There are many boards were ranking is simply decided by recent activity of replies. I find that DeviantArt has the ideal forum: a tree-based structure like Reddit, and H.N., and the top comment within a branch of the tree is simply the one which had the most recent reply to a child recursively, and any new replies always end up at the top.
This achieves two important goals:
1) visibility is dictated by activity and nothing more: a good comment is a comment that generates discussion
2) visibility is statistical in nature: less active trees still sometimes end up in the most visible spot, simply less often than more active trees
I dislike votes and the idea of “soft bans”: a comment is either against the rules, in which case it should be removed altogether and appropriate actions should be taken against the user, or it is within the rules and should not be “soft banned” by being faded out or something similar.
no filtering rules only work when you can consume the whole feed in a reasonable time. note that reddit gives you the option to sort e.g. by controversial. since you can't not have a first comment (notable meme on slashdot - FP!), you need to sort somehow; the whole point of activity feeds, walls, scoring is to show the most valuable (to someone... not necessarily you - but sometimes, you) content first.
If the grey area be popular enough with the voters, then it will simply be upvoted. The post you replied to is downvoted. It is not in any grey area of guidelines; it is simply a post that two more people disagreed with than agreed with.
There are many boards were ranking is simply decided by recent activity of replies. I find that DeviantArt has the ideal forum: a tree-based structure like Reddit, and H.N., and the top comment within a branch of the tree is simply the one which had the most recent reply to a child recursively, and any new replies always end up at the top.
This achieves two important goals:
1) visibility is dictated by activity and nothing more: a good comment is a comment that generates discussion
2) visibility is statistical in nature: less active trees still sometimes end up in the most visible spot, simply less often than more active trees
I dislike votes and the idea of “soft bans”: a comment is either against the rules, in which case it should be removed altogether and appropriate actions should be taken against the user, or it is within the rules and should not be “soft banned” by being faded out or something similar.