PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system? • Hacker News Board

Re: PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?

#41

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 13, 2007, 2:50 PM UTC

byrneseyeview wrote: post #39

staunch wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe richardkulisz was also dinged. His new username is "redditcensoredme". So it does seem to only be the most extreme cases. There are some very popular forum sites that have existed for years and maintained civility. Any Reddit-type site could learn a lot from them. They almost all have a group of core users who act as moderators and enforce a set of published rules. It's critical that they not make up the ru…

I think richardkulisz just misunderstood the reporting algorithm. He was a little less polite than pica, so people resented and reported him rather than downmodding and ignoring.

[deleted]

Re: PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?

#42

Post by whacked_new » Fri, Jul 13, 2007, 4:48 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #20

On the topic of community makeup, here are some interesting findings that come from Yahoo's social scientists (using Yahoo lists as the dataset): 1) Small groups have higher numbers of core users 2) Private and semi-public groups have higher numbers of core users than public groups 3) People in private groups remain in the core for longer 4) A user who is in the core of one group is more likely to become a member of…

I suspect these findings will apply to a certain type of "community." It does not, for example, apply easily to the wikipedia community.

What would be equally interesting as these findings, are the premises. What service, what content, what medium, what purpose, and extremely importantly, how presented.

Re: PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?

#43

Post by whacked_new » Fri, Jul 13, 2007, 5:14 PM UTC

Jd wrote: post #37

ryanmahoski wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there may be a way to build the wall you describe in the general-public site. Pretend you could rate commenters, not publicly but privately--for your own private use. If you spot a particularly dumb comment on reddit, you could blacklist the commenter--privately, so that your action would affect only you. Similarly, when you notice a brilliant comment you will want to permanently highlight its author so t…

Your algorithm suggestion is interesting, but probably not sufficient. Although reddit trolls are one step up from internet spammers, the same principle applies. With sufficient quantity of trolls/spammers blocking each one individually becomes an incredibly time intensive task - enough to drive away all those who don't have tons of time on their hands. Pg speaks above about customs, but the problem with customers ha…

I tend to think online discussion systems will evolve to approximate real discussion. The online aspect is simply to allow easier information management, synchronization of more people (which would be physically impossible), and decrease of distance. Temporal issues aside, it makes pretty much sense, in that problems in real discussion easily predict problems in online discussion, and fixes to online discussion systems address problems in live discussion. It seems to me, however, that developers of discussion systems stop relating the online system to the real interaction and try to impose methods that make more programming sense, but less natural sense. Of course I'm probably not qualified to say this because I don't know how valid my theories are; we will see.

Nevertheless, based on this perspective, I suspect the tiered system would not work, simply because we don't think in tiers in real life. Everything is graded in subjective degrees. One day your Lisp email list would evolve into a nonsensical banter (somebody starts posting after getting drunk). One day a couple geniuses post on digg and write a bestseller novel on the comment system within 24 hours. Perhaps unlikely, but not impossible. There are zero barriers in real life that let this happen; when it needs to happen, it will. But online, the system becomes the barrier.

So instead of a multi-tier system, I believe the best system is bound to be an aribtrarily-tiered system. How might this work? Consider yomama on reddit, who posts yo mama jokes on every thread. Troll yes, but also a clown. If there is a clown thread, yomama gets the crown (sorry). Thing is, there are "tiers" in the sense that you only have upmod and downmod. And really, what do those mean? A tier of good, a tier of bad? Predefined categories will never be enough.

If there are disagreeing voices, I'd love to hear.

Re: PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?

#44

Post by euccastro » Fri, Jul 13, 2007, 7:16 PM UTC

twism wrote: post #6

brett wrote: post #3

Incidentally I came across this while trying to find information about how reddit stores threaded comments. I've read they use postgres and while I've also read about many workable techniques to force hierarchical (and frequently reordered) comments into a relational db these solutions all sort of make me cringe. I'd welcome anyone's ideas here as well.

i am in the process of making a news.yc clone... threaded comments are not as easy as it looks on news.yc. [edit] especially when the comments get reordered on votes.

What's hard about threaded comments, exactly?

Re: PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?

#45

Post by euccastro » Fri, Jul 13, 2007, 7:22 PM UTC

Jd wrote: post #29

nostrademons wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned a possible solution here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902 , but I'm really commenting because there's a really cool connection between PG's approach of storing it as an in-memory tree and my approach of a 2048-bit index: Y'know how in a typical CS datastructures course you'll have to build a heap, and then reimplement with an array? A heap is conceptually a balanced binary tree where every leaf…

Just thinking off the cuff here, but couldn't one store a lisp-style list as a string in a relational database. If I was using Ruby on Rails, I could simply build a simple lisp interpreter in Ruby to parse the string, then capture it as an in-memory tree. This way I would only have active items in memory and could use some of the advantages of the standard web development platforms for whatever else I was doing. Edit…

Why are you using a database, in this case? Aren't you better off serializing your tree using the native methods of your language? (e.g., with pickle.dump() in Python.)

