He believes that the number of comments correlates with how controversial something is and wants to select against controversial topics. Anything with greater than 40 comments gets an automatic penalty.
I think a better way of doing it would be to get a large number of articles which are known to be controversial or uncontroversial and then use features from them (not just the number of comments) and try to develop a good predictor of how controversial something is. It would probably be a lot more effective than just arbitrary penalties for articles with 40 comments.
Though I kind of object to this stuff being done automatically at all. There aren't that many articles on HN that human moderation is impossible. As cool as automation is.
> Anything with greater than 40 comments gets an automatic penalty.
That's not quite right. Anything with >= 40 comments AND more comments than upvotes gets the controversy penalty. Both conditions need to be true. An article with tons of comments will have NO controversy penalty as long as there are more votes than comments.
For most articles, there are more votes than comments, so commenting will not harm the article's rank. (I wrote the recent article analyzing HN ranking.)
It appears he wants to correlate the number of comments with their contextual value, though.
A better indicator of how trollish a thread is and how much that's getting in the way of the conversation (because those are two different things - users may be willing to put up with vehement discussion in one instance but not another) would be the ratio of downvoted comments to comments. I can even see measuring the length of comments and the depth of a thread, as a deep thread with lots of tiny comments might be an indication of sniping.
I realize i'm probably being incredibly naive and that the whole thing is complex with multiple factors interrelating but I don't see how the ratio of upvotes to comments tells you anything useful, if it doesn't take into account that people may comment without upvoting, and people might upvote bad comments. I make certain to upvote the article now with every comment because i'm aware that not doing so, regardless of the content of my comment, is an implicit downvote.
I think it's also a mistake to correlate "controversial" with "unwanted" but that might just be a matter of semantics.
Agreed, the stories sunk include ones like the Anandtech review of the Surface Pro, and the site is quite reputed for being neutral, however the excessive number of comments combined with not too many upvotes can easily sink articles which are otherwise just news and this contributes to the filter bubble(funnily there's a anti-filter bubble post right near this article on the front page).
I think a better way of doing it would be to get a large number of articles which are known to be controversial or uncontroversial and then use features from them (not just the number of comments) and try to develop a good predictor of how controversial something is. It would probably be a lot more effective than just arbitrary penalties for articles with 40 comments.
Though I kind of object to this stuff being done automatically at all. There aren't that many articles on HN that human moderation is impossible. As cool as automation is.