Never mind | Hacker News Reader

Never mind

12 points_g2lm9 comments

Please delete this

This is a really weird way to look at conversations. Clearly your comment was useful, because you said what a lot of people were thinking, and prompted a very helpful explanation from a subject matter expert. Had you stayed silent, rayiner might not have felt any need to comment, and everyone would have been worse off.

Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.

Exactly. Moreover, comment scores do not capture information about truth values, and displaying them would seem only to encourage people to confuse them with something which does. It doesn't matter whether 'rayiner's comment has a higher score than that which prompted him to write it - what matters is that both the erroneous interpretation and its correction by a domain expert are there, publicly visible, for anyone to read and evaluate.

If anything, I'd argue that it's almost more worth going the other way, and hiding scores on one's own comments as well. I don't really know what purpose they serve.

>I'd argue that it's almost more worth going the other way, and hiding scores on one's own comments as well. I don't really know what purpose they serve.

I've never thought of that idea. I think I like it!?

>I don't really know what purpose they serve.

Ego.

> Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.

Exactly! This is why I upvote people I'm arguing with.

Sites like HN have made me realize it's actually more or less impossible to tell if a given argument is well-founded unless you have first-hand experience in the domain. Most people don't have experience in most topics, so upvotes were quite susceptible to "reasonable seeming" yet incorrect arguments.

HN is not meant to be a karma competition. The cream will float to the top.

Inevitably comment votes are going to reflect common thought patterns including misconceptions. Even though this is susceptible to groupthink and gaming, HN has pretty strong antibodies in that area, so I think it's less of a problem than the timing issue.

In short, the worst bias in HN comment scores are that early comments get exponentially more votes than late comments. It would be nice if later posts could get a boost to their upvotes to incentivize late contributions, and help better ones float to the top even after the conversation has died down a bit.

I'll be honest, I'd like this - it would tell me (us) when others make better comments and help me (us) to improve my (our) own commenting.

It would also give readers an idea of how popular the ideas in the comments are - and perhaps, if we could show total up versus total down, whether the comments got a lot or a little attention.

This could be a privilege for those with high karma levels, similar to the downvote.

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