For sites like reddit that have simple up-and-down votes rather than star ratings, one alternative is to generate a confidence interval for the fraction of positive votes. The interval starts wide when a comment has only a few votes and narrows to a definite value (“70% of voters like this comment”) as comments accumulate; sort the comments by the bottom bound of their confidence intervals. New comments start near the bottom, but the best among them accumulate votes and creep up the page as the confidence interval narrows. And because comments are sorted by the proportion of positive votes
...more
