Could there be a way to help surface comments by people who have amassed lots of likes across all of their comments? Or folks who have commented the most prolifically? It’d be nice to have a setting that would make it so that when I scroll to the comments section, the top three that I see before expanding to see more could be written by people who have posted a lot and/or been liked the most. Or maybe you could attach an icon to their profiles (like the VIP/EP tags) that would make it easier to single them out while scrolling through the full list of comments.
Depending on how many active members you have you could set this group to be among a top percentile that would make the list of commenters manageable. Maybe setting it as the top 100, or 500, or 1,000?
If you see a comment you really like, just click on the username and check out their profile. That’s the most reliable way to find commenters worth following.
The length and detail of a comment is the best indicator of quality (for example, Andrew Bloom). So unless someone only complains and tends to break a show down scene by scene creating an angry wall of text, that’s what you should pay attention to. The amount of likes a comment gets… not so much.
Because top rated comments are, by default, seen first and are usually the only ones seen, because you have to want to click though to even see the rest, they’re subject to an extreme popularity bias. Newer, better comments often get overlooked just because they were posted a few days/weeks/years later.
@zax2000 I don’t know if there is necessarily any correlation between the frequency and quality of a user’s comments… Most-liked I could understand, though.
@AeronMelon Just to add my 2 cents here: I personally disagree that length is an indicator of quality. For me, it’s more like a bell curve: One-line comments probably don’t have much to say. Conversely, I don’t come to trakt looking to read 1000-word essays. 1-2 paragraphs is where it’s at, for me at least.
To your point re: recency bias – I think you’re absolutely right that the usefulness of liked comments is limited due to the fact that later comments will invariably be buried.
One solution that comes to mind is a new sorting option for the comments called, say, “Recommended”. This option would display a mix of most liked and most recent comments, and would be the default sorting for comments. This way, newer comments would also have a chance to be seen and “liked”.
It’s definitely not a perfect solution… Anyone have other ideas?
My initial idea is to use the most liked comments in the last 30 days as the default, instead of looking at all time. I’ll need to look into that and see what it will take on the backend to do that.
Either default to Recent, and maybe load more than three comments at a time, or make a new sort called Random just for in-line comments on a page. Have it say something like “Here’s what some people are saying about this movie/show/season/episode:” and clicking through to the dedicated comments page allows people to see and sort everything like normal.
(Speaking of which, I think surfacing random comments, instead of most-liked or most-recent, would be a great default for the new user pages. Same goes for showing more comments at a time.)
I feel that is a very reasonable way of handling this. I would make sure to avoid having it come across to users as some kind of subjective algorithm though (Trending pages on other sites for instance).
I would just make sure to name it something like “Recently Popular” or something like that so people understand how it functions, and could have a little icon that says the number of those likes that there have been in the last 30 days.
Summary pages now default to the most liked comments in the last 30 days. It won’t fully solve the problem of keeping the comments fresh, but should help. Hover over the like count to see how many in the last 30 days. The full comments pages (for an item or user) also has additional sort options to view 30 days or all time.
Thanks for the update @justin ! I’m still not sure if this really helps, though. The first comments will inevitably receive the most likes initially, and will most likely continue to receive the most likes each month.
Rather than showing the comments with the most likes in the last 30 days, would it perhaps make sense to show comments made in the last 30 days which have received the most likes?
(Only problem is, less popular titles may not have any comments in the past 30 days. In such cases, it would have to look at a longer period of time.)
