Want Hacker News Comment Scores Back? Check out HNPoints.com | Hacker News Reader

Want Hacker News Comment Scores Back? Check out HNPoints.com

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234 pointsHNPoints150 comments

If we're going to open a new dialog on this:

Has anybody noticed the drastic decline in quality of links and comments in the last month or so? I think one of the problems is that, without comment scores, new users don't have feedback from the community on how they're supposed to act. There's no way for them to learn the culture.

So it's September, but with no way to tell the new students to mind their manners.

Bad comments are still grey.

People can see their own comment scores.

HN is still in decline, but I don't think it's worse than when it had public scores.

Meanwhile, not having up-to-the-minute scores makes the site more pleasant to participate in; one isn't prodded to make statements in reaction to ludicrous (and likely ephemeral) voting swings.

>one isn't prodded to make statements in reaction to ludicrous (and likely ephemeral) voting swings.

You can see your own score, so I'm not sure why you think that's true?

It does mean that hivemind voting is negated, but I've not really seen that as a problem on HN. Some analysis of voting patterns etc before and after the change would be great to see from PG.

I think hivemind voting is pretty evident at times. You will see certain users with a much higher upvote (based on placement) than someone who had a far more insightful, far more thought and discussion provoking comment that was posted much earlier - and those certain users are people with names the community knows and respects (often rightfully so). This doesn't mean that those users should be upvoted just because of who they are.

Granted I have no facts to back this claim up - but I have seen it happen again and again - just the way certain popular blogs always reach #1 regardless of their content.

Yeah, but there's no context for the new users. I know that a +20 comment score is really good, but I only know this because I've been around for longer than the removal of the scores.

New users wouldn't have this feedback. They might think they're making good contributions at +2-3.

People talk about "group think", but when you've got an intelligent group (like HN), a bit of group think can be a good thing.

> there's no context

Hadn't thought of this. Really good point. How do I know what's a 'good' score if I only have myself to judge against?

I can see why you'd want feedback that worked this way, but HN comment scores never did. Also, +20 isn't a "really good" comment score. Depending on the thread, it's:

* A comment made by someone with name recognition whose comments are read in RSS by 20 people.

* A comment on a political thread that states a clear polarizing opinion for people to glom onto.

* A mystical winged unicorn "good comment".

* A mediocre comment on a buzzy thread ("TechCrunch Says Apple App Store Approval Process Makes iOS Better Than Android!").

My best comments on the site are not, as a rule, my top-scored comments.

Meanwhile, public scores clearly do create problems: they promote groupthink, they prod reactionary voting or, worse, reactionary commenting, and they act as nerd pheromones driving tangential discussions to the tops of threads.

The harm of public scores outweighs the good, in my opinion. Reasonable people can disagree about that point. But I'm not sure they can disagree that there's nothing bad about public scores (which is not an argument you made).

My best comments on the site are not, as a rule, my top-scored comments.

My best comments usually get about 5 points. That's because the best things that I write are usually on very specific topics that I know a lot about. However, the way that breaks down is that there's a tiny number of people who also know enough about those things to know if I'm just talking out of my ass or actually saying something useful. And even if they could tell, there's often not enough backstory for someone who doesn't at least have a passing interest in those areas to make sense of them.

On the other hand, my 50+ point comments tend to be some combination of well-timed, snarky and generic. Basically, they're the sort of thing that HN wants to discourage. As such I'm generally a fan of the scores being hidden.

Strong agree.

One of my highest-rated comments (inexplicable; I'm embarrassed by it):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2184067

Meanwhile, here's a comment I actually had to do research to write. Skim it and take a guess how its karma relates to the previous comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994085

Hint book: ZBER GUNA RVTUG GVZRF YRFF XNEZN.

Why are you embarassed by the first one? Targeted specific criticism is fantastic and hard to come by. The world needs more "this is bad -and heres why-" and less "yo Dawg I'm just not feeling it Dawg"

Can we just suffice it to say that I think the scores on these two comments should be --- at least --- reversed?

Of course the scores should be reversed on a place called "Hacker News" but you know the reason why the scores are the way they are; As the popularity of this site increases, the average skill set of the users deceases. Your "embarrassing" post is comprehensible to unskilled people, but your beautiful post is well beyond the skills of most users to understand.

Perhaps HN actually prefers "infotainment" over genuinely difficult information? Or prefers things that are within or near the shared knowledge to things it knows little about?

It clearly does prefer infobullshit over real information, which is why the top of the BankSimple thread is about Dave Fayram leaving the company and not about BankSimple.

Yes, that was painful.

+1 to this.

Among my first comments to HN was a single word: "Yes." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1533506

It has 34 points.

Albeit witty and appropriate in context, I think we can agree it's highly overrated. Meanwhile some of my much longer (and I think better) posts sit with only 1 point.

Comment timing and choice of article to comment on are huge factors for how highly rated comments are.

If you manage to comment relatively early on an article that winds up being popular, your comment is much more likely to itself be upvoted (or downvoted) a lot.

The later you comment, and the less popular the articles you comment on, the less chance your comment will be voted on at all.

I've often commented on articles which were "old" (by HN time) and on articles which I personally found interesting but which which hadn't received many upvotes, and those comments were very rarely up or downvoted (probably because most people never even saw them).

Comment placement is another important factor. "Top-level" comments (ie. comments without any parent comments) are more likely to be voted on than comments buried deep within a thread. Though replies to high rated top-level comments are often more likely to get voted on than top-level comments which appear later on an article with a lot of discussion going on.

I agree that there isn't a proper correlation between score and quality on most comments, but it's comments about specific topics that I don't know a lot about that I would want to see scores. How am I supposed to know if you're talking out of your ass or actually saying something useful if I know nothing about the topic? The scores allowed me to quickly determine the trustworthiness of a comment.

I think you just missed the whole thread of people explaining why scores did not allow you to determine the trustworthiness of a comment.

