Here's the earlier thread about it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716
Also, I've been planning to write a longer blog post on the following, but given that I've had no time lately and am not likely to have any soon, I'll just float the idea here.
One idea I've had that I think might be interesting is dealing with upvotes or points in terms of logarithmic scales. That is, it takes one upvote/point to get a comment from 1-10, 2 upvotes/point to get from 11-20, etc. (Exact numbers would have to be scaled, of course.) I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going to make sure very few people ever read what I've written. An appropriately scaled log-scale system might make it so that really really good comments still get really really high scores, but so that others (which might have simply come too late in the discussion to be competitive on a raw-point scale) still get a chance at being seen.
(One related idea would be to make the point-approximating graphic log-scale even though the points themselves remain the same underneath.)
I hadn't thought about this, but you're absolutely right. I think having the numbers on other people's posts does facilitate gaming the system quite a bit more. I'd be curious to see what the actual distribution is on points/comment, which might inform efforts to implement a logarithmic scaling on the effectiveness of upvotes.
No matter what happens with having other people's scores, please keep the option to have our own scores displayed. Having feedback on what the community finds upvote-worthy is definitely helpful.
Ah, came here to say exactly this! The difference between 100 points and 120 points just isn't as interesting as the difference between 1 and 10.
Displaying something like floor(ln(points)) instead of points would be the way to go.
I also dislike the lack of points because I find myself voting things down more than I would before. In the past, if something were at 0 or -1 points, usually I'd think, "They probably get the point." Now I find myself downvoting things that probably don't need one more down vote.
I agree with this, may be displaying a color coded dot in place of the comment score. The color can be computed from a log function of the score, and we only need a few colors to indicate the different types of comments without giving too much information away.
The idea would be to highlight any path through the comment tree where comments are strictly increasingly valuable. So, for example if someone asks a question and gets a really good answer, the scores on both comments will be shown. The score could even be shown on an even better reply to the answer. But if someone trolls the really good answer, neither the score of the troll or that of responses to it would be shown.
A further improvement on this might be to use a time weighted value (where newer comments have more weight) similar to that already used in comment sorting so that comments have a chance to gain value instead of being pitted directly against an already popular comment.
The issue with upvote rates is that they're likely to be relatively low, and arithmetic differences between low probabilities aren't useful, so we should really use the log upvote rate -- but people aren't good at dealing with negative numbers, so it should be mapped to color or size or opacity of some indicator symbol or something. Suppose you had just a little dot next to each comment, the opacity of which is 100 + k * <log upvote rate>. Suppose k=8; exp(-12) is like 6 upvotes per million views, so almost no comment's dot would totally vanish, but if you had a 5% upvote rate your dot would be at ~75% opacity.
It would be nice if there was some way to re-nest comments, based on scores, while retaining their logical relationship (as replies). e.g. It could be done with lines or labels, but it sounds too messy.
I've had several comments both older and with less points than others at the same level, but that were still above the rest.
My understanding is that average karma of the poster influences it. I used to be more impressed but my average karma score has been as high as about 6 but most of the time sits somewhere around 2, give or take. One good debate where multiple comments of mine got substantially upvoted raised it that high and then it steadily slid (ie regularly changed if you checked it) until it was back down to around 2. Maybe other people have high averages that are more stable than mine but this experience has changed my view of average karma and made me somewhat less impressed. From what I gather, it's a moving, weighted average. It isn't the average across all comments for all of your history. I can understand the logic of that -- if average for all comments were used and you have been here forever and your comment quality has gone up, a million old comments that were never voted up could prevent you from ever seeing any substantial improvements in that area. But, like all such things, it's a bit of a game in some sense.
BTW: edw regularly has amazing averages - all the avgs are much higher than usual now, I suspect because of karma inflation due to not seeing scores (this happened last time pg experimented with it).
And yes, it influences the ordering of ones comments. When I said "approximates", I really meant it. ;-)
Another way is too hide a comment if it has lower karma than a reply (using reddit-style [+] so it can be unhidden - or perhaps just omit it, and just use "parent" to see it).
The key benefit is that comments that only make sense as a reaction (e.g. criticism) to another comment won't be as interesting, and (hopefully) will get downvoted. This might lead people to change their voting behaviour, to also vote the parent up if they think it does contribute after all (it's a problem that interesting questions don't get voted up, only the interesting answers, because then it's lost down the page... and interesting questions should be encouraged/rewarded, IMHO). A downside might be that people will try to "win" the thread.
I really like this idea.
tl;dr: don't display parent if a child scores higher (still accessible by "parent" link), so they rank higher. Like slashdot.
