It feels like the system is hiding information from me that I would find interesting and that I could use to reason about the world.
I would find it even more interesting if not only the upvotes would be public but also who upvoted.
And for downvotes it could be an interesting experiment to make a statement mandatory explaining why one downvoted.
(This comment got 5 upvotes so far)
Exposing who would just further encourage tit for tat.
Does not eliminate that behavior, but it does very significantly reduce it to almost a non issue.
Just FYI.
I tend to skim, and when I find something compelling, I power through where the subs do little about those things.
Some subs do cultivate better, longer form writing, and or less of the Reddit "BS."
And, I vary too. It's not always annoying. Mixed in there are some real zingers. Love those.
Ordering on HN by vote count works, and would continue to work invisible to all. The few places it breaks - the political, the climate change discussions etc, are where there may be more voting for tribal reasons.
I do wish it took more than a single downvote to "grey" a comment. First of all, a single vote doesn't mean much statistically, and shouldn't change the color of text. Secondly, some stuff is just controversial. I've had comments go -2, +5, 3, down and back up.
aside: I think ones comment history plays a role in the threshold to grey. For new accounts it’s -1, but that decreases for older accounts. Some magic combo of karma sum average and/or mean, probably?
Next they need to remove following and follower count.
I would, though, like if the person you’re replying to could give you a public upvote to signal a friendly end to a conversation.
Knowing who upvoted seems like a fight-starter.
The old Slashdot system gave the user a choice of upvote and downvote reasons - and the reader could assign their own multiplier! So you could decide that "funny" merited -1 rather than the default +1.
I've never seen that anywhere else.
I remember back in the day that the vote count were public, and there was a lot of resistance to the change. For me, while on a micro-scale I feel like I'm missing information, I agree that on a macro-scale it's a net positive for the community.
Being influenced at all by numbers where there is no accountability for site owners of their origins seems increasingly like a bad idea.
That said, I am trying to think how this feature of 'hiding likes' can also be tampered with because that is human nature
But Instagram is like an Ocean of content, there is no clear boundaries between topics, it's an endless stream of content and events happening in parallel, AND the algorithms are known to be opaque. So the information of number of Likes are valuable to relate to other events which happened in the past. This also applies to Twitter.
By the way, we can see the total votes on the front page of Hacker News, because it helps to put things in perspective according to past events.
Instagram should hide the numbers of like in messages in the discussion of picture, but IMHO they should keep at least the order of magnitude of Likes under the pictures. ("10s Likes", "100s Likes", "1k Likes", etc)
You are not wrong. The info was very useful. One could get a map of users and a real sense of their politics, preferences, etc...
I did, and learned a TON about online dialog. Knowledge I have put to use elsewhere to great effect.
But the cost! Damn. The truth is that data generates an insane amount of meta. You name it. Cliques, brigades, retribution, beauty contests, the works!
My guess would be a higher quality discussion, but a less addictive ui.
Sometimes the behavioral impact matter more than full transparency. I definitely think it contributes to HN being higher quality than reddit for example. People say things for the sake of it not to gather 100 meme points
Ir seems like it would be a really rich dataset. On the simple side of the analysis is simply what it did to the vote counts. Did they stay the same, or go down? What happened to the ratio? On the more complex side you could do some semantic analysis to see if the comments have changed in character at all.
I feel like it does a great job of stopping the focus on karma. People who write bad comments still get downvoted/flagged/treated appropriately but everybody else doesn't feel they must write a comment with karma in mind.
I am not to be trusted with such a capability.
Nor is anyone else on here.