Show HN: Flattehn: A Chrome extension to hide points / users until you've voted | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Flattehn: A Chrome extension to hide points / users until you've voted

chrome.google.com

61 pointsGroxx37 comments

Two ideas:

1. put it on github, so people can continue developing it easily, under a free license, during your finals :)

2. Especially in back-and-forth comment threads, it would be useful to know who is replying to whom, or to be more exact: whether the same people are in a conversion or whether someone new joins in. I would suggest running a hash over the username + story_id and putting a colored box or shapes in place of the username. That way, a username is reasonably recognizable within a story, but not across stories, and you can identify participants in a discussion at a glance.

I wish there were a way for submitters to pin info to links... my repo comment will be buried soon.

Anyway: https://github.com/Groxx/Flattehn

Why do we each have a name? On a website, it is so readers can associate what a commenter is saying to what that person has said before. Any community where people are going to encounter each other more than once has a use for names.

Here, look, patio11 just said the following: "Trust me on this: no. I used to have ABingo [yadda yadda]" [1]. Because it's patio11, I do trust him more, at least on this topic. And when he mentions ABingo, yeah, that's right, he has an A/B testing package he made for himself, that he opened sourced to people.

When someone I know is a maker talks about the domain in which they make things, they have more credibility to me. This is not celebrity worship (I have my own gig, thanks), it's just paying more attention to the people I find interesting.

Hiding names and points with a Chrome extension is a cool hack, but there's no way I'd ever want to use it myself.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996587

Reason for its existence: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991973

I hope you like it! Let me know here / on its page if you have any requests. Work on it is likely to stall for a week or two while finals roll through, but I fully intend to make it more flexible in the future.

Want a FF / Safari extension? Let me know, I'll consider it, though it'll have to wait for a bit. I haven't made extensions for either.

In my opinion the only interesting advice comes from people that "been there, done that". I don't need to read any self-help crap from people that tell you how something is done without actually having done it. Sometimes they are right and their tips are valuable, but more often than not they are just writing about trivial things or nonsense.

I don't like people that worship say "pg" and take his words as holy truths. But when pg says something I'm more likely to listen to him than to an unknown person, because he has a track record.

A nick-name (and the authentication behind it) is the only credibility indicator for me. Therefore I'm certainly not installing this extension.

Sometimes something will sound like good information, but that doesn't mean it is good information. At least a high-karma nickname means the person posting it is putting his hn-reputation on the table. Now that may not be much, but it's as good as it gets.

Hmm, I don’t know, I think I see people tend to vote if they think a comment’s score should be higher or lower than it is. For example, unoffensive but unhelpful or off-topic comments never seem to make it to -10 — most people seem to make sure the comment ends up at 0 or -1. This isn’t because slightly less than 50% of those who read it disagree, it’s because everyone thought it needed to be at 0 or -1.

Right?

They never end up at -10 because HN is implemented that way. If the score is lower than -4 it displays -4, but the real score could be lower.

I believe the point is that people tend to leave those comments at zero/-1 rather than downvoting them further. That has nothing to do with the -4 limit.

I see a lot more comments at -4 than at 0/-1. YMMV.

Certainly. I was just trying to clear up a possible misreading.

What's the reasoning here?

Not entirely sure, I've wondered a bit myself.

The main one I come back to is that if a comment is worth both -4 net points and nigh-invisibility with the text fading, it's probably worth more. And only people with > X points (200? I think?) are capable of down-voting on -4 comments. Collectively, they serve to be stronger punishment for truly bad comments, controlled by people who have been here longer / contributed more, who probably know this behavior and vote accordingly.

Good idea, but I suspect the sort of person who'd install this is the conscientious type who wouldn't vote prejudicially anyway. I hope I'm wrong but it feels like selling handcuffs to criminals.

heh, interesting analogy.

My top-level comment here has the line of discussion which led me to make this, which does make some sense. If pg were to comment here, regardless of what he said, would you be more likely to vote him up over someone else who said the same thing? Names / numbers have pretty strong subconscious effects on our behavior - the purpose here is to eliminate that effect, so non-prejudicial voting by those details isn't just attempted, it's achieved.

