Has anybody noticed the drastic decline in quality of links and comments in the last month or so? I think one of the problems is that, without comment scores, new users don't have feedback from the community on how they're supposed to act. There's no way for them to learn the culture.
So it's September, but with no way to tell the new students to mind their manners.
HN is still in decline, but I don't think it's worse than when it had public scores.
Meanwhile, not having up-to-the-minute scores makes the site more pleasant to participate in; one isn't prodded to make statements in reaction to ludicrous (and likely ephemeral) voting swings.
here's another point to consider, since the debate is open again.
I just counted how many replies there are to each comment on this page and this is the result:
21 replies: 1 thread (main thread)
13 replies: 1 thread
6 replies: 1 thread
5 replies: 1 thread
3 replies: 1 thread
2 replies: 8 threads
1 reply: 39 threads
That means the 39 comments that are the only comment in a thread I have no idea whether they're good or bad, save my own judgement. The threads that have 2 replies don't fare much better: Since there's weighting towards users with high average karma, time decay, etc. it's hard if not impossible for me to infer whether these comments are good or bad according to the community.
In other words, in this thread there are 55 comments where I have no idea what the community thinks, and since they're all children to other comments they might show up anywhere in the thread. I have no way of parsing these comments without reading the whole thread through, including all the fluff.
The comments that are replies to comments with 3 or more replies count to 48. This means that in this thread more than half of the comments might as well have been without votes. It makes no difference - you can't see the vote, the comments doesn't rise to the top since there isn't anywhere to rise to, and it might appear anywhere on the page.
This begs the question: If you can't see the votes and can't parse out the interesting information inferred by these why have voting at all? I'm encouraged to read through the whole thing. Voting is then just a token gesture with no real effect. And then you're back to newsgroups...
So here's my observation of what I think has changed.. I think the hidden scores have made the comment scoring higher in contrast.
By that I mean that I think the standard deviation in scores has gotten much higher, and the top few posts end up with higher scores than they used to.. for better or worse. I've had comments that were useful but far from brilliant end up with 40+ points, and I think the biggest reason is momentum. I think being able to see the scores was probably giving people an opportunity to say "10 points, yep.. that's a 10 point comment" and leave it alone.
So.. if that's true (and it'd be great to see numbers to back up or refute it).. then I'm not sure if it's better or worse.. but I'd tend to think it's not a great thing, since it makes it more likely that early useful comments are voted better than later brilliant ones.
At any rate. That's my take on a flaw that I haven't heard anyone else mention.
I would slightly disagree. I'm a new contributor, here, but I simply look at the comments on my profile and see the scores which helps me determine when I have, perhaps, strayed. It helps me refine what I contribute and how, based on the community response. Of course, I then have to interpret what scores are the result of my contributing something of value versus people simply agreeing with the sentiment of my comment, but that isn't too hard. I don't know that enough people would see public scores and derive what is good or bad before contributing to be a reason for tagging every post with them.
I think the way the system is, now, isn't ideal but it is decent. It eliminates the temptation of a lot of people to post with the intention of getting lots of points so everyone sees how awesome they or their comment are, but still provides the input on those comments for the individual to see. So it helps shape your quality, without making the "ranking" a public competition.
As for curating the live contents of an actual discussion . . . I don't think exact point numbers is necessary for that. If I only want to read the best top half of the comments in a discussion, I don't need to know that a set of comments got 12, 32, 48, and 119 points. I just need them to be displayed in such a way that I can discern the top-most content. Physically weight the comments (in color, boldness, placement, or other possible options) so that the top 20% of comments appear in one way, the next 40% appear another, and the bottom 20-40% appear in yet another way. Easy to visually discern and pick through, but the top comments are then tied to the top comments in relation to that exact discussion and not a hardset number of "anything over 50 points is really great - period". (For all I know, this may be how HN does it - I tend to read most comments already, so I'm not sure).
I've noticed more new users making poor comments, but I feel like I've also seen fewer joke/one-liner comments at the top. I think it's more an influx of new users than just a decrease in quality. Perhaps the guidelines should be made more visible, and updated some. For one, the community norms about humor/snark aren't actually in there (from what I recall), but they're an important part of how to comment on HN.
