i) work on the reddit model (submissions + tree of comments on them) ii) are heavily moderated (e.g. no memes but also specific restrictions like on a book series subreddit to not discuss the movie adaptations)
Then this vote-based ranking makes cream rise to the top, I agree.
In general, your "depending on how best is defined in the given context" does a lot of heavy lifting.
I think the only pay most get, is that you get to enjoy the site content. But in the case of Youtube, they slap so many ads in front of it that you often end up paying for this free labor content just to get rid of the ads. HN doesn't do Ad walls, but is more of a sales funnel for YCombinator and harvesting whatever value they can from the data, so not so intrusive.
[1] Youtube does pay some of the more popular content creators
Sadly that is all that reddit is, now. Have a serious question? Expect multiple top replies to be some sort of [un]funny joke answer.
It's a wasteland and devalues the platform when everyone competes for Internet Points.
/r/aviation is just one example of being full of this crap.
Oddly enough, I don't see it as much in gaming subreddits, even the more generic ones.
Yet one can imagine a limited set of filters that could in theory fix this:
- eliminate obvious bots
- eliminate low content / metoo / naysaying
- eliminate memes
- detect and promote high quality controversial posts equally to unilaterally upvoted ones
still i suspect the largest barrier is merely that all the popular social media sites are actively captured by ad-driven development / leaders. That cant last forever, people are sick of it.
Subreddits get jokes or noob content going to the top.
PBS's Spacetime channel on Youtube -- one of the few channels with a budget to go into more depth (as in, not afraid to show you some math) on science -- has three types of comments at the top: jokes, thanks to the algorithm, and commenters saying they're too dumb to understand the video.
Political posts here on HN end up with the attention getting rhetoric going to the top.
"Surfacing the best comments" is only a problem at scale. And attention media demands scale whereas your social circles break down at scale. Commerce sites (like Yelp or Amazon) also demand scale, so they also have a "surfacing the best" mechanism.
That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).
"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.
Facebook on the other hand has become too very bad.
Is it your intention to suggest that the highest possible form of commenting is humorous?