On the other hand, I agree with the OP that not showing the votes has significant downsides. For instance, I don't know whether your comment is something a lot of people agree on (it has a lot of upvotes) or it has just been posted two seconds ago, and is thus the top comment. You won't know whether other people agree with my comment either.
This becomes even worse when it's a discussion about something like security - if someone posts a comment saying that you should always use md5 encryption and someone else replies that this is wrong and you should always use bcrypt which is right? I simply don't know, even though one of the answers may be obviously correct and the other obviously incorrect.
Besides - low scores are about the same as they were before, and high scores are a bit higher. Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465002
Now we get to have a lot of "+1" to counter-balance the criticism.
But agreeing and disagreeing aren't the whole of discussion, either. The posts I enjoy the most on HN are neither of these—instead, they're just comments on the subject of the article, but with the ideas of their parent commenter serving as an additional jumping-off point for whatever tangent they find themselves on. When I think of something that's valuable to the discussion (and therefore deserves upvotes), I think of the parents to these posts—the ones that cause people to spin off tangents in all sorts of directions; those are what I want to see more of here. On the other hand, the expression of purely normative opinions, whether through the voting arrows or through long-winded sermons that still simply amount to "Yay!" or "Boo!", is something I want to see avoided altogether. I can form my own opinions by reading the facts in the discussion and doing research on them, thank-you-very-much—and if I don't have time to do that, then I shouldn't think I have time to form an opinion.
That highlights a major problem right there. I would hope that upvotes are for worthwhile contributions to the discussion. You (and others) seem to assume that they are for agreement. Different things. I would like to know whether lots of people think a comment is worthwhile. But except in the rare case of polls, I'm usually not much interested in who agrees.
So as long as lots of people think in terms of agreement, I say counts can stay hidden.
The symbol is a little triangle, and inherently says none of those things. People will click to mean whatever they mean.
Your two metrics pretty much nail what I want to know to quickly skim a dense comments page. They don't even need to be numbers, a small graphical representation might work even better.
Just give my eyes something to lock on, from there I will likely read the sub-thread regardless of votes anyways.
The current state is awful. Just take this thread, with currently 180 comments. No chance am I going to skim even half of them to pick out the good ones. I read the top few, scroll down a little, and then quickly lose interest. - That's the new HN for me.
To illustrate starting with the most stark case- try to imagine a comment that 0% of HN readers agree with but that 100% feel is a valuable contribution. I can't, and the reason I can't is because usually when I encounter the "valuable but disagree" situation individually, it's actually me thinking "some % of other HN readers may share this misconception, therefore it makes more sense to respond than to downvote." or "I disagree with this, but I know most HN readers won't." Or, rarely, "I disagree vehemently, and feel obligated to make that disagreement known because the 5% of readers who actually agree really need to know why it's [dangerous/silly/misguided...]"
If the poster is the only one in HN-space that agrees, no matter how "thoughtful" (i.e., verbose, in that case; possibly like the comment I'm writing now) it is, it's not important. The fact that some percentage of readers agree* or may agree is what gives it importance. In aggregate I'd suggest that the number and ratio of upvotes to downvotes would match the importance as defined by the community.
In this context I'm using the word "agree" in a sense a little broader than usual. Instead of "I take that position to be my own"- an upvote is broadened to "I can see myself taking that position as my own after further reading/thought/experiment," and finally even "This line of thinking is attractive to the kind of people I like to have in this community."
Where things get muddy is when we take that even further and say to ourselves "Some percentage of people will take that position even though I will not. Therefore it is 'important' and I will upvote it." Kudos to the altruism and social empathy, but imagine if 100% of HN readers thought this way. A position that is shared by only 5% of the community would have the same number of votes as a position shared by 90% of the community, even pithy one liners and mean-spirited ad-homimems. In a more likely equilibrium, a percentage of people will do an "importance" upvote for an item separate from their agreement with a probability roughly equal to the number of people who actually agree with the comment (So, there's a 1 in 100 chance that I'll give an "importance" upvote on an item that roughly 1 in 100 people would agree with). That would keep the proportions more or less sane and only result in general karma inflation.
