There is no way to get a handle on comment and submission quality without content analysis.
You need a list of properties that define good comments and good submissions, you need some way to quantify those properties and then you need to invest obscene amounts of work coding those properties.
All of this is hard work and full of uncertainty. Different people want HN to be different things, there can’t be one list of properties that does them all justice. Who gets to define what a good comment or a good submission is? Is it even possible to exhaustively translate someone’s understanding of a good comment or a good submission into a list of properties? Can those properties be quantified, in the best case with as little work as possible? Does the coding process scale to the amount of content that has to be analyzed?
This is a Ph.D. thesis worth of work. I wouldn’t try to do it as a hobby.
You need a list of properties that define good comments and good submissions, you need some way to quantify those properties and then you need to invest obscene amounts of work coding those properties.
All of this is hard work and full of uncertainty. Different people want HN to be different things, there can’t be one list of properties that does them all justice. Who gets to define what a good comment or a good submission is? Is it even possible to exhaustively translate someone’s understanding of a good comment or a good submission into a list of properties? Can those properties be quantified, in the best case with as little work as possible? Does the coding process scale to the amount of content that has to be analyzed?
This is a Ph.D. thesis worth of work. I wouldn’t try to do it as a hobby.