How to avoid echo chambers: Stop sorting comments by popularity.

submitted by uwubunny from self.SaidIt

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[–]SeasideLimbs 9 insightful - 2 fun9 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 2 fun -  (6 children)

Good suggestions, especially about transparent moderation. One thing though, I think if sorting by "old" was the default, people would just keep switching back to "best." I don't know if it would accomplish anything other than annoy people.

Offtopic: Anyone else miss bulletin board forums? They felt so cozy compared to all the stuff we have now. Web 1.0 in general, really.

[–]uwubunny[S] 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Very much Web 1.0 person here.

The sort ordering matters a lot on Reddit-like fora. Whatever you sort by, you incentivize. If you sort by old, you incentivize hair trigger, low-effort replies. If you sort by New, you incentivize trying to get the last word in. If you sort by Best, you incentivize trying to appeal to lowest common denominator. What I want to explore is how to get away from the groupthink that murdered Reddit.

On image boards, if posts have a lot of replies, you'll find them quickly by scanning the thread. They don't discriminate between posts that get positive or negative attention, and I don't think that's a bad thing - provided you've got some tolerance for controversy.

If your site encourages people to just read the top posts in any meaningful ordering, you're putting repliers and people who make late, thoughtful posts, at a disadvantage. Ordering by old forces everyone to at least skim everything. That additional work that everyone has to do to interact with the board is what encourages everyone else to contribute. It also doesn't work for anything over a few hundred posts.

If you're determined to sort by "what people agree with", the best way to do this would be to treat it like a multi-armed bandit problem, with an algorithm to boost new comments to determine how good they are. I think HN does this.

[–]Papitas 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

How about random sorting, then? That would kind of iron out those kind of biases.

[–]uwubunny[S] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Has anyone built a forum with a random or stochastic sort order? Plus, it's not clear to me how it would work in a threaded conversation.

It's about incentives. The reason I'm replying to you is that I believe that people will read it - chasing the dopamine hit of getting interaction, upvotes and replies, and ultimately the belief that I'm influencing other people by some absolutely tiny amount. If you think internet points are better, you should design to maximize the chance that I'll vote your comment up. If you think replies are better, design to maximize the chance that I'll reply.

[–]JasonCarswell 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

I like the old bulletins. I also like some other forum formats and their nifty features better. I really like the QxR forum for torrents, though I don't know what it was. Other forums just don't have the great content though.