Edit: Hmm, that gives me an idea. Perhaps give new users a few "sample comments" of what's good, and a few of which are bad. IE: "This comment by grellas comes from an informed background, and is free of snark despite contesting some of the claims in the article. Goofus sees the same article, and decides he can make a good pun on the title, and throws in an insult to the author based on something he sort of remembers hearing about a while ago. Be a grellas, not a goofus!" Well, perhaps less hokey, but you get the idea.
I don't think I've noticed a decline in quality (yet), but I know for a fact that I comment less frequently (especially with root comments on a submission) and almost never up- or downvote comments any more.
I'd be interested to know if the votes per pageview have plummeted since the removal of comment numbers.
without comment scores, new users don't have feedback from the community on how they're supposed to act. There's no way for them to learn the culture.
Or more likely, the culture just changed. That happens sometimes, and when it does, there's no going back.
HN has become much more adversarial in recent months, and it has nothing to do with whether or not we see a number attached to the comment. You don't need that number to know whether the person who wrote the comment is someone that you probably wouldn't want to hang out with in real life.
My guess is that we're just all strangers now, and that it is human nature to implicitly treat strangers differently than we do friends. What's amazing (to me anyway) is that this change has affected even users whose names I recognize going back years. People whom I used to have a lot of respect for. It's not just the new users.
You either like debating strangers or you don't, and the people who relish these kinds of debates will pursue them even in the absence of a scorekeeper.
Actually I've thought the quality of comments has improved since points went away.
With too much gamification, everything becomes a game. Writing a comment should be about sharing experience or insight, not making a move to try to score points.
To some extent, I think it's wishful thinking to suppose that improved algorithms can significantly forestall HN's reversion to the mean comment quality of the internet.
It's a question of size. With ten people in a room, it's likely that none of 'em is a complete doofus. But with a thousand people in the room you've got a bunch of doofuses. And hugh3's Fifth Rule Of The Internet is that doofuses will inevitably dominate conversations. They do this in two ways:
1. When a perfectly sensible article is submitted, some doofus will make a completely unreasonable comment about it. Three or four sensible people will carefully piece together responses detailing why the doofus is wrong, each of which sets off its own thread, and pretty soon the single dumb comment made by the one doofus is starting to dominate.
2. Other doofuses have agendas. They're not here to find out interesting stuff about all fields, they have one particular hobby horse that they really want to push. And that hobby horse is generally stupid, but if you've got a few people really into it then. (I'm not gonna name any names, but there are certain things which do show up on HN awfully often...)
Anyway, you can't force doofuses not to be doofuses. And you can't make doofuses go away. And you can't make the doofuses lose interest in the only outlet they have for their doofus ideas. So aside from starting a new site and hoping you'll get a few years before the doofuses take over, what can you do?
The problem is simply one of scale: communities don't scale up easily past a certain point.
Here's a heretical idea: you're only allowed a fixed number of posts per day, and you have to increase that limit by being a member of the site for a period of time, and be in good standing. It isn't a great idea, but I think we need to strike down the Web 2.0 notion that everyone should be allowed to talk at the same time. pg's realized (thankfully) that 'heavy-handed' moderation is necessary - no community can ever police itself, it will always degrade into memes and groupthink.
I wouldn't say there's no way. It's not as though people can't reply to the memes and aggressive or otherwise poor comments and say, "This is HN, and we don't do that here. And this is why." And I think that for all the new kids, a fleshed-out explanation does far more than votes can, and you minimize the bandwagon effect that they're so prone to as well. Since a lot of these newbies are probably coming from Reddit et al, I think that's an important thing to minimize, because not only are the cultures of those sites different, but the voting, in the context of each community, is as well.
I really thought I was imagining a decline, but I have to agree. For the first time I've actually toyed with the idea of killing my HN rss feed. I still find the lack of points very annoying, for all the million+1 reasons already given.
Yeah, having got past the initial "ooh, this is cool" phase, I do actually think HN was better off with the comment scores.