There is a subtle difference between quality and trustworthiness. It's possible I missed the thread you're talking about, but as far as I can see, most of the discussions here are discussing quality. Like I said, I agree score does not correlate to quality necessarily. I was simply pointing out that in the case of specialized topics like wheels mentioned, even a score of 5 is a useful signal in telling me that it's trustworthy, versus reading a comment with a score of 1 that could be complete BS and should be taken with a grain of salt.

even a score of 5 is a useful signal in telling me that it's trustworthy

But that can be a false signal. It's quite possible to have eloquent writers make total crap written in an authoritative style sound believable enough to have 5 people nod and upvote. Having no scores forces people to do their own research and form their own conclusion about trustworthiness, which is more work, but better.

Agreed. We have been through that argument a hundred times: a high score means the comment is a must-read. Period.

Why anyone wants to hide useful information is beyond me.

Amen, brother.

Most of the comments where I feel like I said something insightful or genuinely useful end up with a score of 5 or 6. The others are higher or lower (depending on timing.) I don't have any 50+ comments though, I haven't posted much and I try to avoid making the kind of low-signal comment that I expect would get that kind of result.

Here's a comment I made with +41 points:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556647

This isn't a joke, nobody recognizes my name, it's just a comment that I did a bit of research on before posting.

I'm sure there are plenty more like this. Of course some comments get upvoted "incorrectly" (A comment on made about "Winklevoss" being a verb got a lot of points).

How does hiding the points negate this? In my opinion, it does the opposite. If you can see scores, you can decide that a comment is "high enough" and ignore it.

Be cruel about someone else's infographic and see if you can't quadruple that score.

> People talk about "group think", but when you've got an intelligent group (like HN), a bit of group think can be a good thing.

Disagree. Intelligence doesn't undermine groupthink; in fact, the veneer of intelligence seems to make people more prone to groupthink because they'll say, "hey, this group is pretty smart, so they must be right!" Critical thinking is what is necessary, and I don't see enough of that on HN. Also, comment scores are not always indicative of quality, they're indicative of how many people agree. Don't conflate the two.

If you want an echo chamber, go to Reddit.

Also, comment scores are not always indicative of quality, they're indicative of how many people agree.

I want to go on record as strongly agreeing with this.

One of the textbook examples of groupthink, used in just about every classroom that covers the topic, is the Challenger explosion. If it's a problem for rocket scientists, nobody is immune.

"In decline" suggests it can go any lower.

Bring comment scores back, HN is getting even worse than before (which is really saying something) without them.

I agree that it makes the site more pleasant, I feel the scores were too often distracting from the actual meat of the comments. Today is a better balance between too much information and too vague: better scores still go up and negative scores are grayed out.

That said, I agree some more context would be useful. Maybe the balance could be adjusted by including some more information. A page could include some overall statistics, for example the top and average score for the page, and/or maybe other useful info that is not hidden but complicated to access, like the top and average karma, etc.

I would like to see some evidence of this decline.

Here is my alternate theory:

It isn't obvious that 'the decline' is really anything other than selective memory. The good posts are memorable because they are good. The crappy posts are uninteresting and forgotten.

So if you look at HN and you see a bunch of stuff that you are not interested in on any given day, you compare it to the good stuff (that you actually remember), and you say 'what is all of this crap.'

This is exacerbated in older users, as they have seen more really great posts that they can compare everyday crap to.

It is like comparing a single random day of your life to the combined highlights of the last 4 years of your life. With that comparison and no perspective about what you are actually comparing. (So its kind of like being in a committed relationship).

----

So I can't honestly say that I have hard evidence of a decline in HN.

There are a few things that annoy me about internet discussions in general, on sites like this, which I would like to eliminate. These are on the level of pet peeves, however. I'll give a few:

1.) Rapid back and forth of 1 liners and memes.

2.) I spend 1/2 hour or so composing and editing a rather in-depth post, and no one sees it.

This happens either because that thread has been pushed off of the front page, or the thread is already filled with comments which are only a couple lines, and while they may be reasonable and appropriately toned, seem to me to be a superficial analysis...

3.) Multiple articles on the same topic, all making it to the front page, even they don't really add anything to each other. It would be cool to merge articles/threads on the same topic.

4.) Blog links that do nothing but redirect to another blog or article. i.e. "x y has posted on y z; here's a link"...

5.) edit: Here's another: Karma is directly proportional to how early you post in the thread (by virtue of time being linear and people only visiting a thread a certain number of times).

There are more, but I can't think of them at the moment.

> 5.) edit: Here's another: Karma is directly proportional to how early you post in the thread (by virtue of time being linear and people only visiting a thread a certain number of times).

Though not perfect, an incomplete solution to the timing issue you mentioned is already in place. A new comment can show up at the top for a while, but the karma and age of the account may be weighting factors to prevent trolls from getting the top spot. The position of the comment degrades over time, and of course, how fast it degrades depends on points it receives. This doesn't work perfectly, but it's better than nothing.

Here is some data on this: http://foundation.logilogi.org/2011/5/9/the-best-time-to-pos...

That explanation works until you see crap that categorically would have been voted to -8 and beyond in the old days. Crap like this in particular: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2534082

> Meanwhile, not having up-to-the-minute scores makes the site more pleasant to participate in; one isn't prodded to make statements in reaction to ludicrous (and likely ephemeral) voting swings.

I feel the same. The change makes the site a bit harder to consume - particularly, skimming-quickly-for-a-couple-good-points is harder.

But it makes the site much nicer to participate in. First, I don't feel the need to reply to mean, nasty, or incorrect replies to me unless I have something to add. Second - and I think this is really nice - voting has become less about promoting an argument or viewpoint and more about saying "thanks for this" or "less of this, please" - I find myself voting up thoughtful stuff I disagree with more often now, and voting less frequently overall.

