Poll: Display points on comments?

[pg]

My goal in not showing points on comments was to prevent the sort of contentious exchanges where people (in this case literally) try to score points off one another. I feel like it has done that to some extent, but at a cost in other areas. So which do you prefer?

Here's the earlier thread about it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716

[samdk]

I think that not having points has some nice qualities, but it also feels like I'm being denied information that I find useful in reading/skimming a thread. I've noticed I find reading HN a lot harder while this has been in effect. (I've also noticed that I tend to unconsciously give numbers in usernames some weight when reading a comment. The same applies for the time it was posted.) One possible compromise would be to display either a number or simple graphic that approximates point totals instead of displaying them explicitly.

Also, I've been planning to write a longer blog post on the following, but given that I've had no time lately and am not likely to have any soon, I'll just float the idea here.

One idea I've had that I think might be interesting is dealing with upvotes or points in terms of logarithmic scales. That is, it takes one upvote/point to get a comment from 1-10, 2 upvotes/point to get from 11-20, etc. (Exact numbers would have to be scaled, of course.) I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going to make sure very few people ever read what I've written. An appropriately scaled log-scale system might make it so that really really good comments still get really really high scores, but so that others (which might have simply come too late in the discussion to be competitive on a raw-point scale) still get a chance at being seen.

(One related idea would be to make the point-approximating graphic log-scale even though the points themselves remain the same underneath.)

[abeppu]

I don't care about total points per se, I care about the probability that I'll appreciate having read something. What'd be a good proxy for this is the upvote rate, roughly upvotes divided by views (or rather, a MAP estimate of the upvote rate as the parameter of a binomial distribution, drawn from a beta prior...). The upvote count system, and the logged upvote count system both have the problem that if comment A has been seen 500 times and has 20 upvotes, and comment B has been seen 1000 times and has 30 upvotes, A is probably actually a bit better than B. An upvote rate fixes that problem, and still gives you a useful indicator about which comments are worth your attention.

The issue with upvote rates is that they're likely to be relatively low, and arithmetic differences between low probabilities aren't useful, so we should really use the log upvote rate -- but people aren't good at dealing with negative numbers, so it should be mapped to color or size or opacity of some indicator symbol or something. Suppose you had just a little dot next to each comment, the opacity of which is 100 + k * <log upvote rate>. Suppose k=8; exp(-12) is like 6 upvotes per million views, so almost no comment's dot would totally vanish, but if you had a 5% upvote rate your dot would be at ~75% opacity.

[joeguilmette]

I really, REALLY would like some way to distinguish 'excellent' comments from comments that are just rising to the top with higher point values.

a star, orange dot, bold title, anything.

that said I like HN without points.

[boredguy8]

I also want to suggest that it might be interesting to have some non-numeric display that still allows for the 'quick scan' that you mention.

I also dislike the lack of points because I find myself voting things down more than I would before. In the past, if something were at 0 or -1 points, usually I'd think, "They probably get the point." Now I find myself downvoting things that probably don't need one more down vote.

[starwed]

"One idea I've had that I think might be interesting is dealing with upvotes or points in terms of logarithmic scales. "

Ah, came here to say exactly this! The difference between 100 points and 120 points just isn't as interesting as the difference between 1 and 10.

Displaying something like floor(ln(points)) instead of points would be the way to go.

[rflrob]

> I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going to make sure very few people ever read what I've written.

I hadn't thought about this, but you're absolutely right. I think having the numbers on other people's posts does facilitate gaming the system quite a bit more. I'd be curious to see what the actual distribution is on points/comment, which might inform efforts to implement a logarithmic scaling on the effectiveness of upvotes.

No matter what happens with having other people's scores, please keep the option to have our own scores displayed. Having feedback on what the community finds upvote-worthy is definitely helpful.

[waterlesscloud]

Isn't the ideal outcome of all this a site where the comment threads are worth reading in full instead of skimming?

If there are so many skimmable comments in a thread that not having points gets to be annoying because you have to sift...well, then the experiment has failed.