I posted it as the discussion was about to fall off the first page, so here is it again for your reading pleasure :-)
---------------------
I have some suggestions that could help regulate the current issues. I'd change the way the karma is calculated in order to reward people who are consistently good rather than heavy posters. I suggest using the geometric mean of the post scores. As such, you wouldn't have to give a karma penalty to comment. A weak comment would reduce the karma automatically. I recommend the geometric mean since the scores are most likely Zipf-distributed. It could be calculated in the background as a running arithmetic mean of the logarithm of the scores, which shouldn't be too expensive. I'd display the karma not as an absolute number, but as color-coded rectangle. The color would be based on percentile of the score described above, or perhaps as a function of this percentile. The post count (or better, the post frequency) of the user could be represented as the length of the rectangle. You could then display this "badge" next to the user name in threads. Since it would be a continuous thing, it would not divide the comunity in have and have nots as the badge system introduced and retracted earlier. In order not to discourage people from posting, users below a certain threshold (say the 50th or 60th percentile) would all have the same value displayed. I'd also grant the various rights based on the basis of the percentile rather than based on hard numbers. Every time a new right is granted, users should get guidelines on how to use it, i.e. don't upvote based on agreement, don't downvote unless the post is offensive/shallow. Commenting in topics with little points could perhaps weight more than commenting in threads with a big score. This would encourage posting in less popular threads. Downvoting should cost karma. This could be implemented as a comment with a low score. You'd keep two counts: a post count and a downvote count. The karma would be calculated based on the sum of these numbers, but the post count would still be displayed. The value of a downvote would be calculated according to the number of post, otherwise it would cost less to people with lots of comments/votes. The karma of the voter may also be taken into account. The up and down votes should be weighted as a function of the karma of the voter. They could be implemented as a floating point number. Removing the number of votes per post prevents to detect a highly upvoted answer to a little upvoted comment. If the votes are weighted as described above, the vote count has little meaning anyway, but the post score could still be displayed in a meaningful way by using a color-coded system similar to the one described for the karma. I'd suggest two distinct scores log( comment score ) / log( highest score in the thread ) log( comment score ) / log( highest score ever at the time of thread submission ) Both of these could be calculated in javascript on the client. The real score could still be extracted with a browser extension, but I don't think it matters much. Making the first value relative to the max score at the time of voting would allow that value remains relevant as time passes, even if the community grows or shrinks. It would require to add a "max score" field to submissions, though.
Leave the point system intact behind the scenes, as is.
Collect the set of comments with a positive score.
For threads with < N positive comments comments, don't show anything
When there are >= N positive comments, show a percentile rank within that set. In the event of a tie, assign both comments the higher percentile (ie. "92% of the positive comments in this thread have equal or fewer points than this comment)
My initial guess at N would be 10. Anything less and the percentiles are somewhat meaningless and not really needed, as it's easy to skim.
The benefit of this approach: It's now a relative scale. Down voting no longer means "I don't like this" it means "the majority of other comments are better than this one". The net result will be less absolute value points for the best comments, as they will stall once they reach 90+% and they will receive far more down votes. However, there is now a community incentive to collectively sort the comment set, rather than award points.
You could have <(n positive comments/total comments) as a work around perhaps.
---------------------------------- The thing is that all mathematical rules end up being terrible at specific edge cases which are better served by another set of rules. In my opinion, the best possible use of mathematical rules are ones which are simplistic and easy to follow. Leave the rest up to the quality of the community.
(There is a different set of changes to cues and layout, which control social/behavioral action - such as removing the vote count, which I am not targeting.)
http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...
Not sure how effective it was.
a star, orange dot, bold title, anything.
that said I like HN without points.
While a lot of insight can indeed fit into a sentence or two, it still figures to me that those who take the time to write long comments are probably contributing more to the thread than those who leave short replies.
Anyhow, it's just a heuristic that springs to mind.
As it is, I find myself commenting less to replies on my own comments, because I'm not invested in furthering my argument - I can't see how many votes those replies got, so I don't know if I need to keep arguing my case.
(That could be a good thing or a bad thing; a good thing if I'm wrong, a bad thing if I just didn't express myself well to start with.)
Points trigger a certain response among some people. The ones that get sucked into WoW for example simply because they have this impulse of getting all the best gear. Works with points as well.
In that case, you might as well just have numbers, since you can correlate numbers with colors, at that point.
I would rather see colors indicating the "heat" of a comment. That is, its numbers, in relation to other numbers in the thread. In other words, you wouldn't have the following:
Blue == 5+ Yellow == 10+ Orange == 20+ Red == 50+
Instead, you would have:
Blue == average score in this thread/topic Yellow == 5% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic Orange == 10% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic Red == 20% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic
This would help provide a more meaningful context for what posts are rising to the top in that particular conversation and the highest would always rise to the top. The top 20% of comments would always be the top 20% of comments, even if the lowest scored comment in the entire discussion is +10 points.
Anyway... really like your idea :).
Was going to write something about colouring entire threads or sub-threads as interesting based on the total sum of points or something else compared to everyone else. Would certainly help finding interesting stuff to read in 200+ comment threads. But not too sure how it would work without being invasive.
If there are so many skimmable comments in a thread that not having points gets to be annoying because you have to sift...well, then the experiment has failed.
But if on the other hand there are just plain fewer comments, which does seem like a possible outcome in the mid-range, and those comments are of higher quality...well, experiment has succeeded!
What about on ASK HN: comments we allow points and on articles, we don't? Just a thought.
Although, one side effect might be: When you can see a comment is highly scored, a reader may think, "everybody gets this guy, no need to help him argue the point. upvote" Whereas when you can see a comment is lowly scored, a reader may think, "this is a good argument, I'll help carry it, upvote and comment". But when you can't see scores, making the call to upvote and comment, or just upvote is made only on the content of the comment. Whether that's good or bad, I'm not sure.
Traditional point based forum systems provide a way for people to up/down any given post - but its a binary decision.
There are a range of factors that one may want to upvote/downvote a post based on. /. had an interesting moderation model by allowing a context selection along with the score - though this too had its limitations.
With respect to the implementation on HN, not showing the score changes the dynamic that we are used to, which is fine - but we sometimes need a contextual vote/filter to promote answers with links/content.
What would be interesting is if one were to post a link in the comment if we could vote up the individual link. So next to the links there were a score for that link -- this way - while we could vote the post author either way, if multiple posts contain links in an answer to a question, the community can vote on the links themselves -- which will aid in people who are seeking the answer.
Additionally, if we have a contextual label selection for posts, then the community can select the label that applies from a list - and the readers would see which applies.
This removes the numerical karmic judgement from the post, but allows for insightful, helpful, informative, opinion or other classifiers to be used.
Would something along these lines work better for us?