Personally, I'd say the site is harder to consume efficiently now, but more pleasant to interact with.

Agree completely.

If you think about it, "harder to consume quickly," as annoying as it is, is exactly what was needed to fix "the decline of HN." It helps filter out the linkporn because the people who participate are the ones who stay to enjoy the whole experience.

I'm finally finding more links on the front page that lead to lengthy articles I actually want to bookmark on instapaper and read later.

Could you please explain what you mean with 'linkporn'? WikiPedia doesn't know the term and Google gives only links to porn (which is probably not what you mean).

I can speculate, but I might be wrong. Maybe you mean something like 'liberally littering articles with links' or even 'linking to one's own blog, even when the link is irrelevant'?

I was thinking more like what you would see on Reddit, a lot of temporarily attractive/gratifying links that hold little long-term value. Great for attracting the masses and short-term traffic, but the exact reason people have been leaving this site in droves.

Also, a lot of people on Reddit blatantly talk about their intent to farm more karma with their posts.

Not that I have anything against reddit - I do frequent the site - but when I come to HN, the type of content I'm looking for is quite different than when I go to reddit.

And I think that's exactly the reason points shouldn't really be shown...

If you think about it, "harder to consume quickly," as annoying as it is, is exactly what was needed to fix "the decline of HN."

I have to disagree. I used the comment scores exactly for this, to "consume quickly". Well, yes, there's only so much time I can spend on HN and being able to figure out which posts seem to be highly valued was helpful.

Most of the time I would read the discussion of the article before the article itself. Sometimes from the discusson I could see that the article would not interest me. Sometimes the discussion was so thorough that there would be no need to read the article at all.

Now I generally read the top comment and decide on that. It's good, because it saves even more time. It's bad, because I'm most likely missing on a lot of content.

Maybe eventually I'll get to the point when I open HN once in a few days for a few minutes and close again. That will save time, but a lot of interesting content will be missed.

Couldn't agree more. A quick scan of the first sentence of a comment is enough to tell me if the rest is worth reading. If you need other people to tell you what you should think then there are other sites you should consider.

Bad comments are still grey.

Well, I would only want "good" comments to have some colour too. Say, those with score over 20 or some other arbitrary number should have a different colour. Maybe even more than one gradation - change of colour at score of 20, another at 50, maybe one more at 100. That would make me a relatively happy user.

I don't think I've noticed a decline in quality (yet), but I know for a fact that I comment less frequently (especially with root comments on a submission) and almost never up- or downvote comments any more.

I'd be interested to know if the votes per pageview have plummeted since the removal of comment numbers.

Actually I've thought the quality of comments has improved since points went away.

With too much gamification, everything becomes a game. Writing a comment should be about sharing experience or insight, not making a move to try to score points.

But, people still are making a move to score points. Your points still show.

Taking away only other people's points isn't really solving the problem.

Now points represent a "personal Everest". The motivation to post is pure.

With the old system, I often found myself motivated to post b/c I saw that a snarky comment had gotten a lot of points and wanted to one-up it. It was an ugly, ugly emotion and thankfully PG has eradicated it from HN.

"Now points represent a "personal Everest". The motivation to post is pure."

Not as long as total karma scores remain visible to the world.

A user's total score represents a very broad measurement of his/her contribution to the HN community, and is unlikely to negatively impact an individual's decision to post. If anything, seeing an overall high score makes a user seem more worthy of respect and less likely to trigger a points arms race in a single thread.

I agree to anything that will kill the stupid Bitcoin articles.

You got downvoted for apparent snark, but for what it's worth: me too. It's pernicious, too, because those comments can germinate in any thread involving money, banking, cryptography, and markets.

Bitcoin's primary use case seems to be generating karma on HN. As a friend put it: "Bitcoin is ruining HN."

As it stands, I'm hoping that Bitcoin is just one of those waves like Erlang was.

Moving to a different forum will kill the "stupid Bitcoin articles".

Are they really that bad? The biggest problem I have with them is that most of the comments are from people like yourself, a disinterested individual complaining about the submission. That's not a judgment on you by the way, I've complained about submissions too. (For a hypothetical comparison, I might get annoyed with a certain level of submissions over Apple's new iShiny since I find Apple fans cult-like. It's newsworthy yet more popular than it seemingly ought to be.)

I've noticed more new users making poor comments, but I feel like I've also seen fewer joke/one-liner comments at the top. I think it's more an influx of new users than just a decrease in quality. Perhaps the guidelines should be made more visible, and updated some. For one, the community norms about humor/snark aren't actually in there (from what I recall), but they're an important part of how to comment on HN.

Edit: Hmm, that gives me an idea. Perhaps give new users a few "sample comments" of what's good, and a few of which are bad. IE: "This comment by grellas comes from an informed background, and is free of snark despite contesting some of the claims in the article. Goofus sees the same article, and decides he can make a good pun on the title, and throws in an insult to the author based on something he sort of remembers hearing about a while ago. Be a grellas, not a goofus!" Well, perhaps less hokey, but you get the idea.

> fewer joke/one-liner comments at the top

One of us is misremembering the old HN. I remember joke/one-liner comments were a real rarity on HN. I might be wrong though.

I'm only a 2 year user, so I can't speak for old old HN, but I meant HN in the months before the change.

> I meant HN in the months before the change

me too, I'm about the same age-user as you.

I started reading HN about 2 years ago. Jokes and "Internet snark" were extremely rare, if I ever saw them at all. To me, that was the single greatest thing about HN - much more important even than the articles. Subjectively, I've noticed a gradual decline in comment quality starting about a year ago, and a much more drastic, rapid decline into a more Reddit-like culture going back only about 4-5 months.

Agreed new users must be flogged into compliance. And the experienced ones should be rewarded for following the pack.