For example, I was looking at a popular submission the other day and someone had said "Hey is there a PHP port of this?". Back in the day, I'd be able to see how many points it had as a rough indicator of how many other people would have found a PHP port useful. Now I can't tell if that was just one guy, or if 50 people thought the same.
Please, PG, bring the points back? (and while you're at it, stop new users being shown in green?)
Have a sort (optional setting) that puts the highest rated comments at the top of each thread branch. This combined with graying of zero/neg rated comments should be adequate to see what the community prefers.
That way, skimmers can see and read comments that are rated higher first, but there's much less gaming for higher scores (just implicit ranking within the specific blog-post context).
Also an indicator of a comment that's much higher rated than others in the comment thread or post could also be indicated.
There are many ways to see quality without revealing the scores. Look at say, online stores like Amazon for "bestselling" sorts... you don't see overall sales, but a sales rank and even that's hidden at the search results level.
On the issue of scores vs no-scores, it'd be possible to A/B test this, so half of HN users see scores, and half don't.
Metrics to track might include the number of comments made, number of hits on the site, number of upvotes / downvotes, and probably many more.
Some people obviously feel strongly about this issue, and it might be necessary to take steps to prevent gaming of the outcome. Keeping the metrics secret until after the test would help with this. So would publicly announcing that only a small (say 10%) but undisclosed subset of users will be used to determine the outcomes of the testing. So any individual user wouldn't know if their behaviour would affect the results, and so would have little incentive to waste their time trying to affect the outcome.
It'd be nice to take a data-driven approach to resolving this question.
I much prefer the new HN, without visible comment scores.
When comment scores were visible, it was obvious that many people would just vote with the herd, downvoting comments with lots of downvotes, and upvoting comments with lots of upvotes.
This is still a problem, since HN still tends to put highly rated comments near the top, and low rated comments near the bottom. But it's not nearly as much of a problem as it was when comment scores were visible.
I think the quality of comments has increased with the new system, and I find myself reading more of the comments now that the scores aren't visible.
I also find myself voting less, and voting only on comments I personally feel are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad.
One change I would like to see HN experiment with is making the score of a given comment visible only after you've voted on that comment.
This will both encourage voting and also satisfy people's curiosity, while still discouraging voting with the herd.
It really bothers me that so many people here seem to be saying "I am capable of scoring articles fairly, but the rest of the community seems not to be able to think for themselves, falling victim to group think and a herd mentality."
This seems like a lot of fundamental attribution error [1] going on here.
I don't think that's accurate - I want points back because it allows me to see what other people have voted. Because I trust this community I'll be fairly certain these ar ethe comments that will hold the most value for me.
In my view, the comment scores made the site more fun and more social.
One thought is that maybe the score gets hidden if it is 1 or less. I think that scores are especially interesting when it highlights a great comment or provides feedback to the person making the comment.
The ordering of comments without a score is a good example of why a visible score is needed. You assume that the best comments are on top but it is not clear how good are the comments below the top one.
Since the scores were removed, I have been commenting less often and often ignoring many of the comments below the top ones.
The submitted site is interesting. I will not go to the trouble of contributing any scores I am aware of to the database, however. Here in this thread, we are once again in metadiscussion about whether or not it was a good idea for HN to experiment with not showing users the comment karma scores of other users, a change that happened not long ago. When pg wrote his post "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?" just 47 days ago,
he wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
That's still the key issue. In the view of the site founder, who has had a registered account here for 1684 days, many of the high-scoring comments carried a false signal of quality, likely to mislead users about which comments are factually accurate or helpful to the community. If some change of voting rules or comment karma visibility brings about higher scores for good comments, and lower scores for mean, dumb, or other bad comments, that is helpful to all readers of HN.
for guidance on what is desired here and thus guidance on how to vote. I defer to the site founder on all issues of site governance. I have found HN largely to be a worthwhile website for my 914 days as a registered user, and my interest is mostly to make sure that the site founder and the members of his volunteer editor ("curator") team
continue to enjoy the site and find it useful for themselves. They are doing a good job, and I want them to have incentive to keep up the good work. On my part, I have been able to find good comments more readily since the comment karma scores were hidden than I was before.