However minor of a gain that may be. To each their own :)

pg is a bad example for me as I don't know and have never spoken to him so he doesn't get undue upvotes from me ;-) But I get your point, as I'm more likely to vote up someone I perceive as a friend because I actively want to read what they say - but I'm also "cool" with that. I'm more bothered about people downvoting people they don't like, but I don't do that and the people who do, I'm not sure they're mature enough to use your extension.

I didn't see an obvious way of looking at the source code for those not using chrome, so maybe you have this already, but you should not hide points for negative comments.

I hate seeing negative non-spam comments that simply don't match common opinions, and I always mod those back up. That's one time where you do want to know how many points before deciding if to vote.

I'll add that to my todo-options list. I watch out for comments like that too.

Currently, you can click the icon in the address bar to reveal everything (v0.9. If you've got an earlier one, force an extension update: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996581). And for negative-voted comments in particular, there's always the grey-ness of the text - that matches how far below 1 they are.

edit: can't figure out how to get source from .crx either... if you want, I could email you the raw zip, or gist it, or something. Only jquery is minified, and the rest is small & simple.

Don't email it to me - post a link in the description of the extension.

When you download .crx rename it to .zip and open it.

If you're not on chrome it doesn't give you any sort of download link, so you can't even look at it.

save-as the install link. (edit: whups, you're right. annoying...)

I'll also be putting it up on GitHub soon.

edit: it's up: https://github.com/Groxx/Flattehn

I really like this. I'm already reading the content of posts more (as that's all there is) as opposed to involuntarily being swayed by extreme points and high profile user names. I'm not sure I'll use it all the time but it has already had a beneficial affect on how I interact with HN.

I think it would useful to have this implemented as a actual feature on the site.

If we can't make a decision without knowing how other people feel, I think that's a disadvantage.

At its worst, the karma system helps fuel a popularity contest. At best, it helps interesting comments rise to the top. This system stands to discourage the first, and encourage the second.

For anyone interested, the github repo: https://github.com/Groxx/Flattehn

Cool!

It would be good if there were a way to reveal the author without upvoting. Maybe in doing so, the arrows would hide?

Main easy-way is to click the "link" link. I don't hide the author (or points) on reply-pages.

edit: oops, forgot to add downvote hook. Coming!

edit2: added :) You can force an extension update by going to chrome://extensions, expanding "developer mode", and clicking "update".

Another version out. Now there's an icon in the URL box - click that to turn it on and off.

The permissions change is a necessary evil, unfortunately. Though I doubt it'll need any other permissions after this, no matter what I end up adding.

Agreed - I think the biggest problem I see with the user name being hidden unless you click on the link is that it makes the comments a bit harder to follow in big threads (especially where people end up being referenced by name).

I've got to add a page-specific button, to turn it on and off. Poking at it now, as I hadn't thought of that purpose :) I think that requires "tabs" permissions though, which warns everyone it has access to "your entire browsing history".

edit: yep, it will. I'll get on it, though.

edit2: think I should have the switch just show names? Or the points as well?

edit3: Another idea: double-click on text, and if it matches a name, it'll reveal and highlight. How's that sound?

You could embed a link into the page and/or add a keyboard shortcut.

Another idea: don't censor the author & the user's own posts.

Your own should be left alone (are they hidden?). Author I think I'll leave for a future version, where I'll have loads of options (what to hide, when, etc), and I'll add that to the list.

Maybe show censored names until the vote, either G*x or even User 1, User 2 etc.

Definitely further down the line if I do, but I'll keep it in mind.

What I'm doing right now is really simple - I'm just tagging the names / points with CSS classes, and then hiding. Up-voting changes the comment's class. Clicking the page-action removes / re-makes the CSS rules. Re-writing and being able to restore means storing the data somewhere, quite a bit more complex than just labeling the DOM.

Good work for making this. I see a few hypotheses here on how behaviour will be changed...I'd like to see another post in a about a week or so on peoples' experiences using this extension.

One request: I'd like to hide my own karma.

I'll add it when I get options running, which unfortunately needs a pretty big change to make this more flexible. The source is up, you can see it's pretty simple.

Did you want your comments' points to be hidden, or your points at the top of the page (or both)? I sort of liked when it showed your ratio instead of points, I could get that going as well.

https://github.com/Groxx/Flattehn

What good are points if people can't see them?

They affect where the comment shows/ranks on the page.

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