Ask HN: How do you like HN's new karmaless comments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you like HN's new karmaless comments?

25 pointsgnosis46 comments

Looks like HN has implemented one of the suggestions on the previous "How to stave off decline of HN?" thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

Now there is no longer any display of how many upvotes a given comment has received.

What do you think? Is this really an improvement?

My observation so far is that I am no longer voting any comments up or down since there's no feedback. Usually I would vote up a comment that was good and that didn't have the karma I felt it "deserved", and vice versa. Without that "putting things right" motivation, I seem to have stopped. Interesting as I wouldn't have predicted that outcome beforehand..

What would be interesting, though, is if posts didn't show karma too. In that case, I suspect I'd be more inclined to vote because I wouldn't know how well a post is doing and if I thought it deserved to be on the front page, I'd vote it up. All comments appear in a thread, though, so there is little reason for me to vote them up.

That's exactly what happened to me as well. There's no easy solution to this. I think one of the best I've seen is how Slashdot does it, but it's probably too much work for pg

I think this has substantially reduced group-think though.

I've actually found my experience is somewhat different. I'm reading more comments now and voting more often. I imagine your comment, as it now stands after 11 hours at the top, has plenty of votes behind it -- previously I wouldn't have considered voting for it since it already had plenty of "momentum," now, I can't tell, so I voted. Conversely I'm less inclined to just vote for a low total post to "promote" it. At the end of the day I find I'm treating each post more fairly without the count displayed.

I believe changing the arrow to a plus (or another symbol... circle?) that would change colors (highlight?) when clicked would fix the "no feedback" feeling.

I mostly read Hacker News without posting. I like the change. Something about the feeling of reading comment chains changes when you can't see what the faceless community has thought about every comment. Now you can read the arguments without such an immediate bias.

It also makes me more aware of the clipped, cold feel of the dialogues we have here. Most (though not all) exchanges here read to me as humorless and either blunt or overpolite. I don't know if I entirely like it, but I wouldn't immediately say it's a bad thing either. It works better, I think, in the tech discussions, but elsewhere it keeps me feeling distant from the conversation.

Now, the question I'd have for people who post more than I do is: How do you feel about comment threads where you see your score but nobody else's? How's that change your perception of threads when your score's high, versus when you have a comment or series of comments in the greys?

I think removing the display of karma will be a big benefit. It tends to be that when a site gets popular, you attract idiots who want to use it purely in the pursuit of having a "high score" on a popular site. Keeping the karma, but not displaying it makes a lot of sense to me.

If it's not displayed, how can I tell where the 'activity' is happening, so to speak?

Does this mean I have to read each comment carefully(!), and ponder the comment in a large psychological way(?!) ;-)

1) I want to see my own points really badly!

2) I want to see how many points a comment has after I cast my vote.

This is how Perlmonks does it.

For 1), click the "Threads" link at the top. You should see your comment-specific points there.

This was changed after I posted my comment.

Ah, I didn't notice until today.

It makes it more difficult for me to quickly scan the most "insightful" comments when determining whether or not to read the article.

I think the system is designed such that the comments with the most upvotes tend to drift to the top over time.

So, if there is some correlation between the most "insightful" comments and those with the most upvotes, you should see them near the top (eventually, anyway).

The problem I see with this is that upvote distribution across comments isn't linear. Just because you are at the 1/2 way mark doesn't, in any way, mean that the comment can be considered middle ground. A thread with 100 top-level comments might only have 2 or 3 which the community considered insightful. In which case, the 4th comment isn't really any better then the last (it might be a difference of 1 or 2 votes).

Maybe a way to indicate that a certain branch represents X% of all votes? Dunno, stupid idea probably.

Totally agree. It's much harder to pick out the best subthreads of a large discussion. As topics are getting large numbers of comments more quickly now, this is exactly the wrong direction to move in.

It is too soon to tell whether this is an improvement.

I disagree, if only because I'm stopping to read comments way more than in the past. Hiding karma really solves the "great comments with only one vote" problem.

You had the benefit of several more hours experience of the new system when you wrote your comment.

But also, it will take a while for second order effects to emerge.

Something's really bugging me about this now..

You have a conversation between two people who disagree about a fact. They both can't be true, but short of people posting useless "I agree" or "you are right/wrong", there's no way to tell which is right and which is wrong.

I think thats exactly the intent of removing the score, so that you have to use your head rather than looking at a number.

I promise you that you can figure out which is right and which is wrong with out without knowing the karma.

I thought the point of removing the scores was to de-incentivize (??) people from posting for karma. Or, put another way, to improve the quality of comments.