Whew, hopefully showed my point- aggregate agreement _is_ relative importance- even if the individuals agreeing and upvoting are not the same people. I could go on with a parallel line of thought for disagreement, although with slightly different results (it's probably a lot less likely that one thinks "While agree with this, it's not important." or "I agree with this and it is important, but x number of people probably don't agree with it so I'd better give it a downvote to be fair...") In fact maybe, the difference between the two sides is key to the bigger questions of site quality degradation.
So, to the bigger question: possible reasons for degradation that I've thought about and seen discussed so far-
* People trying to decouple agreement from importance and therefore end up trying to channel the thoughts of others, leading to inflation and biases in all sorts of weird ways due to a social instinct that is, by itself, very positive and healthy.
* The blind leading the blind (avalanching) that pg is experimenting with solutions to now.
* Scariest of all because the fixes are more difficult: The community, in aggregate, is not as valuable/smart/insightful as it was. This compounds the problem with the first point- What happens when some percentage of people (say, greater than 10%) genuinely find "You're a dirtbag" insightful? It trumps the other two points even if they're perfectly solved. What happens when 80% of readers thoughtfully proving comments turns into 30% of readers, with the other 70% just there to "learn" and follow the lead of the 30%?
The last point is the most difficult to solve, but there are several methods- there are tweaks such as the "only posts from old members" hack pg did, the green names for greenies, etc. Then there are more frontal attacks: Doing everything you can to lift the collective thoughtfulness and intelligence, and discouraging, sometimes via use of the downvote, comments that aren't worthy of the community.
With all three happening at once, the system becomes very difficult to understand. Some suggestions:
* Let your vote reflect your degree of agreement/disagreement, AFTER giving it some serious thought. Feel free to not vote either way and to post follow-up thoughts or questions instead first.
* Refrain from voting as an emotional reaction or indiscriminately to simply feel more a part of the community.
* Try not to take downvotes or upvotes personally.
* Never pass up an opportunity to try to crystallize your own thoughts and lift the collective intelligence of the entire community by responding with care, whether expounding or disagreeing.
* Never pass up an opportunity to downvote comments that genuinely degrade the intelligence of the discussion ("frist p0st", personal attacks, almost anything that is a single line and contains no wit...)
* (more I'm sure but this post is getting way too long)
EDIT: formatting
you can always see how much time has passed since that comment was posted.
I watch my karma on reddit and HN very closely. It is very rare that I get reflexively downvoted as a result of initial voting, and when it does happen, I mention it and clarify my post and almost always see it even back out.
Edit: Downvotes? WTF? I'd like to know who downvoted this. At least post some constructive criticism.
I didn't really ask for your judgement, but since you've taken it upon yourself... I don't "game" karma. The few posts that I've editted here to inquire about downvotes have usually resulted in a further discussion supporting my point, or at the very least opening up further discussion about areas of contention. As it often turns out, no one had bothered checking the child comment below me that said "No you're wrong because of [obvious statement].", when in reality it turned out that actual evidence or a simple screenshot proved my stance.
If I edit my post and point this out and inquire as to why people downvoted me without supporting their position...
That's me "gaming karma"? That's a sad stance. I should just let people say that Chrome 11 lacks H.264 support when a very simple test and very minimal amounts of research prove otherwise? What would you have me do, but edit my post and plea that people take a second to research what they think they know rather than just recalling the infamous blog post that was on HN for a week discussing a phase-out of H264?
So I'd rather chose to not have any votes and actually get something out of other people's votes than to have an impact that nobody can actually see.
Building on your idea: why not also have the downvote count revealed after pressing up/down/pass? That way we can also know more than the net score tells us.
The point is that we want to be able to see karma relative to the rest of the thread. If one comment in 20 has 150 upvotes, it means we should at least look at it because what is being said might be important.