My initial reaction was negative. I found it harder to scan a long page of comments quickly. And I'm not sure why, but I also found that I'm more resistant to vote, either positively or negatively. Maybe because the site feels more static.
The one fix I would suggest is that having the arrows disappear after voting does not feel fulfilling. It feels like my vote has been lost. Switching to displaying the darkened arrow that I chose would feel better.
Or, if more voting was thought to be a good thing, you could display the vote count only afterward. I think I'd be more inclined to vote if there was some sort of 'reward' for the action. The previous reward was seeing the number change in whatever direction I wanted to move it, but receiving information about others would probably work too.
The optimum writing style may change. When threads require more skimming it pays to write more skimmable content. The reading style will also change. None of these changes will happen overnight; it takes time, the way that learning emacs takes time.
So I agree: Let the experiment run longer. What is the worst that can happen? HN becomes an order of magnitude less popular? I liked HN when it was an order of magnitude less popular. ;)
Personally I feel I've lost a great news source as the work required to use HN is now much greater (for me). Obviously, as a community, losing my comments isn't going to be noticed. But this appears to be the way of things, first Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then HN, where next ...?
I see that the average comment score has been fiddled with too - mine was only 2.6 or so (but rising). I can't tell from it whether it's rising or not now.
- You don't know whether you clicked the right arrow
- You are forced to skim/read many comments to determine which ones are of value, where previously you may have chosen to skim a particular discussion for the best comments.
- You can't judge the quality of comments on a topic you know absolutely nothing about
In any case, I do think the set of 'the best comments' is usually a subset of 'the comments with the highest points' and especially in submissions with many comments/threads, the amounts can be helpful.
This is of course an entire debate by itself - are the users right, or should they largely be ignored (cf. Zuckerberg and Facebook "controversial" redesigns).
It's always important to remember that the two choices are governed by factors that could be targeted individually and might change the experiences with either completely.
As a producer on HN, I have noticed two things: one, the subjective self-assessed quality of the comments I have been writing since the change has been far higher than it was in the few months prior to the change. I've been quipping less and writing meatier, substantive, useful things (I hadn't stopped writing those, but there were periods of weeks where I had no comment longer than a paragraph and very few actionable bits in those comments). I do not know why this is -- it could be phases of the moon, totally unrelated to the interface change, for all I know.
I also note that my per-comment scores for meaty comments are higher than they've ever been, which may or may not be desirable. I don't care about karma, but to the extent anyone else cares about their karma relative to folks on the leaderboard, my anecdotal single-point observation is that winners seem to be winning at the moment.
Not that I have spent a great deal of time reading comments since the change but I think I may be voting less, I guess there might be an effect there where subconsciously I am less likely to vote because I don't know what kind of an impact the vote is going to make.
Also with a thread like this one with so many comments, the votes can help guide you in what are the key takeaways without having to read the whole thing. In the same way the high voted items can give you some of the best stuff without having to spend hours trawling through many items. I guess in that way the changes effect those that want to get a quick hacker news fix around other activities more than someone who has a few hours to really go in depth on topics.
Bottom line: keep the points so that some of us become a little bit better in our writing.
With this ASK HN post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444709 ) about the best credit card payment method I would typically immediately go and look at the comment scores.
Because a vote for a comment is typically a vote for the thing being recommended.
It's really a "poll-like" question except it can't be a poll because the OP doesn't know the options in advance.
Other than that one problem though,I found I was judging people's comments more thoughtfully without the scores.
Perhaps a hide-by-default policy, but each page has a link you can click to show points on that page. The extra manual step will mean that most people won't bother unless they have a need to. Just make sure there's no 'show points' setting in the user profile, otherwise the extra step is removed.
My guess is, when people don't see how many points a post has, they have no way to calibrate whether it has "too many" points or "too few".
I find it harder to read/skim comments now though ... because I'm reading every comment instead of getting the highlights based on the votes.
I'm of course assuming that my posts are awesome and deserving of upvotes, which they may well not be. :)
Maybe having it as a configurable option would be best.
Now, I am forced to read a comment and ask "Do I agree with this? Does this deserve an upvote?" This is a great thing, and it may slow down my karma-giving, but in the long run, the data will be more accurate.
Now I know how they feel.
Points are a good proxy for user counts, and over the years I've become more and more aware of the number of people reading and judging. For me, at least, not seeing those points makes HN feel more cozy and private. With points I tended to chase after them rather than learning.
I suspect that this feature vote will be very close. I suggest weighting this vote by contribution of the voter (submissions and comments) rather than raw vote count. After all, this experiment is intended to increase the value of contributions.
Compared to the actual value of the comment itself, the information conveyed in an upvote or downvote is rather small, and is always meta-information.
Now that there are so many people here who seem to have vastly different opinions from me on what constitutes a quality comment, I am actually quite happy not knowing which comments they have flocked to support.
If a post has a lot of points on it, it's telling people that they should be paying attention. For instance, (and this may have been after the points disappeared, but the example still works) the other day when ioerror came into the thread that was talking about him getting harassed at airports. I don't know who ioerror is, but points allow people to call my attention to his posts, more so than just voting them to the top of the hierarchy.
I've learned a lot reading comments here over the last 3 years. Lack of showing points makes it harder to discern what I should pay attention to. A good comparison might be book reviews. If I get on amazon and search "iOS4 development", I'll get tons of results, but when a book has 200 5 star reviews, it helps me decide that that is the one I should read.
This is true even if the books are all free.
Don't get lost in the idea that everybody here is a seasoned veteran who knows everything about everything and can easily judge a post's merit based on its content. It's less true for me now than it was three years ago, but it was (and still is) helpful to be able to look to the community to help me know what I should be paying attention to.
