The best thing about reddit, imo was the lack of comments. This way, it avoided a lot of the moronicism of slashdot.

:(

As Aaronsw points out, there's a big difference between Reddit comments and Slashdot comments. Reddit comments are ranked. Which means not only that the lame stuff gets pushed to the bottom where you can ignore it, but that, because the order can change, users won't be tempted into the kind of it-is-so, it-is-not, it-is-so kind of interchange that makes Slashdot comments so tedious.

And of course there's no "frist post!" phenomenon, because the (graphically) first post is the one voted the best, not the first chronologically.

Plus you can take a real karma hit if you post something dumb that a lot of people mod down. That should make people think twice.

Put all these together and I think comments on Reddit will end up being a lot better than on Slashdot.

What if a post gets a very low score but the replies to it get a very high score? Then the root post gets ranked downward, but the subposts with a high score unfortunately move downward with it as well?

You have made a good point. This is also a very irritating feature in Slashdot which I am afraid will manifest itself here as well.

For e.g: If you respond to something and then someone else responds to you. But the responder does not quote you or the context in which he is responding. Now the moderating hordes march in. Since they know the context of the reply it gets a high score. So that reply moves up in ranking. If someone new comes in later and does not know the context in which the post was made, he is at a loss.

This is very much true in Slashdot, Kuroshin, Plastic etc where you go in and browse at level 5 for example.

You are talking about a situation where root posts disappear while their higher-scoring subposts remain. What I meant however was that, as bugbear said, low-scoring posts get pushed to the bottom of the page; but it may be the case that their subposts score highly. Thus it would seem better to let the rank (location in page) of a thread take into account the scores of its subthreads.

will comments dissapear if ranked low enough? I can just see the pages with 5000 comments now..

not yet, but we'll play around with it

You can rank the comments and demote the moronicism.

Like a lot of people I can't claim to know first-hand about the harsh realities of war. That's why it matters a lot to me that McCain is the one leading the fight against torture in Washington. He has a military background; he would not advocate something that would prevent us from defending ourselves. And unfortunately for him he knows a lot about torture specifically.

Even the White House could not avoid noticing how bad it was for PR to have Cheney, who avoided service in Vietnam, advocating torture, and McCain, a war hero, speaking out against it. So they've switched to lying. "We do not torture" is now the official line. For some definition of "torture" that they know the hearer doesn't share. Where have I heard this before? "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

Firstly, there is a fine but important line between torture and coercive interrogation methods. This article does not distinguish between the two, nor does it pose a good argument because it states that these methods are an ineffective way of getting information (which I think is wrong), and then launches into heart-jerker human interest pieces. Bad journalism.

The McCain Amendment would require that ALL interrogations be conducted in accordance with the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation. The problem, as argued by critics of this amendment, is that Al Qaeda or terorists combantants would be given POW status, when they themselves do not comply with basic laws of war (deliberately attacking civilians is prohibited). The consequence is that this legitimizes and elevates terrorist organizations to the same level of nations.

It's a New York Times editorial that was also published in the IHT.

Here's the copy published in the NYT.

Oh, fair enough.

Make sure to go back and read the comments on the submission entitled "Reddit now supports comments".

That's where the intelligent conversation is, concerning Reddit's comment system.

Comments? About time, I want to see what other people think about some articles.

A most interesting feature

blimey! my comments keep getting lost. what is going on here??

Are you sure they don't just get moved down? Comments are sorted by score.

ha ha ha... i am rofl.

really :)))

but i still think this site's getting an awful lot like METAFILTER.

this is wonderful. just what i needed.

I do what the computer tells me to, so I'm posting a comment here. (just trying the comments out)

This is comment to link Reddit no supports comments. Just testing. Below I seet comment where bugbear discusses war? Something wrong here?

just testing this feature