Yes it’s interesting but it’s also more complicated than that.
I tend to start at the top and up/downvote some of what I encounter. By the time I get lower on the page, I have several reasons to care less about each comment:
1) fatigue
2) an expectation that these lower ranked comments may be less worthwhile to read
3) the fact that any reply I make to a lower ranked comment is unlikely to have any impact or even be read at all (so why bother).
Even voting for low ranked comments has little payoff, because the ranking setup virtually guarantees that they are only being read by a couple people.
You can verify this fact by posting a quality comment right as the west coast is waking up on a story that has already been up for say 8 hours, where comments in the story have already garnered a lot of votes. Your good / interesting comment will likely sit at 1 point forever.
This seems to be a blind spot in the design of most comment vote ranking systems. Including HN.
So in case it wasn’t clear, although I agree it’s interesting, the part I disagree with is that the west coast has the last word. Technically they are the last, but for some stories that have already been voted on by other time zones, the ranking is already cemented.
I tend to start at the top and up/downvote some of what I encounter. By the time I get lower on the page, I have several reasons to care less about each comment:
1) fatigue
2) an expectation that these lower ranked comments may be less worthwhile to read
3) the fact that any reply I make to a lower ranked comment is unlikely to have any impact or even be read at all (so why bother).
Even voting for low ranked comments has little payoff, because the ranking setup virtually guarantees that they are only being read by a couple people.
You can verify this fact by posting a quality comment right as the west coast is waking up on a story that has already been up for say 8 hours, where comments in the story have already garnered a lot of votes. Your good / interesting comment will likely sit at 1 point forever.
This seems to be a blind spot in the design of most comment vote ranking systems. Including HN.
So in case it wasn’t clear, although I agree it’s interesting, the part I disagree with is that the west coast has the last word. Technically they are the last, but for some stories that have already been voted on by other time zones, the ranking is already cemented.