But if on the other hand there are just plain fewer comments, which does seem like a possible outcome in the mid-range, and those comments are of higher quality...well, experiment has succeeded!

[emil0r]

I'd just rather have colour codes. Threshholds of 5, 10, 25, 45, 75+ or something along those lines.

Points trigger a certain response among some people. The ones that get sucked into WoW for example simply because they have this impulse of getting all the best gear. Works with points as well.

[rubergly]

Your example of a logarithmic upvote/point scale is wrong (it's currently a simple scale of multiplying by 10), and you might want to update it for clarity. I believe you meant it would take 1 upvote/point to get from 0 to 1, 10 upvotes/points to get from 1 to 2, etc.

[TheEzEzz]

Perhaps we could have a mix: top level comments have karma shown, but child comments do not. This way when quickly scanning for a good top level comment to read you have something to guide you, but for nested discussions karma is hidden to prevent contention.

[jerf]

I think it's too soon to actually judge, as we're still in the "ick! change!" phase. Ask again in another week or two. Same for any other experiment you run in the future; unless it obviously and immediately fails, give it some simmer time. (IMHO, of course.)

[mechanical_fish]

It is going to take time for the second-order effects to develop.

The optimum writing style may change. When threads require more skimming it pays to write more skimmable content. The reading style will also change. None of these changes will happen overnight; it takes time, the way that learning emacs takes time.

So I agree: Let the experiment run longer. What is the worst that can happen? HN becomes an order of magnitude less popular? I liked HN when it was an order of magnitude less popular. ;)

[nkurz]

I'm in this camp as well: keep it for a while and see how we adjust.

My initial reaction was negative. I found it harder to scan a long page of comments quickly. And I'm not sure why, but I also found that I'm more resistant to vote, either positively or negatively. Maybe because the site feels more static.

The one fix I would suggest is that having the arrows disappear after voting does not feel fulfilling. It feels like my vote has been lost. Switching to displaying the darkened arrow that I chose would feel better.

Or, if more voting was thought to be a good thing, you could display the vote count only afterward. I think I'd be more inclined to vote if there was some sort of 'reward' for the action. The previous reward was seeing the number change in whatever direction I wanted to move it, but receiving information about others would probably work too.

[duck]

I agree. I was lost without the scores at first, but now I think it is useful not having them. However, I would like to see them after so many days/hours when the article is off of the front-page as it would be helpful when referencing older stuff and at that point I don't see any harm including it.

[pg]

Ok, I agree. The poll voting is close enough that I think the best course is to wait a bit before deciding.

[Confusion]

There are at least three problems with the current situation, that don't go away by 'getting used to' them:

- You don't know whether you clicked the right arrow

- You are forced to skim/read many comments to determine which ones are of value, where previously you may have chosen to skim a particular discussion for the best comments.

- You can't judge the quality of comments on a topic you know absolutely nothing about

[spoiledtechie]

Since no one can actually see the points I just gave jerf on his comment. I would like to say ditto. I think its much too soon. Some times there are a need of comments like this one where I would rather just vote up then comment ditto like im doing now.

What about on ASK HN: comments we allow points and on articles, we don't? Just a thought.

[phlux]

I have an idea, thinking out loud here - so bear with me:

Traditional point based forum systems provide a way for people to up/down any given post - but its a binary decision.

There are a range of factors that one may want to upvote/downvote a post based on. /. had an interesting moderation model by allowing a context selection along with the score - though this too had its limitations.

With respect to the implementation on HN, not showing the score changes the dynamic that we are used to, which is fine - but we sometimes need a contextual vote/filter to promote answers with links/content.

What would be interesting is if one were to post a link in the comment if we could vote up the individual link. So next to the links there were a score for that link -- this way - while we could vote the post author either way, if multiple posts contain links in an answer to a question, the community can vote on the links themselves -- which will aid in people who are seeking the answer.

Additionally, if we have a contextual label selection for posts, then the community can select the label that applies from a list - and the readers would see which applies.

