Tell HN: The utility of comment karma | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: The utility of comment karma

40 pointssimonsarris20 comments

There are several insightful posts, like this one:

"Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444709

As well as other ones where the submitter is soliciting advice from other HNers, or else threads where HNers are sharing their experience with some technology.

In comments like these the up-vote is used to say "I agree and share the same experience." Since replying with "I agree", etc is frowned upon, the karma makes for an important tally in determining how many people agree with the statement or share the same experience. Whats the ratio of people who like service-foo to service-bar?

In the topic on Rails 3.1 shipping with CoffeeScript, one comment starts:

"After a few months of CoffeeScript development I vastly prefer it to JavaScript."

How many HNers feel the same way? 2? 55? 109? Without comment karma shown I have no idea how many people agree. For all I know, nobody feels the same way.

"It's hard to debug when you get compile errors"

How many people have had this experience? I no longer have the rough tally of karma.

I think HN is missing fairly valuable information from not having the comment karma shown.

Thoughts?

The intention of karma wasn't for stating whether you agree or disagree, it was to separate posts that add to the conversation from those that don't, regardless of whether you agree. The reality is people use it to express disagreement as well.

Perhaps showing both upvote and downvote counts would be useful. A comment with lots of vote that average out to close to 0 likely adds more to the conversation than one with very few votes in either direction.

Well said. Several people upvote comments/stories they disagree with because they are very interesting and you would like for more people to see it and share their point of view.

I agree. I've never felt this way, but it's obvious some people do. I made this comment[0] about a rendering issue a while back and was surprised when it got 3 upvotes.

[0]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852048

I just mentioned this in the "Legal Mistakes Made by Entrepreneurs" post.

I know they're experimenting, but something very useful is lost when we can't see what we all agree on. I'm using all loosely, but it makes a big difference when you're trying to learn something new.

When (if?) the upvotes get changed back, it will be difficult for me to go through all of the old article comments I didn't get a feel for and see what I missed out on.

Upvotes numbers are too valuable. Please bring them back.

How about only showing them a day (or whatever arbitrary amount of time) after the date of submission? That'll avoid all the charges of groupthink, force people to evaluate all comments fairly, and advice threads will still be useful.

This post should be a comment on pg's post about it[1], this doesn't need to be on the front page itself.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039

Quora got this right. The identities of those who endorse a comment is significant. There may be people who voted on the coffeescript comment who may not have direct experience on it. There is no way one can tell.

Further, there may be different reasons a comment may have been voted up:

1. The comment voted up is considered relevant

2. The reader agreed with the sentiment.

3. The comment was irrelevant, but was humorous.

Similarly, a comment may have been voted down because:

1. The comment was irrelevant.

2. The comment was relevant, but the reader disagreed with the point of view.

3. A polarising comment may end up with a net score of 0, but it is actually very relevant.

4. The comment was relevant, but was delivered in a brusque manner.

I agree; comment karma was valuable for me. It also allowed for polls.

It seems to me that part of the value of the experiment is that pg is getting vast amounts of meaty feedback that is based on actual experience rather than conjecture. "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." It's just kind of a shame that so much of it is framed so negatively. I also hope that complaints or popular vote are not pg's highest priority. I hope he has some more meaningful measure in mind/ in use for determining the value of the impact on his goals for the site.

Peace.

I Liked comment karma as when I'm just taking a quick HN break I can skim down and read the best comments based on how many votes they got. Now I often just don't bother.

I was actually looking through several year old hackernews articles relating to sysadmin best practices, but I could not determine which comments had the "pearls".

Apart from karma (good post or not), there needs to be a way to signify agree/disagree. These are orthogonal.

I think I've noticed more 1-liner 'I agree' or 'similar thing happened to me' comments now that a simple upvote can't be used to send a public 'me too'.

Also, totally empty 'nice!' comments (that should've been a public upvote to the parent) are now harder to censure with a single downvote.

There was a definite instructive value in communicating shared sentiments, short of groupthink, via public tallies.

So, it's time for me to resuscitate one of my hobby-horse proposals: two-axis, four-button voting.

The up/down axis is 'appropriateness', the sometimes-platonic ideal of the old voting (though in practice it was always contaminated with a little agree/disagree). 'Up' means 'valuable; more-of-this-is-good'. It accrues to long-term karma. 'Down' means 'subtractive; less-of-this-please'. It also accrues to long-term karma. The net of these two, per comment, need not be shown – or they could only be shown very indirectly as 'positive/negative' or via ordering/shading.

The new left-right axis would be explicitly 'publicly agree/disagree'. Left is agree (keeping with English conventions of usually listing the affirmative first or promoting popular items to a more leftward position). Right is disagree. Neither accrues to karma; they are completely local to the comment. But the net is displayed alongside each comment – or possibly even the total of each agree/disagree, because +100-99 is very different from +1-0. It's just like, it's just like, a mini-poll, a mini-poll.

The right design could keep this from appearing too visually busy: spacing out the buttons, using very faded colors, hiding some details (perhaps even agree/disagree totals) until mouseover or click-for-details, etc.

It would resolve the eternal 'can upvotes/downvotes ever be used for agreement/disagreement' debate by providing an easy outlet for the irresistible human impulse to express sentiment with a single click. It would eliminate many now-superfluous vertically-wasteful comments that are just ways of registering agreement/disagreement. (Many group discussion dynamics require that certain salient statements must trigger at least a grunt of assent or dissent, lest they be misinterpreted as being more or less widely held than they actually are. Having at least one public place to capture this saves a lot of other typing!)

Hmm, I haven't noticed more one-liners. Why would people be less likely to upvote something if they can't see who else has done so?

If upvotes are visible, one function they serve is as a simple, 'me too'. If you know they're invisible, you may still upvote – I meant no strong conjecture on that – but if you want to signal to the group your agreement, now you have to add a comment.

Maybe you'll work to ensure that comment also adds a new detail. But it also might just be, 'I thought the same thing when I saw that' or 'That happened to me too' or 'I had the same problem'. All of which are more-compactly/quickly accommodated by a visible +1 tally.

I see.

Though it's a little bit mitigated by you being able to see votes on your own comments.

I agree.

pg: "Notice: Experimenting with HN"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333

I agree and express the same opinion.

I agree.

(no seriously, I do, but I enjoy the irony as well)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com