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Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

Idea: a [view count] link. Once clicked, votes are ignored for that comment. You can vote, or get the social proof, but not both.

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That's quite brilliant. How about up, down and abstain buttons and if you click any you get to see the vote count and you're done voting. It will encourage voting, remove the social proof influence and give the option to abstain.

There should be an option to abstain from voting as well, for those that don't know if it's a valid comment or not.

Isn't that just called "not voting"?

I think they mean "not voting but still being able to see how people voted on that particular comment"

About 4 seconds after that feature was implemented, someone would write a greasemonkey script that clicks all the abstain buttons for an HN article.

If you choose to run that script then you're choosing to not vote at all (assuming votes can't be changed, which they can't now.) Which means you can't contribute to the "social confirmation up/down vote pile-on" problem either. So that particular problem would remain solved.

I agree so much I'm commenting.

Perlmonks.org does this. They only show you vote counts for nodes you've voted on. It always seemed effective to me -- I'd vote on comments I thought were good, and after I voted I'd see what their vote scores were.

That defeats the entire point of having people vote who know what they're talking about.

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.

Oh, are you one of those pathologic "Edit: Downvotes? Really?!?" karma gamers on reddit that seem to feel entitled to upvotes? I think that sort of meta-entitlement karma-whoring is extremely annoying. I get a little chuckle when the person playing that game makes the edit within the ninja-edit window and is missing the edit-star on their comment. Of course even on HN even with the hidden points, you see your own comment points, so feel free to go ahead and play that game here. Or just pretend you're being abused by the ignorant hordes. It's pretty easy. Nobody knows if you're actually negative here anymore.

Edit: Downvotes? WTF? I'd like to know who downvoted this. At least post some constructive criticism.

I'm a karma gamer for being disappointed when rational opinions are downvoted by people that make incorrect assumptions or whose opinion get in the way of a good discussion?

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?

School conditions us to care about numbers assigned to our work so it's an easy trap to believe numbers on comments represent correctness or truth. When things are graded incorrectly it's only natural to want to object. I feel the number more as readings of my ability to communicate effectively in the medium with the audience. I wouldn't take low scores personally as a reflection of your skill or domain mastery.

This is the third post on HN that has had massive numbers of people saying that they use the karma for posts to judge for correctness and to add relevancy to the posts. I have stopped reading many comment threads because comment volume is simply too high and I have no filter. It's not so much that I need the ego as I get aggravated that false information is spread to anyone.

It's been suggested before, but the actual problem here is that the functions of the up/down arrows are overloaded and used differently on other sites. Some people use them for correctness, some people use them for entertainment. Personally, I think admitting defeat on the UI is the best option here. The arrows should become essentially placebos. Separate the mechanisms for rewarding insightful comments. Perhaps something more like the "thanks" mechanism in some forums where there is a scarcity to the votes--each user is allowed only 5 thanks/day whether they use them or not. The limit could be seniority based. But if I was running the site, I would leave the arrows and just give up on re-educating the masses to use the arrows differently and move on. It's a battle that cannot be won.

How does that option help the main poster? Forcing him to vote on comments (even as abstention) is just meaningless mechanism that gets in the way.

I want that option as an account setting, I'd gladly give up all voting rights in return for being able to see vote counts.

This makes me sad. I always thought that part of being a good user on HN was submitting feedback via comments and voting. To imagine that there are users out there who don't consider this a community, and want only to leech off the useful information contributed by others, is saddening.

In general I would agree, and I would agree that people should do their part in up (and down) voting comments. But to me, with no scores visible, I hardly notice the impact. I always read all the way down the page, and rather than trying to work out how high a comment has been voted based on its position on a page, I just ignore it.

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.

Bad idea. That doesn't help skimming for info, which is the main poster's problem - you have to read the comment before you decide to find out if it's upvoted. And once you've done that, you've already committed the time. Sound nice, but it's not practical.

How does this help the situation at all? And how long before there's a plugin to "click" all of the [view count] links?

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.

Also a [view votes] for the whole page, and you lose your right to vote on that particular topic.

I upvoted this. My own opinion. I don't know how many other silent readers agree, but hopefully I can know soon.

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.

No. It's overly complicated for the problem that's trying to be solved. I would have to weigh voting on a comment against seeing how many other people voted on it for EVERY comment. I just want to scan smart comments and learn the sides of an issue quickly.

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?

The problem is groupthink. Even HN is not immune.

Unless you create two accounts.

All systems can be hacked and tweaked, you should never write off a system just because its possible to work around it. It's a trade off, and you have to weigh it all up.

A great idea. You get to see votes only after voting, which eliminates social proof inertia and gives an incentive to vote. As long as you can't revoke votes (a la reddit), this would work beautifully.

Pretty sure they're doing this already; have you guys looked at how this thread is sorted? It's not by time of post, implying that your vote is tallied (and counts).

Would having a socket puppet just to peek at votes be grounds for banning?

Would this even be a problem for most scenarios? I don't think most users have (or would want to spend) the time to look at two browsers for every set of comments I want to view and/or vote on.

This is a hacker community. It will take all of 24 hours for purpose-built bookmarklets or even browser extensions to appear.

Seeing vote counts could also be a karma linked feature, I suppose. That makes it enough work to the point where it's probably not worth it to game the system.

I figured that is part of how it works anyway not just upvotes.

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