What is the problem we're trying to solve again, anyways? And do the multiple downsides mentioned here multiple times (and heavily upvoted each time) really outweigh the downside of whatever that perceived issue is?
I'm not saying that everybody here is completely immune to what you're talking about, but this isn't digg. We're not just going to heap on the downvotes because we're trying to follow the pack. In fact I've found the opposite to be true; HNers seem to be really good about correcting downvotes. Compare the bottom comments here to the bottom comments at reddit if you don't believe me.
And what you're saying isn't fixed by hiding vote counts, downvoted comments still appear grayed out.
How do you choose which ones to read? Do you read all of them?
I think if you don't have time to read all of the books and judge them on their merits, then you shouldn't be participating in an activity like reading books.
What I really like is there is less of a knee jerk reaction to assigning value to a post. You can assume it's value based upon placement, but in order to determine it's value you must actually read what they say.
What I don't understand is why people need to be told what is valuable. With an ever changing community, I don't see how you could forever trust it's ability to tell you what is a quality post and what is noise.
I find myself upvoting less as a result of this change because the post must actually persuade me to upvote it without the influence of the group mentality. This means my upvotes are now more meaningful, and I think that is a good thing. I believe many people are having similar experiences.
Showing points does not kill HNers brains. We've already lost if it does.
High vote counts tend to be very convincing to all but the most discriminating people, it's not the mark of a fool to believe what everyone is telling them is correct, just a sign of inexperience with that topic.
The upvote system used to work because it consisted of a lot of similar people saying, this is a good point, or I like this.
Today's community is much more diverse, which is inevitable when you have a quality service/product/community/yadda yadda.
>> In total, Hacker News now sees about 90,000 unique visitors per day. http://newsgrange.com/ycombinators-hacker-news-reaches-1-mil...
The old system just doesn't mean what it used to. People are looking for new strats to preserve the original culture as best they can.
1) It actually has improved comment rankings.
2) or I am just experiencing a placebo affect.
- 1: If it actually fixed the problem, this would mean that quality comments will appear higher on the page, not cluttered by mediocre comments that enjoy the group bump. I pull this assumption based upon the way I use the upvote system. So of course, I could be wrong.
- 2: Maybe the site just feels better to me, because I don't have to see comments get high upvotes that I believe are poorly thought out, or based highly on emotion/fanboyism/or other non logical motivations.
I could see it going either way, but my money is on the first possibility.
All I know for sure is that I now rarely find myself thinking.."Whaat? People think that was a good comment? People thought that added value? People think this guy knows what he's talking about?"
I don't see it addressing the quantity of highly voted comments vs quantity of lower voted comments.
Good point though. It does definitely question my assertion that the herd mentality has negatively affected the value of upvotes. But I don't believe it disproves it.
If this is a common change in other's voting patterns, you might see a shrinking of mid ranked comments, since there are less votes to go around.
If this is the case, I would say that the herd metality has been removed. I never stopped voting on comments that I thought were really good, just on the ones that I was on the fence about, and pushed over by their rank.
The fact that the high comments have seen a bump? Maybe people are reading more in depth, which could get them a few extra up votes? It's a possiblity.
We won't know for sure until we see some actual stats about whats going on. I don't think either side could prove the other wrong at this point.
But there are some outliers that are getting voted much higher than they honestly deserve. I'm talking 50-70 range for something that would have been 8-10 before.
I think people might be seeing comments that contribute to the conversation in some useful way and are now upvoting them when they would have let them cap out at a medium score, if they could see the score.
They have no way to know the comment is already considerably over-upvoted.
I mean, thanks for the karma and all, but I don't know that it's really helping.
>You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction.
Judgmental and prescriptive much?
>The problem with vote counts is that two downvotes can start a cascade of reflex downvotes.
a) You're guessing b) Is that really "a problem" c) Said "cascade" can only actually amount to 3 additional downvotes before the -4 limit is hit. Not much of a "cascade".