I wouldn't say there's no way. It's not as though people can't reply to the memes and aggressive or otherwise poor comments and say, "This is HN, and we don't do that here. And this is why." And I think that for all the new kids, a fleshed-out explanation does far more than votes can, and you minimize the bandwagon effect that they're so prone to as well. Since a lot of these newbies are probably coming from Reddit et al, I think that's an important thing to minimize, because not only are the cultures of those sites different, but the voting, in the context of each community, is as well.

You don't need comment scores to know how to act or whether your comment is meaningful or not.

The problem is simply one of scale: communities don't scale up easily past a certain point.

Here's a heretical idea: you're only allowed a fixed number of posts per day, and you have to increase that limit by being a member of the site for a period of time, and be in good standing. It isn't a great idea, but I think we need to strike down the Web 2.0 notion that everyone should be allowed to talk at the same time. pg's realized (thankfully) that 'heavy-handed' moderation is necessary - no community can ever police itself, it will always degrade into memes and groupthink.

So here's my observation of what I think has changed.. I think the hidden scores have made the comment scoring higher in contrast.

By that I mean that I think the standard deviation in scores has gotten much higher, and the top few posts end up with higher scores than they used to.. for better or worse. I've had comments that were useful but far from brilliant end up with 40+ points, and I think the biggest reason is momentum. I think being able to see the scores was probably giving people an opportunity to say "10 points, yep.. that's a 10 point comment" and leave it alone.

So.. if that's true (and it'd be great to see numbers to back up or refute it).. then I'm not sure if it's better or worse.. but I'd tend to think it's not a great thing, since it makes it more likely that early useful comments are voted better than later brilliant ones.

At any rate. That's my take on a flaw that I haven't heard anyone else mention.

A suggestion that has been given (which I second) is to have 'bucketed' scores above some threshold:

-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5+, 10+

I've noticed that myself. Asking a question got me a 10+ point score on a comment that would have previously garnered only 2-3 points tops.

I don't really bother to vote that much anymore; I realized that I had previously only upvoted good comments that had low scores.

without comment scores, new users don't have feedback from the community on how they're supposed to act. There's no way for them to learn the culture.

Or more likely, the culture just changed. That happens sometimes, and when it does, there's no going back.

HN has become much more adversarial in recent months, and it has nothing to do with whether or not we see a number attached to the comment. You don't need that number to know whether the person who wrote the comment is someone that you probably wouldn't want to hang out with in real life.

My guess is that we're just all strangers now, and that it is human nature to implicitly treat strangers differently than we do friends. What's amazing (to me anyway) is that this change has affected even users whose names I recognize going back years. People whom I used to have a lot of respect for. It's not just the new users.

You either like debating strangers or you don't, and the people who relish these kinds of debates will pursue them even in the absence of a scorekeeper.

I just mostly can't get it in me to write long comments when there are so many more short comments that I can easily reply to. I also feel like if I do have something long/complicated/insightful to say, no one will see it anyways. I also have no idea who anyone is anymore -- but yes, early on, Hacker News was a bunch of friends, and now it's a really popular site on the internet that everyone knows about. It's way past my Dunbar number.

I would slightly disagree. I'm a new contributor, here, but I simply look at the comments on my profile and see the scores which helps me determine when I have, perhaps, strayed. It helps me refine what I contribute and how, based on the community response. Of course, I then have to interpret what scores are the result of my contributing something of value versus people simply agreeing with the sentiment of my comment, but that isn't too hard. I don't know that enough people would see public scores and derive what is good or bad before contributing to be a reason for tagging every post with them.

I think the way the system is, now, isn't ideal but it is decent. It eliminates the temptation of a lot of people to post with the intention of getting lots of points so everyone sees how awesome they or their comment are, but still provides the input on those comments for the individual to see. So it helps shape your quality, without making the "ranking" a public competition.

As for curating the live contents of an actual discussion . . . I don't think exact point numbers is necessary for that. If I only want to read the best top half of the comments in a discussion, I don't need to know that a set of comments got 12, 32, 48, and 119 points. I just need them to be displayed in such a way that I can discern the top-most content. Physically weight the comments (in color, boldness, placement, or other possible options) so that the top 20% of comments appear in one way, the next 40% appear another, and the bottom 20-40% appear in yet another way. Easy to visually discern and pick through, but the top comments are then tied to the top comments in relation to that exact discussion and not a hardset number of "anything over 50 points is really great - period". (For all I know, this may be how HN does it - I tend to read most comments already, so I'm not sure).

Points should definitely be visible after certain amount of time, if not in real-time.

here's another point to consider, since the debate is open again.

I just counted how many replies there are to each comment on this page and this is the result:

21 replies: 1 thread (main thread)

13 replies: 1 thread

6 replies: 1 thread

5 replies: 1 thread

3 replies: 1 thread

2 replies: 8 threads

1 reply: 39 threads

That means the 39 comments that are the only comment in a thread I have no idea whether they're good or bad, save my own judgement. The threads that have 2 replies don't fare much better: Since there's weighting towards users with high average karma, time decay, etc. it's hard if not impossible for me to infer whether these comments are good or bad according to the community.

In other words, in this thread there are 55 comments where I have no idea what the community thinks, and since they're all children to other comments they might show up anywhere in the thread. I have no way of parsing these comments without reading the whole thread through, including all the fluff.

The comments that are replies to comments with 3 or more replies count to 48. This means that in this thread more than half of the comments might as well have been without votes. It makes no difference - you can't see the vote, the comments doesn't rise to the top since there isn't anywhere to rise to, and it might appear anywhere on the page.

This begs the question: If you can't see the votes and can't parse out the interesting information inferred by these why have voting at all? I'm encouraged to read through the whole thing. Voting is then just a token gesture with no real effect. And then you're back to newsgroups...

The alleged weighting of comments within a thread is a complete failure because of that exact reason. I actually get a headhache from the frustration of knowing that weighting is done so I have to take into account the size of the thread to decide if something deserves my special attention. What a pain.

