Ask PG: Why not AI in place of (or in addition to) comment voting?

7 points

15 years ago

So, in the time I've been here, it's been my understanding that there was a gentlemen's agreement of sorts that upvotes go to comments which "add to the discussion", even if the specific point of view is something the voter disagrees with. Here's the thing though: we shouldn't need to vote in order to determine what adds to the discussion. Certainly some fairly straightforward heuristics like Flesch-Kincaid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_test) Grade Level times number of replies (possibly adding in a factor for the F-K Grade Level of the replies to weed out long chains of drivel) should be relatively good at picking the best comments in a thread.

I'm not saying that voting should be eliminated entirely, but maybe it becomes just part of the heuristic. Imagine something like BCS standings, but for comments. Even vote tallies could become smarter, with votes from "trusted" users counting more heavily than those from "noobs" or well known rabble-rousers.

Finally, I think it would be really neat (assuming you like my proposal of a combined heuristic in place of voting) if the algorithm was open source. Take the Google view of "if you don't like the results, don't special case the outcomes, improve the algorithm!" This would have the added benefit of giving the world a first-class comment value sorting algorithm vetted by some of the top talent in the world, and dog-food-ed on a site where they care deeply about the quality of the discussion.

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