I wonder if a system that weighed upvotes based on the commenter's karma would make things better. The top 10% (or 50%) of users could get full upvoting capability, while the rest can give a fraction of an upvote based on their location on the karma order.
There is a huge asymmetry in the power of HN users between those that can down-vote and the rest. The problem is that many of the "powerfuls" use their privilege to punish other users based on disagreements, whims, or simply to silence opposite opinions. It is OK to indicate the popularity of a comment by moving it to the top but it's wrong to silence an unpopular comment by fading it away. That should be reserved only to comments that violate the rules: spams, trolls, shameless ads, etc.
Put the unpopulars at the bottom or indicate the degree of popularity with a number, but don't disappear it. Fading away honest unpopular comments is a big turn off that ultimately harms the debate.
I'm planning on doing that, but wanted to fix up any bugs that crop up first. In the meantime, as you noted, the un-obfuscated JS file is up on the server for all to see. It's used in the bookmarklet and Firefox plugin directly, and the Chrome, Opera, and Safari extensions use the same file bundled up with minor or no changes.
Yeah, in its infancy, it's natural for all of the participants to be congregated on the inaugural thread. :) Comment scores for people who have the extension should show up for any comment they've made in the past two weeks, though, and it should start filling in around HN as more people start using it.
Yeah, it's a nice idea, and without an API it's the best we can get, but really it requires the participation of the majority of the userbase in order to work.
Dear PG, please bring back the vote counts and vote-based sorting. If you want to give the option, make it a per-user setting to disable.
My recent approach to having to weed through ALL comments to find the interesting ones has been to completely avoid reading them and switch to different channels of obtaining information (blogs, apps, reddit, etc.)
Apparently Websense filters the site as "Potentially Damaging Content Sites."
I am not saying this thinking that the site is potentially damaging. Websense is pretty dumb about most of the things it chooses. I just wanted to let HNPoints know that because it blocks people from seeing it from behind a Websense filter.
How do you infer comment scores. The order of comments appears to be determined by both score and elapsed time. You'd have to have pretty exact knowledge of how it worked. Is that information available?
The source code for Hacker News is available with the Arc download. pg has said that the actual ranking algorithm differs slightly from the code listed in order to thwart abuse, but for the purposes of ranges I thought it'd be close enough. Knowing the time, relative ranking, and the known scores of participants, the ranges are basically "how many points would this comment need to be one rank higher/lower".
Goodness and badness is subjective. Up/down voting should exist only for the purpose of recommending articles to each individual user. This is far different from the typical use of up/down which is to recommend articles to the collective, which is not robust against influxes from other communities, e.g. reddit, digg etc.
In other words, when I log in, I should see my own personal HN list of stories, that have been submitted by people I respect (i.e. people I've previously upvoted), or people that they respect etc.
I would love to see information from PG on the following in relation to the recent changes in HN:
- increase/decrease in activity of users with highest karma
- increase/decrease average in comment score, normalized
by time after post of OP
- amount of time the highest rated posts stayed on the front page
- trends for # of flags
Also, it would be great if he put the guidelines on the
submission page.
I've posted this before, but haven't heard anything.
Seriously, just bring the friggin' scores back. I feel this experiment has run its course and at this point it's really just more irritating than anything.
I was relieved when the scores disappeared. The less unnecessary information the better, I find. Besides, I think score visibility just promotes groupthink.
I don't use score sheets with my friends. Moderation becomes necessary in a pseudonymous environment, but there's no reason for it to become visible where it's not necessary. Reply-order shuffling and grey-out seem to be a pretty good fit there.
[+] [-] blhack|15 years ago|reply
Has anybody noticed the drastic decline in quality of links and comments in the last month or so? I think one of the problems is that, without comment scores, new users don't have feedback from the community on how they're supposed to act. There's no way for them to learn the culture.
So it's September, but with no way to tell the new students to mind their manners.
[+] [-] tptacek|15 years ago|reply
People can see their own comment scores.