To some extent, I think it's wishful thinking to suppose that improved algorithms can significantly forestall HN's reversion to the mean comment quality of the internet.

It's a question of size. With ten people in a room, it's likely that none of 'em is a complete doofus. But with a thousand people in the room you've got a bunch of doofuses. And hugh3's Fifth Rule Of The Internet is that doofuses will inevitably dominate conversations. They do this in two ways:

1. When a perfectly sensible article is submitted, some doofus will make a completely unreasonable comment about it. Three or four sensible people will carefully piece together responses detailing why the doofus is wrong, each of which sets off its own thread, and pretty soon the single dumb comment made by the one doofus is starting to dominate.

2. Other doofuses have agendas. They're not here to find out interesting stuff about all fields, they have one particular hobby horse that they really want to push. And that hobby horse is generally stupid, but if you've got a few people really into it then. (I'm not gonna name any names, but there are certain things which do show up on HN awfully often...)

Anyway, you can't force doofuses not to be doofuses. And you can't make doofuses go away. And you can't make the doofuses lose interest in the only outlet they have for their doofus ideas. So aside from starting a new site and hoping you'll get a few years before the doofuses take over, what can you do?

I really thought I was imagining a decline, but I have to agree. For the first time I've actually toyed with the idea of killing my HN rss feed. I still find the lack of points very annoying, for all the million+1 reasons already given.

I downloaded and installed this.

From now on, I personally stop upvoting or downvoting anything at all. It will not be noticed by anyone, it just feels the right thing to do.

Yeah, having got past the initial "ooh, this is cool" phase, I do actually think HN was better off with the comment scores.

For example, I was looking at a popular submission the other day and someone had said "Hey is there a PHP port of this?". Back in the day, I'd be able to see how many points it had as a rough indicator of how many other people would have found a PHP port useful. Now I can't tell if that was just one guy, or if 50 people thought the same.

Please, PG, bring the points back? (and while you're at it, stop new users being shown in green?)

Speaking of coloring, what if, instead of points, highly voted items showed orange-red or something to that effect.

I lost information when comments went away. When someone suggested a payment processor and got 150 upvotes, I would know they sound respectable.

Maybe bringing comment scores back isn't needed, just a rough sense of how the comment was received via coloration.

Yeah that would solve it. (even better, make the shade of colour relative to the number of votes deployed on that page. So it's indicative of the percentage of votes on the page, rather than some absolute value)

> Please, PG, bring the points back? (and while you're at it, stop new users being shown in green?)

+1 (not least because then I could hit the up arrow instead of wasting space with this post).

I'm not following. Why does a lack of visible comment scores necessitate your post?

Perhaps because (s)he wants to share with the community that at least one person agrees with the comment:

Previously: click up arrow, score of parent shows as 2.

Now: click up arrow... no one knows. Post a comment to make it visible (ideally add some other relevant detail).

Definitely suboptimal.

Isn't that what we're trying to avoid? Having some symbol of agreement?

I'm not really sure what people wanted to avoid by getting rid of the voting numbers. Posts still appear to be ranked based partly on score, and posts near the top of a discussion are still going to get more upvotes and replies.

Meanwhile, if someone posts about the project they are setting up and 50 people reply to the discussion with an assortment of feedback, it is probably useful/interesting to know that 5 of those ideas were also supported by many other people. Personally, I would rather see that from a simple, discreet number than a million "me, too" posts. The latter is the most obvious negative change I have observed since the scores disappeared, though as it happens I do agree with many of the other points people have made in this discussion as well.

If you're worried about too much groupthink and people trying to score every last point they can for some reason, surely there are other approaches that could be implemented quite simply: you could use some sort of grouping with a logarithmic scale, for example, or cap the maximum points any post can receive and let it decay accordingly in the priorities relative to newer posts no matter how many upvotes it got at the start of the discussion.

by showing that my opinion is not isolated, but shared by others.

I agree actually... It would be nice if there was a visual indication for greater than 1 as well as less.

I don't miss the actual scores though. Just indicating positive/negative/neutral would be enough for me.

I present sorting as a possible solution.

Have a sort (optional setting) that puts the highest rated comments at the top of each thread branch. This combined with graying of zero/neg rated comments should be adequate to see what the community prefers.

That way, skimmers can see and read comments that are rated higher first, but there's much less gaming for higher scores (just implicit ranking within the specific blog-post context).

Also an indicator of a comment that's much higher rated than others in the comment thread or post could also be indicated.

There are many ways to see quality without revealing the scores. Look at say, online stores like Amazon for "bestselling" sorts... you don't see overall sales, but a sales rank and even that's hidden at the search results level.

On the issue of scores vs no-scores, it'd be possible to A/B test this, so half of HN users see scores, and half don't.

Metrics to track might include the number of comments made, number of hits on the site, number of upvotes / downvotes, and probably many more.

Some people obviously feel strongly about this issue, and it might be necessary to take steps to prevent gaming of the outcome. Keeping the metrics secret until after the test would help with this. So would publicly announcing that only a small (say 10%) but undisclosed subset of users will be used to determine the outcomes of the testing. So any individual user wouldn't know if their behaviour would affect the results, and so would have little incentive to waste their time trying to affect the outcome.

It'd be nice to take a data-driven approach to resolving this question.

An interesting idea. But what would stop someone from continuously creating new accounts until they got an account which could see the scores?

You could exclude recently created or low-karma accounts, or at least track them separately. Indeed, there are many subgroups of HN users it might be interesting to track. E.g., new users, or users who've had accounts for a long time, or users with particularly high average comment scores, etc.

I much prefer the new HN, without visible comment scores.

When comment scores were visible, it was obvious that many people would just vote with the herd, downvoting comments with lots of downvotes, and upvoting comments with lots of upvotes.

