Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

The reason I come here is to read interesting articles, participate in discussions where I can have my views challenged by smart people, and (hopefully) contribute to these discussions in a meaningful way.

Not to degrade polls in any way, but they don't often add to the above reasons for being here. While I would love to chime in on which web framework is the best my observation is that:

a) the information I gain from reading a poll is minimal

b) the comments to a poll are less interesting than an ask YC link or a link to a story. The reason being that polls are (mostly) yes/no answers and tend to promote yes/no answers or flamewars.

Just my opinion of course. And since I come here to have my views challenged, feel free to do so. :-)

View on HN

I fully agree with you. Polling would only be interesting if in addition to answering the poll the users would post comments. I like the overview of the different votes at the top of the thread that the polling feature provides but I think there should only be 2 ways of voting:

1. vote only when you add a comment by specifying your vote in addition to the comment

2. upmodding someone's vote/comment automatically adds a vote from you for the same choice

We need to keep in mind that a benefit of polls is that the folks answering can answer without worrying about loosing karma if they vote for the least popular choice. But we need to balance this with the fact that readers of the site don't gain much from just reading the numbers of a poll.

News.YC in my understanding is not a forum or a discussion group, it is a way to quickly find new interesting links. Sure, commenting on the articles is great, but polls and the like are not news, and not usually new or interesting (imho). I think sites like Reddit, Digg, News.YC get watered down when they start adding "features" like this.

I disagree -- good links are easy to find; good discussion is not.

Since the front page is so empty, maybe it can be split down the middle between internal and external links.

Would this harm the aesthetics?

I think what we're seeing a few hours later is the success of the polling feature - the poll on gender has (at the time of writing this) 155 votes, but only 8 points - it has barely stayed on the front page. So while a poll doesn't add a huge amount to the community, the way people upvote polls reflects this if and only if the polling is separate from the frontpage upvote.

I also come here for the smart people you can find. I don't see why polls would change that.

Zeitgeiss anyone? Vote a), b) or c).

I think that the signal/noise ratio would get higher.

We could adopt a convention that when you vote, you post a short comment to explain your rationale.

???

Why would that be bad?

Because then the site would be like Reddit - interesting content that is impossible to find in the vast froothing sea of Ron Paul submissions, funny pictures and conspiracy theories.

:-)

Then I think you meant that the signal/noise ratio would become lower.

Oooops....

You're right. Sorry about that.

This subthread is an example of the ratio getting higher.

I think you mean lower.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com