Ask PG: Is there any chance of getting points displayed again

[deutronium]

I'm just wondering if theres any plan to bring back the points being displayed for comments.

As I find it rather disorientating not having them, as it makes it more difficult to know which comments to read.

We could always have a CSS style to hide them for people who don't want them. Also I believe sites like Reddit 'fuzz' their points displayed to help prevent gaming the system.

[pg]

I'm not inclined to. Hiding points seems to decrease the intensity and perhaps also the number of fights, as I'd hoped.

[feral]

Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments.

Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair enough.

So, is there any way of getting back the utility, without increasing the fights?

Maybe show points, but with a time lag? Show points, but just in bins (maybe logarithmicly binned?) You trust users above a certain karma threshold with downvote, because they've learned the ropes; maybe display points to these users? People that get in fights, and hence are downvoted, won't see points?

[JangoSteve]

I'm curious, what has happened to the average time spent on comment-pages since removing the points?

I personally don't care about fights, they're usually confined to a single nested thread which is easy to skip right over. What I can't stand is not being able to judge consensus on topics in which I'm inexperienced. In that regard Hacker News has gone from being my main resource for diving into new topics, to being near the bottom of my list of resources.

Removing points hasn't merely reduced HN's usefulness for me, it's put it in an entirely different category. This used to be a place for me to skim and read an entire thread, top-to-bottom, and provide insight where appropriate. Now, if anything, I read the first couple comments and move on, because I just don't have the time.

[cletus]

I second this. At first I was against the hiding of points for the reasons others have stated: to show good comments.

In reality you would get situations where someone would post a thoughtful and well-reasoned comment (2 points) and someone would reply with a very minor correction (12 points).

It also seemed like "wars" were fought over points too, purely anecdotally.

My own experience is that voting now seems to be more rational. People seem to upvote when something should be upvoted (my guess is that this topped out before if someone thought a comment had too many votes). When something is negative, it's indicated so it doesn't tend to get downvoted into oblivion.

As for curating interesting comments to the top, this happens now and seems to work quite well.

I just wish there was a way to:

- Look at comments you haven't seen yet; and

- Filter comments by "quality", sorta like Slashdot has. The meaning of this can be vague and "quality" doesn't have to be a straight point measure but I'd like to see a way to just see the best comments, particularly when there are 300+ comments.

[adbge]

I agree that it has improved the civility of discourse.

Have you considered allowing users to turn karma display back on once they have reached a set amount of karma, much like other features (such as downvoting)? I imagine that, as long as the threshold is high enough, users would have learned how to be a benefit to the community by that point and, in addition, it might remove some of the psychological tendency to "score points off of someone" if only a subset of users can see those points.

[morsch]

How about displaying them when stories are archived, i.e. people can't post new comments?

[pdenya]

I understand the argument for not having points but I think I get less out of HN without them. I'm not able to quickly find gems within subcomments without actually reading thoroughly and I don't always have time for that.

[mixmax]

which is of course a good reason.

The problem is that there are some rather heavy casualties that come from not showing points.

- It's very hard, if not impossible to scan a thread for good comments. Busy people don't have time to read through a whole thread to pick out the good comments.

- I did a back of the envelope calculation here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2569997 that shows that there is no way to assess the scores of around 50% of the comments. If there isn't a good way of assessing which comments are deemd good by the community is the system working properly?

- When a poster postulates something and is refuted by a sibling it's impossible to know who is right. Points give you a gauge of what HN as a community thinks. For instance, if a user comments that you should always use Bcrypt and a sibling replies that this is simply wrong I don't know what is right and wrong, even though it may be obvious to someone knowledgeable in encryption. Points give you a good header.

- When you don't show points people tend to vote less. Without having seen the numbers I'm confident that voting has decreased significantly. If noone is voting (or even worse, only a subset of opiniated users vote) then we're back to a threaded discussion ordered by randomness.

- As I remember it one of the original reasons for hiding points was to stop the "piling on" where already popular comments got more upvotes. You posted at some point that comments which had a lot of points before actually have more points after the don't-show-points change.

Hiding scores to reduce arguments seems like a very crude and inelegant way of solving the problem. You solve one problem but effectively render the scoring system useless in the process.

[Sukotto]

Well, it's your site and you're doing what you think is best for the community.

Fair enough.

I feel pretty unhappy about it though. As something of a data-geek, knowing there's data I used to get (and that I personally found really useful) that you have chosen to withhold... I don't feel good about that at all. Especially when you did it to solve a problem that I didn't even notice.

[auxbuss]

Interesting observation. I almost never post now. I never used to fight, intensively or otherwise. Nor do I now. I spend far less time on HN now than I did when there was a mechanism to easily determine the quality of the debate.

[burke]

So crippling utility in favour of civility is a fair trade?