This is still a problem, since HN still tends to put highly rated comments near the top, and low rated comments near the bottom. But it's not nearly as much of a problem as it was when comment scores were visible.

I think the quality of comments has increased with the new system, and I find myself reading more of the comments now that the scores aren't visible.

I also find myself voting less, and voting only on comments I personally feel are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad.

One change I would like to see HN experiment with is making the score of a given comment visible only after you've voted on that comment.

This will both encourage voting and also satisfy people's curiosity, while still discouraging voting with the herd.

> making the score of a given comment visible only after you've voted on that comment

That would be an acceptable compromise to me. It fulfills my own use-cases for having scores, but retains the benefits of not having scores.

> When comment scores were visible, it was obvious that many people would just vote with the herd, downvoting comments with lots of downvotes, and upvoting comments with lots of upvotes.

Hmm. First of all you had no way of knowing that people were voting because of the high (or low) scores. Your theory seems to be "Hmm, the score on this comment is un-naturally high, therefore people must have just been voting on it because it was high". Secondly, now that we can't see the scores, you've no way of knowing whether the points awarded are just as 'un-naturally' high as they were before scores were shown. For example, one of my comments in this thread has got 11 points in the last ten minutes or so - that's without scores being shown.

In the past, you may have attributed that score to herd-voting. But clearly that can't be the case, as no-one can see the score. ( except the few who've installed the points plugin!)

Well, it's true that I can't read people's minds and find out the real reason that they voted for something.

However, it's not true that there weren't signs that herd voting was going on.

I've spent quite a bit of time on HN, and have monitored many popular threads and have seen how comments fared when they've gotten lots of up or down votes.

It was my feeling (though just a feeling, without hard data to support it) that comments would tend to get upvoted substatially more when they already had a relatively high rating, and downvoted when they had a relatively low rating.

Also, I noticed many comments that I considered to be of high quality get passed over for low quality comments with higher scores, and what I considered to be kneejerk downvoting on valuable comments with lower scores.

Now that comment scores are no longer visible, it's harder to gauge these trends, but not impossible.

HN still tends to place higher rated comments near the top, and lower rated comments near the bottom, so you can get a feel for how people are voting on a given comment by making note of how the comment moves up and down the page.

The scores of your own comments are also visible. So you can draw some conclusions from monitoring voting on them.

I would certainly love to see public release of anonymized HN voting data, and some good analysis of these sorts of trends (also on voting patterns in relation to how long a given user has been on HN, and how active that user is, etc..).

Until then, all we have are our own subjective interpretation of what we've seen happen on the site.

It really bothers me that so many people here seem to be saying "I am capable of scoring articles fairly, but the rest of the community seems not to be able to think for themselves, falling victim to group think and a herd mentality."

This seems like a lot of fundamental attribution error [1] going on here.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

I don't think that's accurate - I want points back because it allows me to see what other people have voted. Because I trust this community I'll be fairly certain these ar ethe comments that will hold the most value for me.

I agree with you. It seems to me that those opposed to visible points are saying that "other people don't vote properly".

I trust my judgment better with the lack of quantified information on how the group as a whole has behaved. Perhaps I'm just projecting but I trust the judgment of others better under the same circumstances.

I don't think I voted well either. I think you may have set up a false dilemma here.

Agreed.

I agree with this too. HN community has value. Points = harnessing that value.

In my view, the comment scores made the site more fun and more social.

One thought is that maybe the score gets hidden if it is 1 or less. I think that scores are especially interesting when it highlights a great comment or provides feedback to the person making the comment.

The ordering of comments without a score is a good example of why a visible score is needed. You assume that the best comments are on top but it is not clear how good are the comments below the top one.

Since the scores were removed, I have been commenting less often and often ignoring many of the comments below the top ones.

The submitted site is interesting. I will not go to the trouble of contributing any scores I am aware of to the database, however. Here in this thread, we are once again in metadiscussion about whether or not it was a good idea for HN to experiment with not showing users the comment karma scores of other users, a change that happened not long ago. When pg wrote his post "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?" just 47 days ago,

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."

That's still the key issue. In the view of the site founder, who has had a registered account here for 1684 days, many of the high-scoring comments carried a false signal of quality, likely to mislead users about which comments are factually accurate or helpful to the community. If some change of voting rules or comment karma visibility brings about higher scores for good comments, and lower scores for mean, dumb, or other bad comments, that is helpful to all readers of HN.

Feel free to review the site guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

and the site welcome message

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

for guidance on what is desired here and thus guidance on how to vote. I defer to the site founder on all issues of site governance. I have found HN largely to be a worthwhile website for my 914 days as a registered user, and my interest is mostly to make sure that the site founder and the members of his volunteer editor ("curator") team

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

continue to enjoy the site and find it useful for themselves. They are doing a good job, and I want them to have incentive to keep up the good work. On my part, I have been able to find good comments more readily since the comment karma scores were hidden than I was before.

I wonder if a system that weighed upvotes based on the commenter's karma would make things better. The top 10% (or 50%) of users could get full upvoting capability, while the rest can give a fraction of an upvote based on their location on the karma order.

I love this. A hacker approach to getting the points back :)

Thanks for your support! Yep, just trying to make something people want. :)

This is definitely something people want. Thanks for building it :)

There is a huge asymmetry in the power of HN users between those that can down-vote and the rest. The problem is that many of the "powerfuls" use their privilege to punish other users based on disagreements, whims, or simply to silence opposite opinions. It is OK to indicate the popularity of a comment by moving it to the top but it's wrong to silence an unpopular comment by fading it away. That should be reserved only to comments that violate the rules: spams, trolls, shameless ads, etc.

Put the unpopulars at the bottom or indicate the degree of popularity with a number, but don't disappear it. Fading away honest unpopular comments is a big turn off that ultimately harms the debate.

How about throwing the code[1] up on github?

