alt Hacker NewsI will admit, one thing the crowd attention model does exceptionally well is surface the best comments on content. Whether it's HN, Instagram, YouTube, etc... the top comments are usually the "best", depending on how best is defined in the given context. On the silly Instagram meme videos my algo serves up, the top comments are invariably hilarious, often funnier than the actual content, and as you scroll it's impressive how the ordering by like count matches hilarity quite well.
Replies
> the top comments are invariably hilarious,
Sadly that is all that reddit is, now. Have a serious question? Expect multiple top replies to be some sort of [un]funny joke answer.
It's a wasteland and devalues the platform when everyone competes for Internet Points.
/r/aviation is just one example of being full of this crap.
Oddly enough, I don't see it as much in gaming subreddits, even the more generic ones.
Excepting small communities: if you're looking for anything but humor, sort by best typically ruins the comments.
Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.
PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.
Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.
> depending on how best is defined in the given context
That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).
"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.
Speaking of instagram - i have found the ads sometimes incredibly helpful - sometimes exactly the thing i am looking for.
Facebook on the other hand has become too very bad.
I regularly see pretty bad/misinformed takes upvoted to the top though.
You have simply redefined “best” as “hilarious” “often funnier” or “hilarity”
Is it your intention to suggest that the highest possible form of commenting is humorous?
This works on platforms like HN, Less Wrong or niche subreddits, which
i) work on the reddit model (submissions + tree of comments on them) ii) are heavily moderated (e.g. no memes but also specific restrictions like on a book series subreddit to not discuss the movie adaptations)
Then this vote-based ranking makes cream rise to the top, I agree.
In general, your "depending on how best is defined in the given context" does a lot of heavy lifting.