Re: PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?

#46

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Jul 14, 2007, 2:17 AM UTC

euccastro wrote: post #45

Jd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just thinking off the cuff here, but couldn't one store a lisp-style list as a string in a relational database. If I was using Ruby on Rails, I could simply build a simple lisp interpreter in Ruby to parse the string, then capture it as an in-memory tree. This way I would only have active items in memory and could use some of the advantages of the standard web development platforms for whatever else I was doing. Edit…

Why are you using a database, in this case? Aren't you better off serializing your tree using the native methods of your language? (e.g., with pickle.dump() in Python.)

Database for searching for by the item (news story, game, journal entry), pickle or sexprs for the individual comment threads. The database helps you manage the hopefully large number of news stories you'll get. The tree takes care of individual comments for a single news story.

Many filesystems have trouble with large numbers of files in a single directory, as you'd get with eg. pickle tree to a file per item.

Re: PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?

#47

Post by Jd » Sat, Jul 14, 2007, 2:54 AM UTC

Jd wrote: post #40

Alex3917 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I heard this talk at the Cornell Microsoft International Symposium on Self-Organizing Online Communities. The presentation was called "Implications for Future Research; Theory and Methods in Large Scale Analysis of Online Communities." And the three Yahoo presenters were Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins, and Cameron Marlow. Not sure which one those three specifically, but I'm sure you could ask any of them. I've develop…

At least one related paper is available online: http://research.yahoo.com/publication/structure_and_evolutio... I probably won't have time to read it until this evening, but will post then.

Yeah, this is mostly about speed of growth in social networks and only looks at Yahoo 360 and Flickr. I will keep looking for the original paper and post back if I find it.

Re: PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?

#48

Post by Jd » Sat, Jul 14, 2007, 3:02 AM UTC

whacked_new wrote: post #43

Jd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your algorithm suggestion is interesting, but probably not sufficient. Although reddit trolls are one step up from internet spammers, the same principle applies. With sufficient quantity of trolls/spammers blocking each one individually becomes an incredibly time intensive task - enough to drive away all those who don't have tons of time on their hands. Pg speaks above about customs, but the problem with customers ha…

I tend to think online discussion systems will evolve to approximate real discussion. The online aspect is simply to allow easier information management, synchronization of more people (which would be physically impossible), and decrease of distance. Temporal issues aside, it makes pretty much sense, in that problems in real discussion easily predict problems in online discussion, and fixes to online discussion syste…

I disagree that we don't think in tiers in real life. We do - except they are called roles or titles. For instance, the typical university has undergraduate students, graduate students, professors and administrators. One could simply say that there are four tiers. The reason that we don't think of it this way is most of these institutions have grown up organically over time, or at the very least we aren't aware of the original design decisions.

Now I'm not arguing that we should necessarily replicate real-world institutions in online form, but one should at least recognize that real-world institutions (like universities) provide various measures which enforce content quality.

As for approximating real discussion, I'm not sure exactly what you mean. There are many different types of real discussion, from idle conversation about sports to academic journals about the poetry of W.B. Yeats. Although certain similar principles apply, the way in which you would model either of these would have to be different.

I'm afraid I also don't understand what you mean by an arbitrarily-tiered system. Are you arguing in favor of the reddit model?

Re: PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?

#49

Post by Jd » Sat, Jul 14, 2007, 3:15 AM UTC

euccastro wrote: post #45

Jd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just thinking off the cuff here, but couldn't one store a lisp-style list as a string in a relational database. If I was using Ruby on Rails, I could simply build a simple lisp interpreter in Ruby to parse the string, then capture it as an in-memory tree. This way I would only have active items in memory and could use some of the advantages of the standard web development platforms for whatever else I was doing. Edit…

Why are you using a database, in this case? Aren't you better off serializing your tree using the native methods of your language? (e.g., with pickle.dump() in Python.)

The question has to do with storage. I suppose you could serialize it and store in a flat file, but will this beat the DB access time, even if there is extra time needed for interpretation?

Re: PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?

#50

Post by Jd » Sat, Jul 14, 2007, 3:16 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #46

euccastro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you using a database, in this case? Aren't you better off serializing your tree using the native methods of your language? (e.g., with pickle.dump() in Python.)

Database for searching for by the item (news story, game, journal entry), pickle or sexprs for the individual comment threads. The database helps you manage the hopefully large number of news stories you'll get. The tree takes care of individual comments for a single news story. Many filesystems have trouble with large numbers of files in a single directory, as you'd get with eg. pickle tree to a file per item.

Is this what you are actually doing? How do you store the pickle output?