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I like that idea, the tricky thing is comments require more context. So if there were a way to make it as “top conversations” than just comments, I think it might have more success.
Most people are not aware that ranking for upvoting top comments is WAY easier than ranking for upvoting posts. To me that’s plenty of incentive already to engage with comments and a way for them to compete with posts.
Comments can be extremely detailed and valuable, but there is plenty of work in posts, especially those generally speaking with more sats & longer word counts.
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I know it's already part of how things become "hot", but maybe there could be another feed specifically for hot conversations that only weighs the zaps to comments. (or, something like that)
That would be cool -- the context thing would be an interesting challenge, though a fun one, and it would help w/ notifications, too. You wrap the thing you're being notified about in a bundle of context so it can be interpreted.
(Perhaps could also incentivize people to make their comments more 'sovereign' in that they contain enough ingredients to be interpretable with minimal other context.)
You could always just have a feed of "hot comments" treated as a territory? If you wanted to not do something bespoke. But what the hell do I know. Well, I know that such a thing would probably be more interesting to me than the post-centric version, as I can dig into any conversational cul-de-sac regardless of topic if it's hopping, but many things I won't see because the post's topic is not a particular interest of mine.
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This might be a good example of what you're talking about.
No one would have any reason to suspect this interesting little chat, that belonged in ~meta, was in a ~Stacker_Sports post, but it would have been nice for more people to have weighted in on it.
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Perfect illustration, thanks for providing one. It's fun to imagine how one could display this on some kind of feed, and how its candidacy for such a feed could be determined. First thing that comes to mind is a weighted-subtree thing, e.g., sum up the zaps of the whole subtree, and then show the highest ones; or the subtree up to some depth, or only top-level sub-trees bc the first thing I said is computationally unfeasible...
And then what to show for it? The parent comment? An LLM-summary of the subtree? The parent comment + a summary? Lots of cool things you could pilot. Harder to figure out how to do user influence on top of it, though -- graph embeddings beyond my paygrade, but maybe some simpler way would be 60% as good.
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And then what to show for it?
That's tough, because the interesting topic could have started anywhere in the tree. Just showing the parent comment might not give any sense of why that subtree generated so much value.
Even if there are good LLM summaries of the conversation, they will still have to decide where to send users who want to check out the thread.
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If there's a high-value embedded comment lower in the subtree, it would hopefully have been zapped appropriately, though, right? And practically speaking, it's not usually that onerous to read a subtree. It's rare for them to cross the "see more replies" boundary, empirically. Or at least, that's my sense.
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I think you're probably right. I haven't thought about what kind of metric to look at, but it should be pretty easy to at least get close to where the interesting conversation started.
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top-level sub-trees
This is something we've been planning to do, ie rank sub-tree roots by their sub-tree's zap sum. Posts, being sub-tree roots themselves, could also see their ranking enhanced when they contain a great sub-tree.
We'd do this when writing the zap at a cost
log(zap_depth), ie one update for every ancestor.
homearen't great feng shui, but maybe we can surfacehotglobal comments some other way.