>Or at best, it won't get upvoted.
How do you know this? And if you do know it, why are you contradicting it in your very next sentence?
>When vote counts where active, this effect caused many instances where an excellent comment was found greyed out at the bottom of the page until a few smart HN folks with high karma voted it back up.
Yeah, this sentence. Anyway, the effect also "caused" many stupid comments to be rightly downvoted. BTW, high karma does not equal "smartness"; but it's interesting that you seem to like high karma so very much, since your rating is rather high, but hate displaying the accumulated karma on actual posts. Who precisely is "addicted", here?
You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction
The OP, like me, gained a great deal of value from knowing the vote counts of comments. In much the same way I (and presumably s/he) gain value from knowing the score and comment count of the post itself.
Vote counts were not perfect indicator of value, but they were better than having to guess at comment quality by observing the relative position of comments vs posting time.
[edit] Interesting. The comments from mixmax (29 minutes ago | http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495535) and blhack (20 minutes ago | http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495561) show higher than my brand new one. Presumably that means quite a few other people have voted them up in agreement
I still hold they are far superior to nothing.
Edit: case in point: I'd REALLY like to know how many people upvoted mmaunders original comment.
I disagree. Since the new system was implemented the signal:noise ratio seems to have gone up. The fact that HN is more difficult to read now is a good thing; it forces people to think for themselves, and improves the overall level of discussion.
I do agree that the voting should be shown after a few days, but for right now the changes seem to be making things better.
This is my entire point: I don't care about the points when I know about the topic, it's when I'm not qualified to decide what is signal and noise that they are valuable.
I can't agree that the signal noise ratio has gone up since the system changed, though this is a subjective, unmeasurable point.
It was common, before, for me to jump into the comments of a dicussion, check out the few highest rated ones, and then read the article with that information in mind, coming back to read other comments after that. With nothing to differentiate upvoted comments (unless they happen to be at the same thread level in the same thread), there's no way for me to do that, now. I don't view this as a good thing.
No. I'm well aware that others have different tastes.
What I'm arguing is that this feature that some people find convenient and harmless is not in fact harmless, and actually systemically degrades the site over time.
It's a systems problem, not a problem with any one individual.
Points should reflect the quality of the comment. If it's not being used for that, it's worthless to have.
Showing them days later, after the discussion is finished, is also fairly worthless.
I'd much rather have some indicator of quality posts. We already have an indicator for poorer quality posts. Their is value in knowing what your peers think.
People can't stand out based on upvotes (actual community approval) so they're trying to stand out based on post-length.
At a very basic glance it appears that what you're saying is true, but I've found the opposite.
In terms of learning new things, the vote count helps tremendously! You can tell that a security-related suggestion earning 50 up votes is sound (of course considering context), technology-wise. I've learned a lot about passwords, plaintext, server-side hashing, salting and related best-practices solely from HN comments.
Displaying scores might make the other aspects troubling (since group-think is supported unnecessarily, often disregarding novel thoughts or disagreements). But I've learned to ignore such things, especially since most of the conflicts are "opinions" anyway, so the value addition is somewhat limited.
In terms of actual facts and expertise though, nothing can beat the vote count!
Having said that, I am still not sure which one I prefer given that there is inherently a tradeoff between the two aspects.
No, absolutely not! You can only tell that other non-experts agree in some path-dependent fashion.
I'll occasionally see highly-upvoted nonsense in an area that I'm expert in. This is very bad.
This is some kind of cognitive bias.
EDIT> I should clarify that it's entirely possible for experts to disagree. So this isn't the you disagree with me so you dumb argument.
The fact is we're already half way bought in to this "social bias". Otherwise just get rid of the voting altogether. Get rid of karma. In fact, get rid of associating usernames with comments. But I think everyone realizes, even if they don't like to admit it, that social context provides some value, even if not perfect.
These two things are very different. I'd be all for getting rid of karma, but usernames provide identity.
