking could be merely probabilistic -- for each comment set its "page-sort" score by selecting a random number between 1 and the comment's score. (For negative comments, between 0 and their score?) Then sort the comments by their page-sort score. I've looked at this mostly on reddit, since their threads are much more popular than on HN, but finding late wheat in the chaff of low-voted comments can be a problem when threads get large.