I think a suitable compromise would be to hide for X days until most voting activity is over (reusing the threshold where downvotes are no longer available but upvotes still are might work). This would still meet your goal without the cost of information loss.
EDIT: I'd hate to give up lists like http://top.searchyc.com/comments_by_points and http://top.searchyc.com/users_by_average_points_per_comment .
If I could see the points after I vote I would probably vote even more than before.
Is that ironic?
Perhaps some of you know much more than me and don't need to learn anything. I'm not in that boat. HN helps me learn how other entrepreneurs think and what they think about areas that I'm moving into. This isn't reddit. This is a serious forum and seeing which advice gets the most upvotes helps me tremendously.
Edit: Perhaps a hybrid option would be to just enable points for Ask HN's where people are specifically requesting feedback.
I think it'd be neat if whoever posts anything can choose whether to have comment scores display in the discussion thread, at least until/unless the community decides that one way is definitely better than the other (since opinions seem about equally divided right now).
Someone who gives good advice who can't justify it, isn't giving good advice.
Plus, if somebody gives bad advice, other people are likely to comment and point it out.
I think there are some kinds of things where you really do need raw numbers (this thread for example), or "which front page is most aesthetically appleaing for my website," and those kinds of things can use polls (as this thread does).
EDIT: On second thought, after reading what some others have said, I think there really are some Ask HNs that could use comment scores (but I don't think all of them need it).
I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough in the fields covered within hackernews to weed out the genuinely sagely advice from the erudite crap. I learn a huge amount from coming here and I feel I have lost a tool which helped me judge what I needed to dig into and study and what is just todays kool aid/lie/misunderstanding. I hope they get brought back, even just as an option.
One idea i thought might help the whole points vs. no points situation is changing karma from being the total points over all posts to just being the average points over all posts, so then people will be motivated to create fewer high-quality posts to boost their karma, rather than just trying to saturate HN with lots of posts that nab a point or two each. (somewhat hypocritical maybe)
Personally, I think it's better now that they are not displayed, but if it reverts back to displaying them, I'd be happy to just not have to see them myself, regardless if other's want to.
But let's postulate that we revert back to the previous system where comment points are displayed. I can't think of a reason why it would matter if I personally don't want to see comment points.
Honestly, I'd probably rather either have comments, or not have them, than have the possibility of turning them off in the preferences.
• It feels pointless to upvote the only comment in a thread, it doesn't affect anything unless more comments are posted (again, lack of feedback).
• I often can't tell if a comment is any good (e.g. an answer to a scientific question), points really helped here.
So, if so, I'm sorry.
If you want to get real results, I think you need to start doing randomized trials of different users, showing karma to some and not to others to see whether it results in a change of behavior. Of course, you probably need to warn people about this in advance.
BTW, there seems to be a little bug wherein clicking on a comment or poll option no longer updates. I had to refresh to see whether my vote had taken or not, although the ▲ correctly disappears.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
To help along the thinking process here, as we digest our own personal experiences (each from a different subset of threads, I suppose, unless several participants here read HN exhaustively), let's think about those issues:
a) After the change, are mean comments less likely to be upvoted?
b) After the change, are dumb comments less likely to be upvoted?
c) What is the general character of highly upvoted comments after the change? Are comments with the highest number of upvotes after the change usually helpful, thoughtful comments, or flippant comments that don't gratify intellectual curiosity?
Over the next few days, it should be possible to look at some highly upvoted examples. The bestcomments view of HN content
http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
still shows highly upvoted comments, although right now it shows them without explicit comment scores. How do those comments look to you?
P.S. There is a lot of speculation in this thread about how comments are weighted, how users gain karma, etc. As far as I know, except for possible details of the current experiment, the source code for this site in ARC,
https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc
which was mentioned in an HN thread a while back,
http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307128
tells any code-literate user most of the story about how karma is allocated and how users gain karma. (Please note that I am NOT a code-literate user here, not in ARC, and I have never attempted to reverse-engineer any aspect of the karma system here. I simply empirically observe what happens to my own submissions and comments after I submit them, which I can still do during this experiment by viewing my own followed threads.)
Many of my best Reddit posts, in my personal opinion, are at 1 or 2 points, just because they got buried in huge threads. Whereas I have one-liners that took me literally 5 seconds to come up with and ended up at 100+.
If I were to make an automated system for judging quality of message board content, it'd be a function of text readability (grammar/punctuation, avoidance of overly-long "text wall" paragraphs), size, and user feedback. A 500-word post with 7 upvotes is probably more awesome and more deserving of prominence than a 10-word one-liner with 125 upvotes.
All you need to know is that the comments on the toppish are the best ones, and as you scroll down you can stop reading whenever you feel like it's gotten too bad.
I find that without points I'm definitely more focused on the content and are less likely to consciously / subconsciously groupthink.
So, worst case, you'll end up reading a new comment with no votes and not know it. This is by design; fresher comments appear at the top so they have a better chance of being read, and up voted if applicable. Do your part and vote on the comments that you think deserve it, not the ones that everyone else does.
I don't see what a comment's score has to do with the structure being threaded: they're still in the same exact place.
Seriously, though, I kinda like it without scores, because I don't get inadvertently suckered into voting to go along with the crowd (I try not to anyway, but sometimes it happens without thinking about it), while now I only vote if I feel the comment needs it (ie, the comment is very relevant and informative (up vote) or off topic/rude/irrelevant (down vote)).