[1] The XPI is a slim greasmonkey-compiled script which just loads http://hnpoints.com/hnpoints.js into the page

I'm planning on doing that, but wanted to fix up any bugs that crop up first. In the meantime, as you noted, the un-obfuscated JS file is up on the server for all to see. It's used in the bookmarklet and Firefox plugin directly, and the Chrome, Opera, and Safari extensions use the same file bundled up with minor or no changes.

By the way, I don't think you'll get past the mozilla review process with this extension structure. When I wrote one for my job, I seem to remember them being nervous about loading and executing JS from 3rd parties (the thinking being: if you're hacked, suddenly everyone who installed your extension is also hacked, especially as the JS is executed with raised privs.) Not that you're at that stage yet, but I just thought I'd give you a heads-up :)

Nice idea, well executed.

PS: You aren't using the extension yourself? edit: ah you are now :)

Thanks for the tip! Given how technically savvy most of HN is, I was thinking the XPI download would be sufficient at least for now, but when I do go to submit it to the addons repository, I will be sure to put the actual JS in there.

I am indeed using the Chrome extension, but it only updates comment scores every 10 minutes while on HN as not to slow down the HN reading experience. :)

I'm onboard, but I think it's funny that this is the only thread I've seen numbers in so far.

Yeah, it's a nice idea, and without an API it's the best we can get, but really it requires the participation of the majority of the userbase in order to work.

Yeah, in its infancy, it's natural for all of the participants to be congregated on the inaugural thread. :) Comment scores for people who have the extension should show up for any comment they've made in the past two weeks, though, and it should start filling in around HN as more people start using it.

Dear PG, please bring back the vote counts and vote-based sorting. If you want to give the option, make it a per-user setting to disable.

My recent approach to having to weed through ALL comments to find the interesting ones has been to completely avoid reading them and switch to different channels of obtaining information (blogs, apps, reddit, etc.)

Apparently Websense filters the site as "Potentially Damaging Content Sites."

I am not saying this thinking that the site is potentially damaging. Websense is pretty dumb about most of the things it chooses. I just wanted to let HNPoints know that because it blocks people from seeing it from behind a Websense filter.

Thanks for the heads up; I will see what I can do. :)

How do you infer comment scores. The order of comments appears to be determined by both score and elapsed time. You'd have to have pretty exact knowledge of how it worked. Is that information available?

The source code for Hacker News is available with the Arc download. pg has said that the actual ranking algorithm differs slightly from the code listed in order to thwart abuse, but for the purposes of ranges I thought it'd be close enough. Knowing the time, relative ranking, and the known scores of participants, the ranges are basically "how many points would this comment need to be one rank higher/lower".

Thanks for this extension.

A suggestion- I understand what you're trying to convey with the point range, but for usability I'd prefer always seeing one number there. I don't mind a best guess and marking the score as an approximate number. Having to mentally parse ranges and less than symbols adds a slight speed bump.

Goodness and badness is subjective. Up/down voting should exist only for the purpose of recommending articles to each individual user. This is far different from the typical use of up/down which is to recommend articles to the collective, which is not robust against influxes from other communities, e.g. reddit, digg etc.

In other words, when I log in, I should see my own personal HN list of stories, that have been submitted by people I respect (i.e. people I've previously upvoted), or people that they respect etc.

I call this idea PeopleRank.

I would love to see information from PG on the following in relation to the recent changes in HN:

    - increase/decrease in activity of users with highest karma
    - increase/decrease average in comment score, normalized 
        by time after post of OP
    - amount of time the highest rated posts stayed on the front page
    - trends for # of flags

Also, it would be great if he put the guidelines on the submission page.

I've posted this before, but haven't heard anything.

Seriously, just bring the friggin' scores back. I feel this experiment has run its course and at this point it's really just more irritating than anything.

I was relieved when the scores disappeared. The less unnecessary information the better, I find. Besides, I think score visibility just promotes groupthink.

I don't use score sheets with my friends. Moderation becomes necessary in a pseudonymous environment, but there's no reason for it to become visible where it's not necessary. Reply-order shuffling and grey-out seem to be a pretty good fit there.

Thanks for this; I've installed it. I don't really think that disabling the public points has lead to better discussions.

Are you filtering on the server side for cheating?

(I am testing it with this very comment)

Edit: No

Double Edit: well it was 99999 for a moment, back to 1, so you are doing something. gg.

Take away points from people too.

Only submissions themselves should have points.

That way there is no "ego" - it's only about the articles.

Thank you so much for doing this.

I guess I don't really get the point of this. The whole idea of ditching points was to see if it could generate better discussion. By using this extension you are re-enabling points (even if only for a few select users). That re-enabling is going to encourage those users to go back to their bad posting habits... or so we would assume if the original theory that points cause bad posts is correct.

I know a lot of you love your points, but maybe we should see if no points really does generate better discussion rather than trying to find a way to create a point system.

PS: I think points is really tricky, it rewards people for great comments, but it also rewards those stupid-one-line-no-thinking comments. Maybe only show points for comments with more text... whatever, thats a whole other subject.

The point of this is that users' wants & desires are really hard to dictate. The desired outcome of ditching points was to see if it could generate better discussion. The thing is, there are a certain sub-set of users (personally, I'm ambivalent) who really, really want the point system back, and don't necessarily agree with the assertion that HN was on the decline to begin with.

I have a tendency to use HN in a few ways:

* As a tech industry firehose: I review headlines in RSS (Reeder) and only 'v' through to headlines that really pique my interests.

* As a means to directly interact with smart people whom I would not otherwise meet (I'm in a small town in Florida).

* As a means to understand how people feel about the ideas I'm reading.

That last use case has been more or less squashed by the removal of visible points. I can only know how much the community agrees or disagrees with what I say, not those in disagreement with me. What's ironic is that agreement/disagreement wasn't the purpose of the karma system at HN to begin with. That's just how it was frequently used.