Like others, I found it very helpful to be able to gauge the general consensus on a topic by the number of points each comment had. If the price for that is having to skip over a fight or two, I'm pretty okay with that, personally.

[pbhjpbhj]

Why have [up|down]votes then?

These "fights" do you have any sort of metric that backs up your contention?

IMO people downvote on opinion a lot more. Now the only time I vote is to upvote someone who's faded out (I'm assuming that's what fading means) and who is usually making a point I disagree with but nonetheless a good point clearly made. From a UX perspective the fading of comments sucks.

Vote blindness makes the whole site of far less worth to me.

[joebadmo]

I haven't been here that long, but in the few discussions about this I've witnessed, I haven't see the suggestion to try breaking voting into agree/disagree and good/bad. Have you considered something like that before?

[dennisgorelik]

Crippled person is less likely to fight too.

That does not mean that we need to cripple everyone in order to prevent fights.

[polshaw]

Could we perhaps have powers of 2 shown?? ie where points are 1,2,4,8... 1,2,3,4.. are shown.

This would still allow some way to see the relative opinion of other HN users, but hopefully with less problems than you saw with the direct points system. (personally i was ok with how it used to be).

Whilst here could i request a minimize thread button (like reddits); without it allows anyone to hijack the top comment's popularity (and overly/improperly focuses discussion around it), at the cost of the guy who properly started a new thread.

[jessriedel]

I'm only half kidding when I say I'd love to seem some data, e.g. number of swear words per post with points invisible/visible.

[kqueue]

From the polls that happened in the past, I saw more votes in favor of showing scores.

[byrneseyeview]

Reddit does "ninja bans" where a banned user can see his submissions, but others can't. Could you do that with arguments and long threads in general? If there's a lag of 10*2^n minutes before seeing replies in a thread n messages long, arguments will fizzle; nobody can stay specifically mad that long.

[phuff]

Out of curiosity, did you measure that quantitatively or is it just a qualitative observation? If quantitatively, what did you use to measure it? (Totally just randomly curious...)

[cosgroveb]

Would you consider putting comment scores on a user's Comments page or perhaps on the permalink page to an individual comment? That way the truly curious can look?

[jemfinch]

The main use of points seems to be to allow people to view the best comments and ignore the others. Perhaps threads could be sorted by total score?

[cpeterso]

Do you mind sharing the algorithms used for sorting comments and for "graying out" (rude) comments?

[dmarinoc]

I thought it was a trick to speed up the site avoiding queries to the database ;)

[eande]

not sure if I can share this observation. I did like the point system as it took out the noise level and I was able to get the good feed in an instance, now is it search and read over and over again like the internet.

[wavephorm]

It also decreases the level of engagement, readability of a thread, and because weighting of comments is now invisible there is no reason to upvote or downvote anything, or read any particular comment over another. It's all just one big blob of text that I have to manually sift through. Might as well just remove the arrows because they serve no purpose now.

[michaelochurch]

I would like to see points displayed after voting. I think they have more information content when hidden before the voting takes place, but I think it's useful information.

I've never seen "fights" over karma scores, especially over the difference between +2 vs. +20 (downvoted posts are visible by color). Usually posts about upvoting or downvoting (i.e. "Why is this crap at +20?" or "Stop downvoting me" or my favorite, "I know this will get downvoted but...") get downvoted hard and people learn that the community dislikes them.

[SeoxyS]

I'd be more interested in something that'd prevent this situation from happening:

    smartest comment
    --smart reply
    ----more discussion
    ----more discussion
    ------correction on more discussion
    --smart-ish reply
    ----more discussion
    ----more discussion
    ----more discussion
    ------not-so-smart reply
    ----uninteresting reply
    ----downvoted comment
    ------comment on why parent was a bad comment
    ------another comment that's essentially the same thing
    ----a bunch more downvoted comments
    2nd smartest comment
    [etc.]

Basically, the 2nd best top-level comment is buried below the entire discussion for the best comment, even if much of that discussion has been voted average or negatively.

A possible solution could be to collapse all the replies except for the few quality ones and show a [more] link, much like reddit.

EDIT: This very comment exemplifies my point perfectly.

[larrik]

I actually considered posting this idea just now too, but since you did, I don't have to.

A javascript +/- button to collapse and expand threads would be perfect. The indentation is just too subtle, and it's too hard to follow the thread in bigger discussions (which are often the good ones worth following).

Somewhat unrelatedly, I would think that comments should get extra points if they spawn a lot of discussion. I mean, that's what the points are for, right? This would credit the original user's karma for fulfilling the goal of the site, but more importantly, it will bump up the entire discussion higher on the page to better reflect it's value. (Though I don't know the algorithm that orders comments, so that part may already happen)

[apike]

Making threads collapsible via JS would be good, but better might be to collapse third-level and lower comments by default.