I didn't think the goal was to remove the social benefits that come from crowd sourcing. Now, unless a comment has a negative score, we need to waste time to filter something that others could have already filtered for us.

I think it's more to avoid groupthink, posting for karma would only make sense if you couldn't see your own scores, and also, it would probably involve removing the karma leaderboard.

"I thought the point of removing the scores was to de-incentivize (??) people from posting for karma."

How does it do that? People who post comments are still going to get karma for upvotes.

"I didn't think the goal was to remove the social benefits that come from crowd sourcing."

Comments which get more upvotes still tend to drift to the top of the screen over time. So there is still some indication of which comments probably got more upvotes (they're the ones near the top of the screen).

Whether that's really much of a benefit or not to revealing a given comment's upvotes is debatable. Apart from some really trollish or contentless comments, I don't think the number of votes on comments is particularly indicative of their quality.

As pg stated in the original thread which motivated the change to hiding the upvotes for comments:

"The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

Hiding the upvotes that comments get reduces the tendency of people to vote with the herd. It also gets people to read more comments and read them more carefully.

I think overall this is an improvement, but not an unqualified one (for reasons discussed elsewhere in this thread and others). As I've stated elsewhere, it might be further improved by revealing the number of votes a given comment has gotten to each user who votes on that comment only after they've voted on it. That will encourage voting and still discourage voting with the herd.

Up/down arrows are not synonyms for agree/disagree but are supposed to reward people for providing valuable additions to the conversation.

Too many times have I seen people downvoted because they provide an unpopular perspective on a topic. This results in HN turning into a circle jerk of similar discussions/ideas and avoids some of the most truly interesting conversations. To me, this is the single biggest threat to HN.

Why would anyone mention any radical ideas when the masses downvote them because it does not match their own?

Possible feature if karmaless posts are kept: Allow users with certain levels of karma to create a poll on a comment. It would allow people to see what the masses are thinking without spawning a thousand I-agree posts, but still let the really vocal people post comments.

I like it. Let things move organically.

As a relatively new user, I've found the visibility of karma on comments helpful in observing community standards as to what constitutes a helpful, constructive comment. Written guidelines can be helpful, but observing community values by way of votes is much more so (IMO)

Removing the karma overall is a good thing, I think. However, it doesn't allow us to see how much the community supports (or doesn't) a comment. Maybe a system showing the percentage of karma per thread would be better.

Quick q - what does the green username that I've started seeing indicate? A new user? Certain level of karma? Got no result searching the Staving Off Decline thread for "green".

I think it's a good experiment. I have no idea how it will turn out. Like with anything, I am sure it has its good points and bad points. The question of most importance: Does it have the desired impact on the culture/comment quality? If so, great. If not, whatever.

Following karma/votes on HN is one of the more harmless ways I have wasted time online. The fact that it has such an appeal when I feel like crap may not be a good sign. :-P

This should help prevent the reddit 'upboat' syndrome from appearing here...

Having said that, I don't think that this had become an issue on Hacker News (yet)

I hate it. I understand the motivation, but the coin has two sides. Sometimes I want to contribute, and the karma-less system allows for greater discussion instead of easy convergence to groupthink. Sometimes I want to just benefit from the insights, and I can no longer do that effectively without the comment karma.

One alternative is to hide the number of votes a given comment has received until after you've voted on it. Then it could be revealed. I don't see much downside to this. And it would encourage people to vote.

This is a clever move.

The quality of social news websites with up-/downvoting of comments suffers when people behave like in hives. This has increasingly been the case on HN lately. Let the content of a comment decide if you agree, not the number of others who agree with the comment.

Then show me the vote count after I vote.

Why is it relevant?

As much as anything, I come to HN for the comments and the expertise of the crowd in general for subjects outside my particular areas. If I don't have time to read an entire argument/thread or study a topic in detail, it can be useful to see the prevailing mindset. Sometimes that is akin to consensus.

Would be interesting to be able to enter a thread being able to see the votes but not vote, or voting without seeing the results. First time you enter a thread, that choice is locked in so you can't straddle the fence.

It's good, but it may make a mediocre reply to the top comment even more "profitable" (in terms of both karma and attention) than it is now. Displaying '10+ points' (only) may be useful, and will also make finding the "good" comments easier.

Not sure if it is the silver bullet, but sure does put an end to the popularity contest.

Why is the order of comments so inappropriate? Is it based on Karma that a comment has received that you order them?

Comments are ordered by smth like comment_karma / log(comment_age) so that newer comments stay on top for some time

As long as the comments are still ordered appropriately I guess I don't see what the big deal is.