This removes the numerical karmic judgement from the post, but allows for insightful, helpful, informative, opinion or other classifiers to be used.

Would something along these lines work better for us?

[patio11]

I'm conflicted. As a (heavy) consumer of HN, not having the best comments called out to me has made it more difficult to parse, and not being able to sort searchyc results by points will eventually diminish its value as external memory for me.

As a producer on HN, I have noticed two things: one, the subjective self-assessed quality of the comments I have been writing since the change has been far higher than it was in the few months prior to the change. I've been quipping less and writing meatier, substantive, useful things (I hadn't stopped writing those, but there were periods of weeks where I had no comment longer than a paragraph and very few actionable bits in those comments). I do not know why this is -- it could be phases of the moon, totally unrelated to the interface change, for all I know.

I also note that my per-comment scores for meaty comments are higher than they've ever been, which may or may not be desirable. I don't care about karma, but to the extent anyone else cares about their karma relative to folks on the leaderboard, my anecdotal single-point observation is that winners seem to be winning at the moment.

[Terry_B]

I thought it was working well without points until this morning.

With this ASK HN post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444709 ) about the best credit card payment method I would typically immediately go and look at the comment scores.

Because a vote for a comment is typically a vote for the thing being recommended.

It's really a "poll-like" question except it can't be a poll because the OP doesn't know the options in advance.

Other than that one problem though,I found I was judging people's comments more thoughtfully without the scores.

[cdr]

One other significant problem I have is that it breaks "comments by points" search on searchyc.com.

[user24]

This is a genuine use-case, and worth considering.

Perhaps a hide-by-default policy, but each page has a link you can click to show points on that page. The extra manual step will mean that most people won't bother unless they have a need to. Just make sure there's no 'show points' setting in the user profile, otherwise the extra step is removed.

[skennedy]

Without. The lack of points make me look closer at the content rather than group think of a post. Even if briefly, a brand new comment is at the top of a thread. Unless I read it there is no way of knowing the quality in comparison to other comments. Would be interesting to know if the average karma per post is going up/down for those that have been around for a while.

[edw519]

For years I listened to users complain whenever I removed something they were used to for the improvement of the whole endeavor. I have rarely encountered a user that was happier with less information.

Now I know how they feel.

[aristus]

Consider this: Facebook is remarkable precisely because no matter how big it gets, your experience with it is more or less bounded by your personal circle.

Points are a good proxy for user counts, and over the years I've become more and more aware of the number of people reading and judging. For me, at least, not seeing those points makes HN feel more cozy and private. With points I tended to chase after them rather than learning.

I suspect that this feature vote will be very close. I suggest weighting this vote by contribution of the voter (submissions and comments) rather than raw vote count. After all, this experiment is intended to increase the value of contributions.

[blhack]

Points should stay:

If a post has a lot of points on it, it's telling people that they should be paying attention. For instance, (and this may have been after the points disappeared, but the example still works) the other day when ioerror came into the thread that was talking about him getting harassed at airports. I don't know who ioerror is, but points allow people to call my attention to his posts, more so than just voting them to the top of the hierarchy.

I've learned a lot reading comments here over the last 3 years. Lack of showing points makes it harder to discern what I should pay attention to. A good comparison might be book reviews. If I get on amazon and search "iOS4 development", I'll get tons of results, but when a book has 200 5 star reviews, it helps me decide that that is the one I should read.

This is true even if the books are all free.

Don't get lost in the idea that everybody here is a seasoned veteran who knows everything about everything and can easily judge a post's merit based on its content. It's less true for me now than it was three years ago, but it was (and still is) helpful to be able to look to the community to help me know what I should be paying attention to.

[keyist]

"My goal in not showing points on comments was to prevent the sort of contentious exchanges where people (in this case literally) try to score points off one another."

I think a suitable compromise would be to hide for X days until most voting activity is over (reusing the threshold where downvotes are no longer available but upvotes still are might work). This would still meet your goal without the cost of information loss.