Reading more than a couple levels deep on a highly-discussed submission is no longer reasonable, since you can't tell what's insightful or not. Myself, I now only read the top-level comments and maybe their children.

[davidu]

This is off-topic, but since PG reads this thread:

Please add back the "by " in front of each comment. It was useful because if I wanted to see all comments by PG on a page, I could Ctrl-F and just look for "by pg" but now I can't -- if I just search for "pg" I get people talking about you, rather than only comments by you.

A very small UI tweak probably to remove clutter, but it served a purpose, albeit a very small one. :-)

-David

[tptacek]

You know you can just use HNSearch and filter on a user, or use "http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mechanical_fish (that's pretty much how I read the site now).

[davweb]

In proof of your point I was searching for comments by PG and instead found your request.

[igorgue]

pg(space) works most of the time, since there're not many words that ends on "pg" and not a lot of users I suppose.

EDIT: Well.. unless it's an "Ask PG" :-)

[morrow]

In the meantime, I created a JavaScript bookmarklet that searches for, highlights, and cycles through comments that match a hn username regex query (default is /^pg$/) on the current page, if you're interested.

https://gist.github.com/1293929

[rkudeshi]

A tangential question for PG: whatever happened to perhaps showing logarithmic point values?

If I remember correctly, you were seriously considering this.

Personally, I like it better without the points now. But I do still wish there was an indicator of high-quality comments (I think you said you were considering an orange dot?).

[gkoberger]

There's a huge difference between an opinion held by one person and one held by 100 people.

[alextingle]

All it's done is freeze the status quo. Nobody votes any more, so those users who had lots of points at the cut off get to exercise their extra powers, and the rest of us just have learn to be good little serfs. I for one have come here less because the voting has become so pointless.

[Homunculiheaded]

I realized the current system works pretty damn well when I thought "I wish these were points were visible!" upon seeing a heavily up-voted comment of mine. I quickly realized that this is a really bad concern to have when commenting. There is such a fine but significant difference between getting feedback that let's you know people like what you say, and publicly displaying it. The former is the natural desire to be right/smart/insightful, the latter is actually the desire to appear right/smart/insightful to others.

I think we've all seen this pattern of fame at any scale: Smart but unnoticed person finally gets attention for their work, people notice this and the person appears smart and worth listening to, after time the person's focus shifts from the smart work they did to work maintaining the reputation of being smart.

I think it's great to get some form of acknowledgment that your ideas are generating positive feedback, this encourage thoughtful comments and provides a real reward to those primitive parts of our brain that want to be the big monkey. But any further and the big monkey starts to be the one doing the talking.

[huhtenberg]

It'd be useful to have 1 point comments marked somehow.

I suspect I am not the only one who uses downvoting as a way to sink unwanted comments down the thread, but since newer comments are given a position boost, it is not always clear if a comment floats near the top because it is popular or because it is new. It'd be nice to tell these cases apart (as a short-term fix).

[baddox]

I don't think I've voted for a parent level comment since the point were hidden, with the possible exception of downvoting a few trolls. Not having points displayed probably does help prevent fighting and pandering, but it also makes the ordering of comments instinctively feel arbitrary. It's quite possible that the pros outweigh the cons.

[rsbrown]

"I find it rather disorientating not having them, as it makes it more difficult to know which comments to read."

This is a telling admission, in my opinion.

I love the newer, non-points display. Skim through the comments and read the ones that seem most interesting to you. Otherwise, the discussions quickly degrade into thoughtless popularity contests.

[powertower]

I've noticed that since points have become private, people have become more likely to contribute their up/downvotes...

A comment that used to get 10 points, now gets 15-20.

[satori99]

Perhaps allowing points to be visible after a fews days would be a suitable compromise?

[mgkimsal]

I'll ask again (as I've done in past point discussions):

Why not have these be visible by the people who want them, and invisible to people who don't want them? Perhaps "off by default" but something that can be enabled in registered accounts.

[iskander]

Unrelated, but I'm not sure where I should submit bug reports:

I just tried to submit a story for the first time in a while (weeks? months?) and got the error "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."

[jvanderwal]

Maybe have points become visible after you upvote a comment? That way there's no influence on which comments to upvote, but you get some validation.

[phzbOx]

Anyway, points on comments doesn't say if a comment is good or bad; it says if people agree or not with it.

[wololo]

when it comes to unhelpful comments being (sometimes) voted to the top, why is hacker news "one user, one vote"? why not weight the votes? eg. why not weight users by running pagerank over the vote graph?

[CamperBob]

I'd hate to see a Reddit-esque "fuzz" algorithm used here. IMO, the various hacks applied by Reddit do nothing but confuse people (who then waste bandwidth complaining about being "downvoted") and deny useful feedback to commenters who actually care about their scores.