I think when there are visible comment scores people do not vote based on whether they like a comment or not, they vote based on whether a certain comment deserves the current karma or not. Thus, they are likely to downvote highly voted comments not because they disagree but because they think "this bastard does not deserve THIS much karma".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm
and helps readers focus on the inherent worth of a comment. That's my general observation from seeing which comments are floating up or down in threads and which comments are graying out.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444555
A couple reasons. If I am not totally familiar with whatever the original post is talking about, often the top rated couple of comments give me some good insight or jumping off points to look into it further. Again if this is something that is new to me, it gives me a hint that the poster(s) of these comments know what they are talking about as opposed to a comment rated at -3 which seems ordinary to me but maybe has a hidden agenda I have not seen. (An example of this could be a comment saying--and let's pretend I know nothing about domain registrars--"I recommend GoDaddy because they respect wildlife on a corporate level and have family friendly advertising." I know that is a crock but if it were about a Rails hosting company or a feature of node.js I would not.)
I respect the HN community and have learned a lot here. I generally trust their judgement and I have found if a comment is rated highly, it most likely adds a lot of value to the discussion. (Unlike on reddit where the top couple comments may be a clever joke or inside reference to the community--but that is okay because I read the two sites for different purposes.)
Sometimes I disagree with the highest rated comment(s) and sometimes those comments have a bunch of replies from other HNers stating their agreement. I then see my opinion is in a minority and maybe I re-examine it or stand firm and make a comment to the contrary. Basically it is a nice guide in my perusal of this site. It is not absolute but I like to use it as a reference.
My voting decisions in the past were based on the metric "How many points does this deserve?" If I found a good comment with 0-3 points, I was sure to vote up, and if I found a bad comment with 4+ I was sure to vote down. Normal comments or comments that had scores that were roughly where I thought they should be would be ignored.
I'm generally relatively sparse with the votes, but I've been voting a bit more actively since the counters were removed, and as someone whose voting habits are dictated by the score, it's been really interesting to go "blind" for a while. At the very least, I'd like to see this continue for a while longer, and perhaps finally wind up as a configuration option that each user can toggle based on his/her preference.
Also, perhaps it would be useful to still display comment points in single-view? It would prevent eye-balling a comment, but would still allow you to view a comment score with a little extra effort.
I am aware this could provide preferential treatment to comments already on the top of the page but with the influx of new users the most important thing to prevent is a deluge of mediocre comments, not necessarily the dearth of exceptional comments.
I also get the impression that it's affected the discussions for the better.
If they are, my vote is for without points, because then I can still skim, but I won't have these numbers to focus on.
The advantage I can see from not having points is that I spend more time actually reading the comments and not be influenced by the majority here.
The disadvantage is that I lose a bit of information when there's a comment with scientific content in which case I like to look at votes to see if it's correct.
I agree with some people to show the points in topics that are more than 2 days old...
1) It is harder to scan for good content. 2) Even if I want to read everything, when my knowledge about something is too weak to evaluate the real value of a comment, I can no longer use the wisdom of the crowd to make an idea. 3) Sometimes to resonate with a comment like a question like "Please can you point me to the source code?" the best thing to do is to upvote, so that it is easy for people willing to reply to evaluate if the effort is forth it. There are many instances of this case.
So all in all it was better with points IMHO even if there are advantages without points.
Solution - May be instead of say "37 points", mark it in a range, (say "20-50" points), to give some idea of the comment quality.
OR
OR
I'd be okay with hiding the numbers but having some other indicator which could accomplish the same goal.
I prefer HN without points displayed on comments. 989 points
Ah, welcome my creatures of the night. You have brought victory after a close contest. Seriously, it is interesting that early evening USA saw an almost perfect 50-50 split (384-382 at 9pm PST), but as daytime moves west across Asia towards Europe, there's been a strong trend towards points.
Paul, this might be worth exploring in more depth, breaking out by age or timezone for example.
As for what it does for the community there hasn't really been time to judge. I've seen a lot less of the usual suspects coming in saying the same the things they always say because they know it'll be highly upvoted.
Could there be a keep it for now option?
Maybe that's just a temporary thing; people change their behavior when they know they're being observed. But I'd urge you to keep it for a little while longer.
I like the idea of a more coarse-grained system, perhaps one that uses font weight or shades of grey to emphasize and de-emphasize certain areas of the conversation, weighted perhaps towards the dialog around a particular comment rather than the comment itself. Perhaps over time that would come to suffer from the same problems as the last system. But hiding the algorithm allows you to readjust it before people have the chance to reverse-engineer and game it. Numerical point systems are useful sometimes, but they tend to activate humans' incentive structures in some really negative ways.
Essentially, it makes each vote more independent.
If there will be no points on comments, it would be very beneficial to have some kind of indicator on the comment that it has 2-3 std deviations of votes above the average comment on the thread.
Especially, I think having a few pre-defined tags that people can give is very useful, and in many ways a lot more useful than votes. Votes, as many people have noted, are often off the cuff, and I'll give a +1 without too much thought. Calling someone insightful? A troll? I'm going to think about that a little harder.
So the big thing is increasing the average amount of time people spend before voting. Some AJAX trickery would be a little strong-armed. I think focusing on finding ways of filtering content that are more descriptive is a better direction to go. (Being more descriptive, I think, is the only way to force people to be more discerning.)
Though I don't mean to suggest precisely Slashdot's system. The tags should be carefully chosen. "factually incorrect" would be a nice one to have. (And is a little less insulting than "troll," making no assumptions about the intentions of the author.)
Simplified example: if I know nothing about security, but I can see that the comment "Emailing passwords in plaintext is wrong" is heavily upvoted, and "Emailing passwords in plaintext is not an issue" is downvoted, it helps me learn things.
A compromise would be for voting to be disabled on all threads after x days, with vote tallies being displayed at that point.
