Show HN: HN Demetricator – An extension that removes upvote and comment counts

After hiding upvote and comment counts, I've found myself reading more of those high-quality niche articles that I wouldn't have clicked on previously. I've also found myself reading post titles more thoroughly and reading articles first instead of immediately jumping into the comment section to get summary/judgement.

Perhaps this extension is unnecessary if you have more self control that I do ;).

I've used a similar extension on another forum, and the issue it addressed for me was that 1) upvotes aren't worth reacting to (for several different reasons) 2) it's hard to not react to them in some way if you see them. If you believe the first point, hiding them completely is simply the best solution.

As for why they're not worth reacting to. People have already mentioned they cause people to focus on what's already popular. They can also create feelings of inclusion/exclusion that lead to hive-minds, and mildly addictive slot-machine-like reinforcement (which people have extensively discussed in relation to Facebook likes).

The term "undeserved downvote" can't even exist, as the guidelines state that downvoting for mere disagreement is acceptable. But, what is that if not censorship and promoting groupthink?

If one disagrees, then why not encourage them to engage and explain vs submarining the comment with which they disagree? And, if content is unacceptable for some other reason, then flagging is still available.

I see this same scenario played out in many forums where a very good, high quality comment is made which quotes what "someone" said and subsequently heavily down voted because of the person that said it. In other words, the message is quashed because of the person that said it, and not because of the message itself... this is a sad testament to online dialogue.

What would be interesting is if up/down votes had a weighting based upon engagement upon that post/thread. For example if somebody comments on that post/thread then their vote up or down would hold more value than somebody who had not commented.

Unsure how that would play out, but certainly be interesting. Sadly their maybe a downside I can think of and that would be that it may encourage more fluff comments, just to garner that extra clout.

I’ve observed two interesting outcomes from this, even as someone who has challenged himself to seek clarity and understanding by asking more questions:

- People who ask for clarification are downvoted heavily for reasons that I can’t assume (this happened a few weeks ago, it was a positive interaction with the person who inquired of me, and I enjoyed the back and forth: their questions were relevant, they sought clarity and they were polite and deferential, I told them as much-yet all of their posts in our conversational bivouac were heavily downvoted by parties never revealed themselves or what their problems with the questions were)

- People who are asked for clarification take it as a sneaky and underhanded attack (this happened two days ago, I asked someone if they could expand on a one-line comment because I was having trouble understanding the intention of the comment, someone else came along and called me a troll).

Both of these are anecdotes, but not isolated ones, if you’ll permit the examples as far as pleasant conversation here will allow. I don’t have solutions, it’s just...there’s an awful lot of assuming going on even when people ask questions is my observation.

But for me, upvote and comment counts bias my perception of a post. I'm choosing to hide these counts so I can read articles uninfluenced by the number of points they have relative to other posts on the front page.

This is an interesting topic. I’m working on a new discussion site (sqwok.im) and I explicitly opted to exclude voting. Instead to determine importance I’m using a combination of signals like live activity, publish date, etc, with plans to include further ones at a later time. I echo the sentiments from other commenters and even pg himself in regards to groupthink, and I feel that there’s room for exploration on other alternatives.

How do you choose books to read or topics to study? Sincere question

pg has an ongoing theme over on Twitter on the perils of groupthink. I find that ironic given that this very prominent platform that is associated with him encourages just that.