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Comment by ajj | Hacker News Reader

I agree.

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.

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> 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.

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.

But that's a great opportunity for the expert to step in and say something valuable in reply. The high upvote count of the "wrong" response will lead to your response getting more readers.

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.

> Get rid of karma. In fact, get rid of associating usernames with comments.

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.

> usernames provide identity.

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.

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