If you guys want to fancy it up, you could have a button at the bottom of the page that says, "OK, I'm done voting now, please show me the tallies", and the voting buttons would disappear, and tallies would appear in their place; and you'd only have to keep track of x days worth of user thread status flags before you can purge the data.
Also, the vote tally could be displayed for a post once you've voted on it.
It's been said a few times on the thread but I'm not willing to read the entire thing just to find the nuggets among the blather. Here is the problem:
It's been said a few times on the thread but I'm not an expert on everything and I'm not willing to halt my day and gain the background to fairly judge the veracity of every comment on the threads I'm interested in. In fact, I'm fairly likely to miss a counterintuitive point or chance to think deeper.
Was this comment too verbose? I don't know because I only skimmed it while I was reading this enormous thread.
Here is my suggestion: How about we use the absolute points to rank a comment in a different scale, such as if a comment collects enough a number of point, it will be ranked as 1 star, then 2 stars... and so on. In this way of rating, we not only get what we want but also not to follow "group thinking" as someone said in this thread.
Point scoring: yes, it is a problem. HN "feels" somewhat nicer.
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.
But there's a bigger problem, as long as points matter for anything: Early comments, even fairly inane ones, have an overwhelming point advantage over late comments, even fairly good ones.
I've read criticisms about not being able to quickly/easily filter out top comments (which I care about, too). But there might be other (better?) ways of achieving that without reverting back to scored comments. For example, coloring/annotating comments that cross a certain threshold (either an absolute number, or relative to the other comments in the post). The advantage of color is that it becomes easier to visually filter out highly voted comments.
- 'good' results get shown for the cap, and from experience on other such sites, upvotes slow down once it hits the cap anyway - 'bad' results show as well, as someone already said, sometimes a comment needs to be downmodded to oblivion, other times it just needs that slight rebuke and you don't want to downmod more.
Caps of +/-10 are enough to point out 'this comment is worthy of more attention', and will help avoid that problem where a popular opinion draws a hundred upvotes where a mere insightful opinion draws only a score.
It's difficult to say whether that's a good thing. Since the poll numbers look pretty close so far (though it's only been ~15 minutes as of this writing), maybe it should be an option.
valuable && low points => upvote
valuable && high points => read, no need to upvote
There used to be many responses triggered by consternation over downvotes. This way, most people can only upvote iff they resonate with the comment, without the possibility of jumping on a bandwagon (or trying to derail one)
Suggestion: Moving the comment box to the bottom would nudge people to scan the thread before responding, duplicating, etc.
On one hand, skimming the comments to see which are worth it to read is now denied. On the other hand, discussions seem to have improved, and more focus is on a comment's content and less on community appreciation of it, which makes an individual voice stand out more and not be drowned.
I like HN without comments, I just wish there was a way to tell which comments the community appreciates more, at a glance.
I miss knowing whether a comment will be good and worthwhile to read or not.
I miss the points because I use them to search/filter/etc.
I'm being more thoughtful in reading comments because I don't have the points anchoring or influencing my opinion.
I'm being more thoughtful in the comments I write.
On the whole, it's sounding like the change is bad for individual users, but good for the HN ecosystem in general.
While it complicates the interface, it would be much more useful for both authors and readers. It naturally leads to measuring controversy - the most interesting comments would be those with high quality and mixed agreement. Having a sense of HN's opinion would direct posts towards areas of maximum contribution. It would also re-direct some of the pile-on upvoting from low quality but obvious/funny/mean/etc. comments, so they could drop down the page despite having some appeal.
Some example cases: a) I may agree with the snarky comment that calls out someone's obvious mistake, but I can simultaneously downvote for snark. b) I may disagree with someone's analysis of the iOS vs Android market battle, but I can now register my disagreement while acknowledging that the poster made a good point. c) I made a comment that came off as means-pirited, though that wasn't my intent. The quality downvotes are an unambiguous message, which I can't just write off with "I guess HN disagrees."
As for the point displays, I want them to be there, but I think HN will be better off without them displayed.
I well understand the idea of downvoting to express a response towards ugly, trolling and irrelevant comments. By downvoting, responders show trolls that their attitudes are not welcome.
However newbies such as I are often too scared to ask our questions, or to comment on something of interest, or indeed to contribute in any way, for fear of someone more experienced coming along and downvoting us.
As a system of control, to weed out the unhelpful while promoting helpful discussion, karma points were initially a useful tool. High karma scores indicated a valued contributor to the site.
However once the mindset of points farming settles in, as I suspect it has done here, the contribution ceases to matter in the rush to acquire more points, leading to a drop in quality and this competitive points scoring obsession. Delusion replaces reason and desire to contribute.
Doing without the points scoring could go some way to redirecting the focus on the items and the discussions stemming therefrom, rather than on the karma farming.
And that is my opinion.
For instance, having predefined threshold for collapsing to a title (5, 10, 50) or deep shading for >= + 10 comments would be very helpful in processing a large discussion.
I was reading a recent post on the open-sourcing of some of Greplin's Lucene and Bloom filters code. sigil made a comment asking about performance based on how they implemented prefix matching. Then nostrademons responded[1]. When points were displayed it was trivial to get a consensus of whether the community agreed on the performance assessment or whether it was dubious/questionable. Since points are not visible I can't rely on the consensus of the community to help verify or make a decision. Instead I just have the posts and order of the posts. Which, of course, isn't necessarily bad. But has taken away my ability to use the HN community's consensus as verification.
The main reason I like points is it helps tell me what comments are worthy of me spending time to read when a story has 50+ comments.
So without points, I think you still need a way to show what is valuable and worth reading for the most popular stories. There are a couple ways to do this.