HN is still in decline, but I don't think it's worse than when it had public scores.
Meanwhile, not having up-to-the-minute scores makes the site more pleasant to participate in; one isn't prodded to make statements in reaction to ludicrous (and likely ephemeral) voting swings.
[+] [-] mixmax|15 years ago|reply
I just counted how many replies there are to each comment on this page and this is the result:
21 replies: 1 thread (main thread)
13 replies: 1 thread
6 replies: 1 thread
5 replies: 1 thread
3 replies: 1 thread
2 replies: 8 threads
1 reply: 39 threads
That means the 39 comments that are the only comment in a thread I have no idea whether they're good or bad, save my own judgement. The threads that have 2 replies don't fare much better: Since there's weighting towards users with high average karma, time decay, etc. it's hard if not impossible for me to infer whether these comments are good or bad according to the community.
In other words, in this thread there are 55 comments where I have no idea what the community thinks, and since they're all children to other comments they might show up anywhere in the thread. I have no way of parsing these comments without reading the whole thread through, including all the fluff.
The comments that are replies to comments with 3 or more replies count to 48. This means that in this thread more than half of the comments might as well have been without votes. It makes no difference - you can't see the vote, the comments doesn't rise to the top since there isn't anywhere to rise to, and it might appear anywhere on the page.
This begs the question: If you can't see the votes and can't parse out the interesting information inferred by these why have voting at all? I'm encouraged to read through the whole thing. Voting is then just a token gesture with no real effect. And then you're back to newsgroups...
[+] [-] famousactress|15 years ago|reply
By that I mean that I think the standard deviation in scores has gotten much higher, and the top few posts end up with higher scores than they used to.. for better or worse. I've had comments that were useful but far from brilliant end up with 40+ points, and I think the biggest reason is momentum. I think being able to see the scores was probably giving people an opportunity to say "10 points, yep.. that's a 10 point comment" and leave it alone.
So.. if that's true (and it'd be great to see numbers to back up or refute it).. then I'm not sure if it's better or worse.. but I'd tend to think it's not a great thing, since it makes it more likely that early useful comments are voted better than later brilliant ones.
At any rate. That's my take on a flaw that I haven't heard anyone else mention.
[+] [-] pstack|15 years ago|reply
I think the way the system is, now, isn't ideal but it is decent. It eliminates the temptation of a lot of people to post with the intention of getting lots of points so everyone sees how awesome they or their comment are, but still provides the input on those comments for the individual to see. So it helps shape your quality, without making the "ranking" a public competition.
As for curating the live contents of an actual discussion . . . I don't think exact point numbers is necessary for that. If I only want to read the best top half of the comments in a discussion, I don't need to know that a set of comments got 12, 32, 48, and 119 points. I just need them to be displayed in such a way that I can discern the top-most content. Physically weight the comments (in color, boldness, placement, or other possible options) so that the top 20% of comments appear in one way, the next 40% appear another, and the bottom 20-40% appear in yet another way. Easy to visually discern and pick through, but the top comments are then tied to the top comments in relation to that exact discussion and not a hardset number of "anything over 50 points is really great - period". (For all I know, this may be how HN does it - I tend to read most comments already, so I'm not sure).
[+] [-] jokermatt999|15 years ago|reply
Edit: Hmm, that gives me an idea. Perhaps give new users a few "sample comments" of what's good, and a few of which are bad. IE: "This comment by grellas comes from an informed background, and is free of snark despite contesting some of the claims in the article. Goofus sees the same article, and decides he can make a good pun on the title, and throws in an insult to the author based on something he sort of remembers hearing about a while ago. Be a grellas, not a goofus!" Well, perhaps less hokey, but you get the idea.
[+] [-] baddox|15 years ago|reply
I'd be interested to know if the votes per pageview have plummeted since the removal of comment numbers.
[+] [-] bhousel|15 years ago|reply
Or more likely, the culture just changed. That happens sometimes, and when it does, there's no going back.
