I guess that would fall down once you get to mixed comments - something can be snarky, funny, off- and on-topic at the same time. Human conversational interaction is just bloody hard to quantify. The first few steps are always simple and then it gets hard fast.
Passive voting sounds interesting, though - would that work via Javascript? How would you determine what the user is focused on?
Finally - I think it's important not to get ahead of ourselves - because I think that's what happened at Slashdot. Talking about new classifications is all nice and well, but it's useless when you don't have a clear plan what it should result in and how it would engage people. You need a clear use case.
For instance - my proposal about an off-topic discussion button is pretty straight forward. People would see the immediate benefit: Hey, this can help us make conversation less wasteful and save me scanning time as it separates the cream from the crop. I think it wouldn't have a problem enticing engagement, too - nothing drives engagement in nerds like being annoyed, so they'd click that button.
On Slashdot, I can theoretically reduce a conversation to exclude all the funny-only comments so I'm left with just the cream. But seriously - how often does anybody use that? Once you give people elaborate personal filters, you actually end up having them worry whether they're missing something. Which is why they can only be consistent and transparent. If I reduce a comment thread on Slashdot to exclude the funny business and see that one of the nodes has a HUGE conversation, I wonder whether I should check it out and maybe end up annoyed because it's just a chain of memes after all. If there was a way in HN to mark things as off-topic and have that a clear process that is always applied, I think I would be more confident in skipping. Mainly because if it was broken, the community would complain until it is fixed.
Passive voting sounds interesting, though - would that work via Javascript? How would you determine what the user is focused on?
Finally - I think it's important not to get ahead of ourselves - because I think that's what happened at Slashdot. Talking about new classifications is all nice and well, but it's useless when you don't have a clear plan what it should result in and how it would engage people. You need a clear use case.
For instance - my proposal about an off-topic discussion button is pretty straight forward. People would see the immediate benefit: Hey, this can help us make conversation less wasteful and save me scanning time as it separates the cream from the crop. I think it wouldn't have a problem enticing engagement, too - nothing drives engagement in nerds like being annoyed, so they'd click that button.
On Slashdot, I can theoretically reduce a conversation to exclude all the funny-only comments so I'm left with just the cream. But seriously - how often does anybody use that? Once you give people elaborate personal filters, you actually end up having them worry whether they're missing something. Which is why they can only be consistent and transparent. If I reduce a comment thread on Slashdot to exclude the funny business and see that one of the nodes has a HUGE conversation, I wonder whether I should check it out and maybe end up annoyed because it's just a chain of memes after all. If there was a way in HN to mark things as off-topic and have that a clear process that is always applied, I think I would be more confident in skipping. Mainly because if it was broken, the community would complain until it is fixed.