One option would be to personalize what comments are deemed important to me. For instance if I go and up vote pg comments, then when I go to another story and theres a pg comment it should give me a mark to let me know this comment will probably be of value to me. Another user might visit the same story and down-rate your comment because they don't like it. Thats fine, in the future, your comments probably won't be displayed prominently for them in this case.
This moves away from the group-think mentality of what is valuable to an individuals preference, which I think is more valuable and provides a less contentious exchange platform.
If it is somehow measurable who is trying to do so, in obvious way, in some automated way and if this activity is at a level that affects the rest, then the user could be somehow penalized off that karma gained. Nevertheless this is democracy, so I would only expect this behaviour being penalized only if it really affects other in some measurable way, so that the community could approve penalizing users who are trying to advantage of lack of automated moderation.
The contrary could be done i.e. instead of penalizing users who are suspectable in such behaviour, preferably award recursively to each comment in the same thread more points, therefore the commenters who are 'legit' are awarded. Therefore, add a category of comment points named 'HN ponts' which are awarded automatically by the system.
Thinking of it this way, maybe we should have two different modes--- ‘quick reading’, with points shown and voting disabled, and ‘contribution’, with points hidden and voting enabled.
Wait, I know it complicates things a bit, but it makes sense. Look:
- If you do read everything carefully and don't rely on crowd's opinion, then you don't need points anyway and you can well contribute to HN by voting justly. Use ‘contribution’ mode.
- If you usually read HN in a hurry, thus you shouldn't be tempted to vote. Use ‘quick reading’ mode.
The weakest point here is changing mode. Don't know how frequently people switch between ‘skimming’ and ‘contribution’ mode while reading HN… If not often, then maybe it makes sense to place a switch on the user's settings page. (Maybe with contribution mode disabled for noobs.)
in 2005, the ability the reply using an account was the norm, where replies could be rated 1-5 (slashdot and the rest).
In 2010, upvoting messages by giving them points was the norm, which Digg started and Reddit perfected.
In 2015, labelling posts I think will be the norm. Users will get the ability to associate posts with labels, such as insightfull, funny, interesting, firstpost, nonsense, et cetera. Every post will get it's own tagcloud, the labels being associated a lot being bigger.
The problem with upovoting is that you only classify posts using a numeric value. A numeric value can only express a limited classification. It does not say anything more specific then "bad rated" (<1), "not rated" (1), "somewhat rated" (>1 <6), "good rated" (>5 <20), and "awesome" (>20). Other then that, it does not say anything useful.
I tend to read some comments based on user names, irrespective of the points, for a few users, raganwald being one, primarily because I have read pretty much everything he has written and find it interesting more often than not. Even in cases where his comments has garnered few points, I have found the comment worth while. So I can understand the tendency to up vote comments based on user names.
Having said that, I vote for display of points and the hiding of user names. I would like comments to stand up for themselves rather than for the user posting the comments.
But to answer your poll, I voted for them to be hidden.
What I don't understand is anyone getting worked up about the points one way or the other. To me it's just a meaningless, harmless, and somewhat fun diversion. Yet so many seem to take them seriously and get bent out of shape if they don't agree with people's votes. What difference does it make? Oh no, my post is light gray now! Oh no, a less than brilliant comment has a high number next it! Really? Just take a deep breath. It doesn't matter.
Despite all the grumbling, HN is still one of the best places to find interesting and intelligent discussions on the web, and despite the occasional flukes, votes are generally a good indicator of which posts in a long thread are most worth reading when there's limited time. I say don't fix what isn't broken!
A checkbox for whether you want your comment to be voted on, or evaluated. This is displayed, so HNers know how to treat it. A "poll" comment doesn't count towards karma
a) they agree/disagree with the opinion stated in the comment
b) they accept/deny the factual accuracy of the comment
c) they feel the comment does/does not contribute to the overall discussion; in my experience here, this seems to be heavily influenced by a) and b)
and possibly
d) they like/dislike the person posting the comment
I find the scoring useful for cases b) and c); in case a) I've found the absence of scoring more useful as it gives me more space to think about my reaction to what's being said, and not just follow everyone else. Case d) is trickier - I don't think many people would agree to hiding account names as well but I think it would be an interesting exercise!
So, perhaps it would be helpful to categorise the voting a bit? Accurate/inaccurate, agree/disagree, contributes/doesn't? Of course, there is a usability trade-off.
I like how points are shown only for each user's own comments. This way it's a competition only with one's self.
I think some of the personality types that YC attracts do poorly in a civil discussions where there is a (public) competitive element.
I find that I miss the points on other sites, why couldnt they have a way to uplift comments so I could see through the cruft.
pg, while you are at it, could you fix the size and spacing of the up/down arrows. I never downvote. When I accidentally hit downvote, I have doubalely penalized the commenter, once for the downvote and once again for the upvote I intended to give.
Or show points after someone has upvoted or downvoted a comment?
Honestly, there are sometimes WAY too many comments to wade through, and I feel that comments with higher points have been vetted by the community, so I tend to focus on them. This isn't the case when there are just 10-12 comments, but with over 70 comments, the point system can be helpful.
To remove the system is to imply that the community can no longer be trusted to handle the sometimes contentious exchanges on their own. I hope that hasn't become the case.
It would be more helpful if there was a lingering effect to agreeing with someone instead of just giving someone a karma point increment. Lets say that I upvoted zzyzx's comment, and based on that upvote, I am able to see a thumbs up on other comments that zzyzx upvoted, indicating that people who I agree with, agreed with that comment.
Not to say these polls aren't valuable, just take them with the requisite serving of salt.
EDIT: In the interest of full disclosure, I strongly support the new "no display" points.