EDIT: I'd hate to give up lists like http://top.searchyc.com/comments_by_points and http://top.searchyc.com/users_by_average_points_per_comment .

[staunch]

The problem is I feel no feedback for voting, so I've stopped doing it.

If I could see the points after I vote I would probably vote even more than before.

[entangld]

HN isn't only opinions. It also gives advice. How would you HNers who don't like points get advice in an area you know nothing about? What indicators would you use? Whatever sounds the best? Seeing a cumulative score of the opinions of intelligent users helps me.

Perhaps some of you know much more than me and don't need to learn anything. I'm not in that boat. HN helps me learn how other entrepreneurs think and what they think about areas that I'm moving into. This isn't reddit. This is a serious forum and seeing which advice gets the most upvotes helps me tremendously.

[tjmc]

This is why I voted for points as well. When people put their site up and ask HN for feedback, you can easily see the most critical advice based on the points score. Without it, people have to start posting "I agree that's really important" underneath. Just like I have here.

Edit: Perhaps a hybrid option would be to just enable points for Ask HN's where people are specifically requesting feedback.

[baggers]

[Summary]Comment points are a way of outsourcing BS detection to people with considerably more knowledge than me.

I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough in the fields covered within hackernews to weed out the genuinely sagely advice from the erudite crap. I learn a huge amount from coming here and I feel I have lost a tool which helped me judge what I needed to dig into and study and what is just todays kool aid/lie/misunderstanding. I hope they get brought back, even just as an option.

[javert]

Whatever sounds best.

Someone who gives good advice who can't justify it, isn't giving good advice.

Plus, if somebody gives bad advice, other people are likely to comment and point it out.

I think there are some kinds of things where you really do need raw numbers (this thread for example), or "which front page is most aesthetically appleaing for my website," and those kinds of things can use polls (as this thread does).

EDIT: On second thought, after reading what some others have said, I think there really are some Ask HNs that could use comment scores (but I don't think all of them need it).

[jcl]

Note that, even without points displayed, you can gauge the relative points of comments by their order on the page. While very new comments can appear briefly at the top, the comments that stay there have high points.

[mcav]

Maybe making it a coarser indicator would give the best of both worlds... maybe a colored indicator (or grey dot) with color/darkness indicating how many upvotes.

[m0nastic]

Not to try and "King Solomon" it, but couldn't you make it a user profile option to display comment points?

Personally, I think it's better now that they are not displayed, but if it reverts back to displaying them, I'd be happy to just not have to see them myself, regardless if other's want to.

[ElbertF]

• I'd like to at least get some feedback when I vote, now my vote seems to just disappear into a black hole. Perhaps make the arrow orange after I click it (or simply a tick, ✔ voted)?

• It feels pointless to upvote the only comment in a thread, it doesn't affect anything unless more comments are posted (again, lack of feedback).

• I often can't tell if a comment is any good (e.g. an answer to a scientific question), points really helped here.

[Cushman]

To reinforce your point, I just tried to upvote you in response to the scientific answers point, but I may have accidentally clicked downvote instead. I'm really not sure.

So, if so, I'm sorry.

[anigbrowl]

With. [EDIT: oops, deleted half my post] If something stupid only has a couple of points in a busy thread, then I know there's no need to respond with a passionate denunciation of the obvious. Likewise, if something I disagree with has a ton of upvotes, perhaps it's me that's stupid and I should think carefully before starting an argument. Sure, it's flawed, but so's every other approach.

If you want to get real results, I think you need to start doing randomized trials of different users, showing karma to some and not to others to see whether it results in a change of behavior. Of course, you probably need to warn people about this in advance.

BTW, there seems to be a little bug wherein clicking on a comment or poll option no longer updates. I had to refresh to see whether my vote had taken or not, although the ▲ correctly disappears.

[pg]

Yes, since I wasn't sure I was going to stop displaying points on comments, I just hacked the js for updating scores. Though frankly it never was an indication of whether a vote took.

