[threeseed]

This makes absolutely no sense to me.

For almost all stories you can work out its popularity just by the number of comments. And you can determine the comment count (-/+ an order of magnitude) just by scrolling through the comments. The accurate number isn't important for most people.

None of this will prevent the dissemination of fake news. What will do is (a) not prioritising it and (b) detecting whether it's fake. Facebook just added solutions to do both.

[themagician]

Remove the number of comments.

People comment on stories with the most comments and usually reply to the first set of posts because they want their post to be seen, accelerating commenting in that thread.

If you want to count comments fine. Most people won’t. FB actually makes this hard to do.

Would be fascinating to even try it here on HN. If you hit all the integer counters it would dramatically change the way people use the site.

[threeseed]

I just went to a popular article by the New York Times on Facebook. Just by scrolling down through the pages of comments I could determine that it was likely to be a popular article.

Go ahead remove the number of comments. It won't solve the problem Facebook is trying to solve.

[themagician]

Yeah, but you actually had to do that. You didn’t get to just look at the headline and see how many people agreed with it before you even read it.

You would, of course, have to combine this with not just showing it to people who already hold those opinions.

[DrScump]

   you can work out its popularity just by the number of comments

Popularity, yes. Accuracy, no.

[jamiethompson]

That's the kicker though. For the vast majority of people popularity == accuracy.

[babuskov]

> work out its popularity

Or controversy.