If you do decide to drop them, it might be nice if something different was done for the time-displaying. I keep thinking the minute count in the comment header (pg 22 minutes ago | link) refers to points (pg 22 points [random text] | link). I still feel like jerf's comment (9 minutes ago) has more points than skennedy's (4 minutes ago), even though I know it's not actually true.
Although I'd probably get used to it within a month--it's just an annoying thing during the transition.
Paul, in making the judgment, if even a third of voters think points shouldn't be displayed, it is a strong indicator that that's the right thing to do, because there is no countering cognitive bias that would cause people to state that they want less information.
Myself, I didn't even realize how strong the group-think effect was until the comments were turned off. It feels like there's more substance now, but I might just be reading more closely in the absence of loud communal signals.
I saw some other post about the Whirlpool Moderation forum (http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/wp_modfaq) and thought the transparent moderation policy they have is pretty amazing. PG et al should at least research it and consider implementing something similar.
summary is below.
Vote count should show up only after the discussion is no longer ‘hot’ (say after a day). So people are not unnecessarily influenced by the upvotes by others
No down voting: So people will not lose karma just for having an opposing view. Not gaining, is not as bad as losingI guess that in some ways it's hard to be completely unbiased.
As for my own opinion, I want to echo that no points are fine as long as we see some sort of gradation of quality. Maybe just >10, >50, >100 is necessary. It doesn't have to be too complicated.
I prefer them hidden until I don't want them to be hidden. It makes sense to hide them prior to voting, but I do like to see them sometimes - either after I vote, or on the comment's "link" page. But getting rid of the first, default display is nice once you get used to it.
The quality of comments on HN has increasingly suffered from people behaving like in hives. Let the content of a comment decide if you agree, not the number of others who agree with the comment.
Similarly, let the content of comments in this thread have a say in the future of not showing points on comments, not just the number of votes for or against it.
It is handy to know the points of your own comments, which can help you adjust your behavior to fit in with community expectations -- but we haven't lost that ability, so I'm not even sure what 'cost' this poll is referring to.
I personally don't understand the reasoning behind using tables as formatting and inline styles on a site whose content generally includes articles about web development.
And to the second point, HN is PG's experiment with the programming language he's developing and the community for his company more than an example of modern web design. The point is probably that tables were quicker and easier.
Rendering a page as a semantically structured document won't remove the ability to globally disable a feature. (In fact, I would argue that it would make it easier.)
It's fair enough that pg does whatever he likes... no one can argue that point.
Comments that fail to attract points (but are not downvoted) send a clear signal that something is not right. +1 would be an appropriate HN score for borderline snark, for example, that adds some insight, but doesn't aid the tone of the discussion. This sort of subtle signalling is lost when points are hidden.
Not having points displayed has probably given me ten minutes a day of my life back :-) Though I can't say that I prefer it that way.
My personal feeling is that I don't click the upvote button nearly as often as I did before.
When the tally was displayed, my vote had an instant visible effect. Without that small gratification, voting feels less meaningful.
My vote: definitely continue hiding the points. It takes focus away from the content.
Now though, I have very little info as to where I can "safely" stop. (Though I know I've gone too far if the font starts fading!)
It seems that you can vote for both options. After I voted, the other choice still has the 'upvote arrow'. I didn't try to see if it worked since I don't want to vote for the other option.
Is this intended? I never noticed on any other polls, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention.
What if it was an option? Or better yet, something like "Hold Ctrl to see comment scores", or "hover here to see the score for this comment", etc.?
Seeing comment scores is massively valuable to the way I consume HN -- skimming the article, then reading the top-rated 2-5 comments.
How about showing points for top level comments (those whose parent is an actual posting). Any derivative comment has no visible score. This would help me parse the high level topics while still deflating most of the flame wars.
Can still use them as a heuristic for filtering, but the details and possibly divisive aspects of worrying about minute differences are hidden.
In a post with 100+ comments, the points makes it easy to parse the various threads and conversations going on.
I must admit that as somebody studying social science of the internet, and interested in data in general, I might not be your typical user, but still...
i prefer browsing hn w/o comments since it lets me better evaluate each comment in an informational rather than social context.
I like it sans-points over-all though.
I want points for one reason and one reason only. So I can tell which piece of advice people agree with.
HN has been such a shelter of safety for me because of the clear (in comparison) and immediate feedback.
As a compromise between your goal of people scoring points, maybe a scale might be good?
For example,
0 - 100
100 - 300
>300
Edited: for formatting
-Display points after one has upvoted/downvoted a comment
- Have a quota of votes in any thread so a user has say 5 votes to spend in a new post (may increase with karma)
I'd actually argue for keeping the text color the same at 0 or -1, for the same reason.
I don't know that these "contentious exchanges" happen in practice. I remember that a year or two ago, there was the discussion of whether people with high average ratings deserve to have their names appear in orange, and my thought then was that making a fetish of karma averages discourages nested discussions, since root-set comments can end up at 20+, but 6th-level comments, no matter how insightful, are unlikely to get more than a single upvote.
Truth be told, I don't care about agreement, but it is interesting to measure general sentiment about topics, and without a point value, it's hard to gauge.
What stops people from voting just to find out the score?
Even without point scores, a comment's relative score can still be inferred from the system floating high-scoring comments to the top while comments with negative scores are displayed in a shade of gray. Readers are given hints to what the community currently considers valuable, but moderators have to read the comment to be sure.
Also no user nicknames - if we had a truly anonymous discussion culture there would be more interesting discussions and people wouldn't be afraid of posting controversial opinions.
Perhaps. However, anonymity also tends to bring out the worst social behaviors. And if everyone was completely anonymous to that degree, you couldn't figure out if you were consistently being harassed by a particular individual or if all the snarky comments aimed at you came from different people.
Peace.