[tokenadult]

I went back to the post where pg asked for advice on how to prevent decline of HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

To help along the thinking process here, as we digest our own personal experiences (each from a different subset of threads, I suppose, unless several participants here read HN exhaustively), let's think about those issues:

a) After the change, are mean comments less likely to be upvoted?

b) After the change, are dumb comments less likely to be upvoted?

c) What is the general character of highly upvoted comments after the change? Are comments with the highest number of upvotes after the change usually helpful, thoughtful comments, or flippant comments that don't gratify intellectual curiosity?

Over the next few days, it should be possible to look at some highly upvoted examples. The bestcomments view of HN content

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

still shows highly upvoted comments, although right now it shows them without explicit comment scores. How do those comments look to you?

P.S. There is a lot of speculation in this thread about how comments are weighted, how users gain karma, etc. As far as I know, except for possible details of the current experiment, the source code for this site in ARC,

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

which was mentioned in an HN thread a while back,

http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307128

tells any code-literate user most of the story about how karma is allocated and how users gain karma. (Please note that I am NOT a code-literate user here, not in ARC, and I have never attempted to reverse-engineer any aspect of the karma system here. I simply empirically observe what happens to my own submissions and comments after I submit them, which I can still do during this experiment by viewing my own followed threads.)

[sosuke]

I seem to prefer HN without points because it forces me to actually look closer at the content instead of just skimming for the big numbers.

[makmanalp]

What is the use case for seeing the points on a comment anyway?

All you need to know is that the comments on the toppish are the best ones, and as you scroll down you can stop reading whenever you feel like it's gotten too bad.

I find that without points I'm definitely more focused on the content and are less likely to consciously / subconsciously groupthink.

[sage_joch]

Here's my use case: suppose there's a comment with a longish reply. If I see that reply has 120 points I'm definitely going to read it. But if I just see it as a sole response to a comment, there's a very good chance I won't read it (there being so many comments).

[dangero]

Use case for displaying points is that it allows you to get an idea of what percentage of the users on the site agree with the comment. I think that's really valuable. I'm often more interested to know what the masses think because it helps you understand the audience.

[jamesteow]

Could the same thing be argued for submissions as well?

[india]

This is a nightmare. Please end this. There are 201 comments in this thread at this moment. I am not interested in reading 201 comments about this experiment. I am however very much interested in seeing what the top few most insightful comments in this thread are. That is a very important signal. Right now I am feeling blind as a bat...

[dkersten]

I've been getting more upvotes since the scores were hidden. Maybe my comments were better, or maybe groupthink was holding people back, but either way, my karma has increased wince the scores were hidden, so.. I'm all for keeping it how it is. :-D

Seriously, though, I kinda like it without scores, because I don't get inadvertently suckered into voting to go along with the crowd (I try not to anyway, but sometimes it happens without thinking about it), while now I only vote if I feel the comment needs it (ie, the comment is very relevant and informative (up vote) or off topic/rude/irrelevant (down vote)).

[hristov]

I have been getting the same experience. I actually got my first three digit karma comment soon after pg made the change. And I have been here for more then 2 years now.

I think when there are visible comment scores people do not vote based on whether they like a comment or not, they vote based on whether a certain comment deserves the current karma or not. Thus, they are likely to downvote highly voted comments not because they disagree but because they think "this bastard does not deserve THIS much karma".

[scott_s]

I've seen the same behavior on my comments, and I think I'm upvoting more. I think what happens is that people upvote a comment based solely on their own judgement of it. I know that sometimes if I see a comment that I think is good, but it's at say, 30 points, I figure "Eh, it doesn't need any more points." Now, I have have some idea if others have voted top-level comments up based on their placement, but I still don't really know it's score. So I make sure it gets at least my vote.

[joshhart]

Maybe you could have a color range indicating roughly how good the comment was? I like the feedback a lot the numbers gave but I think hiding the actual numbers would be a good thing so people don't play the numbers game too much.