I.e. when evaluating someone's comment it would be good to see other comments they've made that might provide insight into their biases.
1) username <-> insight into what you think over time 2) karma <-> insight into how popular your comments are
I want (1) and not (2) for my own learning. (2) is interesting in terms of studying group behaviour.
No the don't, they provide a social signaling function that can be just as powerful as a vote count. When a "popular" name is attached to a post it gets read more closely and frequently voted up. If HN users were truly interested in letting the "quality" of the content stand on its own then comments would not have names attached to them and the content would truly stand on its own.
> when evaluating someone's comment it would be good to see other comments they've made that might provide insight into their biases.
In other words, let the popularity of a username influence the visibility of the content. If you are suggesting that people (including yourself) actually go back and check out user comment histories with any frequency I think you are mistaken.
Karma is not just popularity, it is also a measure of perceived authority and insight that a comment provides to a discussion. The consequence of losing this signaling function may not have decreased the quality of the comments, but it has certainly decreased the utility of the comment sections at HN.
So? As you said, this is usually corrected. And, if points don't matter as so many people want to suggest, where is the harm in having some indicator of a posts quality. Please note indicator does not mean points.
I've been suggesting for some time now that high quality posts should be marked in some manner. No, rising to the top of the page is not a good manner, as it only affects parent posts.
Downvoted posts already get this treatment, even under the current system.
In fact, without some sort of quality indicator, points are useless.
Finally, their is a lot of discussion about how lack of points force people to read and research. That's all well and good, but I'm smart enough to know that I can't research everything, and their is value in knowing what the community thinks of a topic. It helps to steer me in the right direction.
Basically...
If you aren't going to use points to highlight good comments, then having points is useless, and they only serve those who think karma is worth anything.
Another scheme I've liked on some sites is to show the counts for both up and downvotes, along with the total. A comment's having 10 upvotes and zero downvotes can be quite different from its having 100 upvotes and 90 downvotes, even though both equate to a net count of +10.
If the comment is good, eventually its going to float up to the top anyway. An excellent article submitted at a time when most HN folks are away is less likely to hit the front page. This is a problem similar to what you mention. Hiding comment scores, IMHO is not the solution. Rather, it just kills the HN experience (at least for me).
Clarification: I don't want to bring back vote counts, or even a general indicator of votes, like others have suggested. I approve of the hiding votes, but a creative compromise could be better than what we have now.
It shouldn't be. Like you said, upvoting!=agreeing. It should be a rough measure of you making your point in a good way.
I can imagine an eloquent, well written movie review with which I don’t agree but which I think is so well written that it should be read by more people. That’s taste and you should certainly not downvote taste, but most discussions on HN are not about taste but rather about questions with right and wrong answers.
When I’m disagreeing with someone about those I must be thinking that what the person writes is based on wrong facts or is illogical. Should users be encouraged to upvote eloquent and well written comments even if they think those comments are spreading false information and are illogical? (Whether or not such comments should be downvoted is a different question. I tend not to.)
It’s never quite that clear cut in the real world. You might feel that the facts are wrong or that some illogical argument is hiding somewhere in the comment but you might not be sure about it. Upvoting may be the right thing to do, then – the comment can be seen by a wider audience and it can come under more scrutiny. The comment and its analysis can help all parties to get closer to the truth.
There is no doubt to me that there are situations in which upvoting despite disagreement can be a good idea. I also think that upvoting because of agreement and not upvoting because of disagreement can be a good idea.
On a certain level, agreement and “making your point in a good way” are one and the same. No matter how eloquent, how can a comment with factual errors that undermine its central thesis ever be an example of “making your point in a good way”?
You took away such an important buoy for us to navigate HN!
Why would the people need "high karma" to vote it back up? I ask this as someone with high karma. "showdead" is an option available to anyone, isn't it? I don't know the answer but I've always had it turned on at least.
Maybe the solution is to only show positive vote counts. We were already stopped at -4, so not showing any count unless it's above 1 isn't that far off.