hey, I'll say that I'm not sure if it's viable long-term or a "good" approach, but I wanted to try it. From years of reddit use, I see voting as a way to amplify echo chambers, and with sqwok I'm hoping to at least try to diminish that. Being based on realtime chat vs threaded comments may be a slightly different experience as well.
I know that one change I'd make to HN would be to disallow voting without at least a single-word comment accompanying the vote. Can't be bothered to contribute? Then you can't be bothered to vote, either.
Failing that, I wish comment votes were rendered with 'sparklines' instead of numbers alone. I find it surprisingly interesting to watch my comment scores go up and down over timeframes corresponding to daylight hours in various parts of the world. It would be very cool to see voting trends presented in graphical form. And it should be fairly obvious that posts that oscillate between high and low scores tend to be more thought-provoking than those that shoot to +4 or -4 and stay there.
> disallow voting without at least a single-word comment accompanying the vote. Can't be bothered to contribute? Then you can't be bothered to vote, either.
That's interesting, and I agree with the idea that there should be _some_ requirement to contribute more than just an opaque vote.
In another comment I mentioned using "activity" as a metric for relevance, but another thing I've thought about is perhaps in the same vein as your thought here, where instead of voting, you could write certain phrases that would match a sentiment. That way the people in the conversation could engage with the message and it would further the discussion. Voting is hidden and doesn't match how conversations happen in real life.
One thing I always liked was the old discussion forums which had subforums for different subjects and then the posts in each subforum were ordered by most recent comment.
The result is similar to voting. Things people are interested in discussing on stay on the front page, things they're not fall off. But then you don't need "gravity" to downrank old posts with many votes, because when people lose interest they stop commenting. Which also means something stays visible as long as people stay interested in it. Whereas "gravity" encourages discussions to be cut short because it's almost impossible for any post to remain visible for more than a day or two, even it was still actively being discussed.
> Things people are interested in discussing on stay on the front page, things they're not fall off.
I like this. So currently on the homepage, and individual user (nest) pages the list of content has two sort options, "hot", and "new". The "hot" sort takes into account the message activity of the post similar to what you described. The effect is that active posts bubble to the top, and even old posts can become current again (anti-gravity) if the activity picks up once more. I think about how humans interact in real-life group discussions, where there is no "voting" on a discussion happening. The "voting" in real-life is in the form of the size of the discussion and how many people it attracts. If you put 100 ppl in a room and gave out a topic, the most interesting discussions would naturally form and people would be attracted to those.