HN has become much more adversarial in recent months, and it has nothing to do with whether or not we see a number attached to the comment. You don't need that number to know whether the person who wrote the comment is someone that you probably wouldn't want to hang out with in real life.
My guess is that we're just all strangers now, and that it is human nature to implicitly treat strangers differently than we do friends. What's amazing (to me anyway) is that this change has affected even users whose names I recognize going back years. People whom I used to have a lot of respect for. It's not just the new users.
You either like debating strangers or you don't, and the people who relish these kinds of debates will pursue them even in the absence of a scorekeeper.
[+] [-] grandalf|15 years ago|reply
With too much gamification, everything becomes a game. Writing a comment should be about sharing experience or insight, not making a move to try to score points.
[+] [-] hugh3|15 years ago|reply
It's a question of size. With ten people in a room, it's likely that none of 'em is a complete doofus. But with a thousand people in the room you've got a bunch of doofuses. And hugh3's Fifth Rule Of The Internet is that doofuses will inevitably dominate conversations. They do this in two ways:
1. When a perfectly sensible article is submitted, some doofus will make a completely unreasonable comment about it. Three or four sensible people will carefully piece together responses detailing why the doofus is wrong, each of which sets off its own thread, and pretty soon the single dumb comment made by the one doofus is starting to dominate.
2. Other doofuses have agendas. They're not here to find out interesting stuff about all fields, they have one particular hobby horse that they really want to push. And that hobby horse is generally stupid, but if you've got a few people really into it then. (I'm not gonna name any names, but there are certain things which do show up on HN awfully often...)
Anyway, you can't force doofuses not to be doofuses. And you can't make doofuses go away. And you can't make the doofuses lose interest in the only outlet they have for their doofus ideas. So aside from starting a new site and hoping you'll get a few years before the doofuses take over, what can you do?
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|15 years ago|reply
Here's a heretical idea: you're only allowed a fixed number of posts per day, and you have to increase that limit by being a member of the site for a period of time, and be in good standing. It isn't a great idea, but I think we need to strike down the Web 2.0 notion that everyone should be allowed to talk at the same time. pg's realized (thankfully) that 'heavy-handed' moderation is necessary - no community can ever police itself, it will always degrade into memes and groupthink.
[+] [-] ssscsb|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iterationx|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrwoodruff|15 years ago|reply
I downloaded and installed this.
[+] [-] thomasgerbe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Geee|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Evgeny|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamilardi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user24|15 years ago|reply
For example, I was looking at a popular submission the other day and someone had said "Hey is there a PHP port of this?". Back in the day, I'd be able to see how many points it had as a rough indicator of how many other people would have found a PHP port useful. Now I can't tell if that was just one guy, or if 50 people thought the same.
Please, PG, bring the points back? (and while you're at it, stop new users being shown in green?)
[+] [-] ericb|15 years ago|reply
I lost information when comments went away. When someone suggested a payment processor and got 150 upvotes, I would know they sound respectable.
Maybe bringing comment scores back isn't needed, just a rough sense of how the comment was received via coloration.
[+] [-] Silhouette|15 years ago|reply
+1 (not least because then I could hit the up arrow instead of wasting space with this post).
[+] [-] r00fus|15 years ago|reply
Have a sort (optional setting) that puts the highest rated comments at the top of each thread branch. This combined with graying of zero/neg rated comments should be adequate to see what the community prefers.
That way, skimmers can see and read comments that are rated higher first, but there's much less gaming for higher scores (just implicit ranking within the specific blog-post context).
Also an indicator of a comment that's much higher rated than others in the comment thread or post could also be indicated.
There are many ways to see quality without revealing the scores. Look at say, online stores like Amazon for "bestselling" sorts... you don't see overall sales, but a sales rank and even that's hidden at the search results level.
[+] [-] michael_nielsen|15 years ago|reply
Metrics to track might include the number of comments made, number of hits on the site, number of upvotes / downvotes, and probably many more.
Some people obviously feel strongly about this issue, and it might be necessary to take steps to prevent gaming of the outcome. Keeping the metrics secret until after the test would help with this. So would publicly announcing that only a small (say 10%) but undisclosed subset of users will be used to determine the outcomes of the testing. So any individual user wouldn't know if their behaviour would affect the results, and so would have little incentive to waste their time trying to affect the outcome.
