this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
133 points (97.2% liked)

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133
An underrated feature of Lemmy that I appreciate: Default ranking for comments balances new comments and comments with many upvotes (feddit.dk)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/lemmyworld
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

On a large subreddit with more than 100K users, it's an unspoken rule that if a thread has more than 200 comments, don't bother making a new comment because it will get buried by the default comment ranking and no one will interact with it. Nobody uses the "new" ranking because you're only going to see the meaningless one-sentence comments from people who don't care about visibility. Only reply to the top comments in the thread after that point if you want to have a discussion.

I really appreciate that Lemmy's default comment ranking lets the most upvoted comments fall off the top of the thread after a while so that newer comments appear at the top instead. It prevents threads from looking like circlejerks where all of the top comments agree with each other and encourages people to add their thoughts in a new comment instead of dogpiling on the top comment. This combined with disabling the global karma count is what improves the discussion experience from Reddit most, in my opinion.

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[–] ndr 44 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And you can also easily see the number of upvotes and downvotes separately (not possible anymore with Reddit’s β€œimprovements”) which can be very helpful in some cases

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Worse, Reddit implements a "vote fuzzing" algorithm where the upvote count can't be determined reliably. The degree of fuzzing is worse for accounts that are considered untrustworthy based on device fingerprinting, like accounts using the old desktop site and accounts using a VPN.

[–] spirals 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The vote fuzziness drove me insane sometimes, I just want to know the actual number.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I just refresh a few times, and I figure whatever the median number is is the real karma lol

[–] Redex68 1 points 1 year ago

I mean, it didn't really matter. The delta would be like Β±10%, does it really matter? You're more interested in the magnitude.

[–] ndr 12 points 1 year ago

While here you can currently enjoy the buggy, flickering upvote count doing parkour /s

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That seems to depend on the community or instance. I can see them on some, but not others.

[–] ndr 9 points 1 year ago

Some communities like beehaw have disabled downvotes.

[–] ericjmorey 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I do like this too.

I want to point out that the "new" sort for comments, however, only takes into account the top level comments. So it may be hard to see the actual newest comments on a post that has aged a bit.

I put in an issue about it on GitHub dut it's gotten no traction at all.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't that how it should work though? If you sort it by comment chains with the newest comment it will almost always be nearly the same as a top sort, since the most commented on comments will likely have the newest comments under them

[–] ericjmorey 1 points 1 year ago

If I want to see the newest comments, I'd want to see the top level comment which has the newest comment nested before anything else so that I can see the newest comment in context

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm curious if this is what chat sorting does. Otherwise how is it different from new?

[–] Redex68 2 points 1 year ago

I don't really get chat but I think the difference is that replies are looked at as separate comments, they're decoupled from the parent comment.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

So true about needing to reply to top comments. Sucks.

I didn't notice the change here. Thanks for pointing it out :)