13

In Data Explorer, looking through some SO data, I noticed that some comments have 0 for Score, while others are null. Why is this? Is there a difference between 0 and null comment scores?

Improve this question
5
  • 4
    I guess the null ones were never upvoted, and the 0 ones were upvoted then the votes retreated... – Nean Der Thal Mar 2 '14 at 23:17
  • @MeNoTalk Ohh, maybe. That makes sense. – Jason C Mar 2 '14 at 23:18
  • 4
    Not a duplicate of meta.stackexchange.com/q/210595/223030 - that question talks about comment counts on posts, this one's about scores of individual comments. – michaelb958--GoFundMonica Mar 3 '14 at 1:03
  • 1
    You must know that one of the new task Twilight was given after becoming a princess was to manage the stack servers dbs. As you may expect she is very diligent and always marks comments with zero votes as "0" - after all mathematic isn't an opinion, isn't it?. Problems started to arise when that lazy pegasi friend of her started helping in the weekend. With the official explanation that "Now the data are 20% cooler" she started to leave null valued field to be faster... – SPArcheon Oct 1 '14 at 14:25
  • 1
    Null is just a very low value of zero, it makes sense to me. – Tim Post Oct 1 '14 at 14:38
4

Similar to the answer given here by Catija, Comments that received an upvote that was later retracted have a Score of 0, whereas Comments that never received any upvotes are inserted into the table with a Score of NULL.

Also similar to favorites (even less useful, I'd argue), not much can be read into this information, as someone could've upvoted by accident and then simply removed it right after, or changed their mind about the upvote for any reason.

Especially considering that the timeframe you have to remove upvotes is small.

Improve this answer
2

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .