Alicorn comments on New "Best" comment sorting system - Less Wrong

25 Post author: matt 02 July 2012 11:08AM

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Comment author: Alicorn 02 July 2012 04:46:14PM 5 points [-]

How do the "Best", "Popular", and "Top" algorithms work?

Comment author: albeola 02 July 2012 06:22:22PM 5 points [-]

Ironically, it appears the new algorithm is frequentist.

Comment author: matt 02 July 2012 11:00:39PM 3 points [-]

Bayesian reformulations welcome.

Comment author: albeola 04 July 2012 08:07:08AM 1 point [-]

Apologies — I should have taken reinforcement into account and noted that the new algorithm is probably still a lot better than the previous one.

Comment author: jsalvatier 03 July 2012 03:02:14AM 0 points [-]

This seems like a neat problem. Would it be hard to go from a python function that takes a set of comment upvote downvote counts and returns a ranking to a comment sorting option? If I don't know much about the reddit internals?

Also, would it be difficult to get a real dataset of comment counts from LW?

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 02 July 2012 06:46:56PM *  2 points [-]

"Top" simply calculates the (number of upvotes - number of downvotes) and puts on top the comments that rank the highest this way.

I think "Popular" tries to favor comments that don't have many downvotes or something, I'm not sure.

"Best" apparently works by magic.

Comment author: matt 02 July 2012 10:56:57PM *  2 points [-]

I think "Popular" adds weight to recent comments. This seems to be a much worse way of achieving what "Best" shoots for.

Comment author: Elund 03 November 2014 02:00:38AM *  0 points [-]

This seems to be a much worse way of achieving what "Best" shoots for.

Not necessarily. Someone who has already seen the best comments and returns a while later to see what new but good comments have been posted may have a use for it.