It'd be nice to take a data-driven approach to resolving this question.
[+] [-] gnosis|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnosis|15 years ago|reply
When comment scores were visible, it was obvious that many people would just vote with the herd, downvoting comments with lots of downvotes, and upvoting comments with lots of upvotes.
This is still a problem, since HN still tends to put highly rated comments near the top, and low rated comments near the bottom. But it's not nearly as much of a problem as it was when comment scores were visible.
I think the quality of comments has increased with the new system, and I find myself reading more of the comments now that the scores aren't visible.
I also find myself voting less, and voting only on comments I personally feel are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad.
One change I would like to see HN experiment with is making the score of a given comment visible only after you've voted on that comment.
This will both encourage voting and also satisfy people's curiosity, while still discouraging voting with the herd.
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|15 years ago|reply
This seems like a lot of fundamental attribution error [1] going on here.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
[+] [-] mixmax|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larryfreeman|15 years ago|reply
One thought is that maybe the score gets hidden if it is 1 or less. I think that scores are especially interesting when it highlights a great comment or provides feedback to the person making the comment.
The ordering of comments without a score is a good example of why a visible score is needed. You assume that the best comments are on top but it is not clear how good are the comments below the top one.
Since the scores were removed, I have been commenting less often and often ignoring many of the comments below the top ones.
[+] [-] tokenadult|15 years ago|reply
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."
That's still the key issue. In the view of the site founder, who has had a registered account here for 1684 days, many of the high-scoring comments carried a false signal of quality, likely to mislead users about which comments are factually accurate or helpful to the community. If some change of voting rules or comment karma visibility brings about higher scores for good comments, and lower scores for mean, dumb, or other bad comments, that is helpful to all readers of HN.
Feel free to review the site guidelines
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
and the site welcome message
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
for guidance on what is desired here and thus guidance on how to vote. I defer to the site founder on all issues of site governance. I have found HN largely to be a worthwhile website for my 914 days as a registered user, and my interest is mostly to make sure that the site founder and the members of his volunteer editor ("curator") team
http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
continue to enjoy the site and find it useful for themselves. They are doing a good job, and I want them to have incentive to keep up the good work. On my part, I have been able to find good comments more readily since the comment karma scores were hidden than I was before.
[+] [-] Hawramani|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blhack|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HNPoints|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spottiness|15 years ago|reply
Put the unpopulars at the bottom or indicate the degree of popularity with a number, but don't disappear it. Fading away honest unpopular comments is a big turn off that ultimately harms the debate.
[+] [-] user24|15 years ago|reply
[1] The XPI is a slim greasmonkey-compiled script which just loads http://hnpoints.com/hnpoints.js into the page
[+] [-] HNPoints|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HNPoints|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user24|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ozataman|15 years ago|reply
My recent approach to having to weed through ALL comments to find the interesting ones has been to completely avoid reading them and switch to different channels of obtaining information (blogs, apps, reddit, etc.)
[+] [-] noneTheHacker|15 years ago|reply
I am not saying this thinking that the site is potentially damaging. Websense is pretty dumb about most of the things it chooses. I just wanted to let HNPoints know that because it blocks people from seeing it from behind a Websense filter.
[+] [-] HNPoints|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KeithMajhor|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HNPoints|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resdirector|15 years ago|reply
In other words, when I log in, I should see my own personal HN list of stories, that have been submitted by people I respect (i.e. people I've previously upvoted), or people that they respect etc.
I call this idea PeopleRank.
[+] [-] DTrejo|15 years ago|reply
I've posted this before, but haven't heard anything.
[+] [-] marknutter|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smosher|15 years ago|reply
I don't use score sheets with my friends. Moderation becomes necessary in a pseudonymous environment, but there's no reason for it to become visible where it's not necessary. Reply-order shuffling and grey-out seem to be a pretty good fit there.
[+] [-] tristanperry|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] J3L2404|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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