You can blame this on the fact that the attribution of karma points on HN was supposed to be driven by causes that many people simply don't think about. Put another way, voting the way we're intended to isn't intuitive to most people. This situation is made worse by the fact that virtually every other site with a similar voting system uses it to express agreement/disagreement, rather than conversational contribution/detraction.

The benefit of transparency is offset by the many well argued counter-points. The perception of this issue has a lot to do with one's personal use case. I'm happy to keep two out of three, but for someone who plays more of a spectator role, I'm sure the loss of the point system is a big hit to the utility of the site.

For goodness' sake people. You don't need to be told which comments are 'good'. In any case, the score system is indicating popularity, not quality.

Use your own judgement, you don't need to behave as part of a herd.

Quick question that is off topic, but did you do the design for that page yourself or did you purchase it off some sort of theme site? Just wondering cause I love it.

The design is from themeforest.net, with some minor adjustments. :)

For some reason it just doesn't feel the same ;) :

http://i.imgur.com/3u1Rb.png

I wish we didn't have to rely on a 3rd party.

Typing is kinda difficult for me on most days, so I don't comment much. I vote a little bit on comments, when I bother to read them, but I tend to vote-up more on submissions. I've also have been known to do a lot of flagging on the /newest queue (and even triggering the "excessive flagger" threshold).

I do try to remember to make new submissions for all to enjoy, but the irony is, this means I'm off somewhere else looking for interesting stuff rather than finding it here. The stuff that I find interesting is new tech, engineering, security and science developments (i.e. hacking up new solutions and analysis) along with a small splattering of business.

The speed of churn on the /newest queue means some of my submissions are not even seen. On average, there's maybe two or three other people here with similar interests to mine, or better said, they appreciated the submission enough to up-vote. But that is on average, so plenty of my submissions vanish into obscurity with no notice. --This is not a complaint. Other people have other interests, and the fast queue progression should be expected when there is no barrier to entry.

The trouble is, the fast queue means submitters get very little USEFUL feedback. If you post some link-baited controversy, getting 1000+ points on the submission is not too unusual, but it probably isn't noteworthy new hacking. The good hacking stuff on HN seldom hits the main /news page, instead it's buried deeply in the /newest queue. --It has always been like this. Blame human nature. If you look at /classic or do some HN spelunking by item?id= or hit archive.org for old snapshots, you'll find the main /news page has neither improved nor declined.

I think gaining points for submissions is unfair. In my opinion, I think a submission just says, "Hey, I thought this was interesting, and you might too." When a submission is sincere, it's just a friendly gesture with good intentions. But we all know how good intentions work. Whether or not the submissions is ever seen by others here, or more importantly, is interesting hacking to them is generally unknown, even to the submitter. The displayed up-votes on submissions are really just a popularity contest feeding on link-baited controversy.

Another reason why gaining points for submissions is unfair is a submission has vastly superior visibility compared to a comment. I believe PG has some secret sauce running to address the visibility discrepancy. As far as I've been able to divine through observation, points from submissions don't count towards the "average" listed in your profile. Well, it seems that way on my account, but I think even older and more active commenting members (grellas) may have their average calculated with both submissions and comments. (Don't get me wrong, when grellas posts, I read it, and usually up-vote. I doubt I'm alone on that so his exceedingly high average might be warranted from comments alone).

So the display of points on submissions fails to be particularly valuable metric. Similar could be said for the display of points on comments. I refuse to care what other people think of you or your statements, and I would prefer avoid being biased by displayed points so I make up my own mind on whether or not I find your comment interesting.

For notes, it was tptacek that made the suggestion to remove the display of comment points in the "Stave Off The Decline of HN" thread from PG. I thought his idea was brilliant, possibly because I had the same idea, but as usual, tptacek thought of and posted it first. If you want a discussion to be useful, turning it into a game is entirely counter-productive. Worse yet, the display of points creates an unfair game due to manipulations of visibility, cognitive bias and other factors.

Since the removal of comment points being displayed, there has been far less one-up-manship in the discussions, and people are more polite because they are not competing for points in a game. You are now more free to just state your opinion without worrying about whether or not others will agree or disagree with you. As long as you're not being an ass about it, you can generally post uncommon or even controversial opinions without repercussions.

Some have (repeatedly) argued that the lack of displayed comment points results in a loss of context or loss of a valuable metric for deciding what is worth reading. I'd argue the opposite (and slightly less popular view) that displayed comment points fail to offer any real usefulness and are mostly harmful. --Just like whether or not my submissions are interesting, the usefulness of displayed comment points is a very subjective matter of opinion. Some find it helpful, but others consider it harmful.

To you, my opinion about comment points does not matter. You already have your own opinion. And there is the very reason why displaying comment points doesn't really matter.

OT: What do names highlighted green mean?

It represents a new user. (I think it is for accounts having age < 1 day.)

Thanks!

I hope everyone on HN installs this.

I knew someone will do this.

I liked it for 2 weeks, but, as a data driven person, i would like to be able to see the scores . What was the incentive to hide them again?

Science says that blind crowdsourcing is generally better: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/17/wisdom-of-cro...

One could find arguments for both sides, though:

- HN is not a crowd, it's a niche community

- Voting is not blind even now.

- The number actually encourages voting, since it serves to remind that your vote will change than number

- It's good to know whether your vote will have little impact or will move the comment upwards

- The site should encourage more people to vote, the more people vote the better.

Thanks for this! I was hoping pg would fix his own site, but since he won't i guess the community will have to.

You can't "fix" it. It's deliberate.

Broken is broken, deliberate or not.

Honestly, I think you're being less than objective. If PG wants comment scores off and comment scores are off then I'd say its correct...

Calling it broken is like calling piracy "theft". It's flamebait and it obscures the issue.

It was deliberate, but it's still horribly, horribly broken.

If you define broken as "I don't like it".

The person you're trying to persuade is PG. His metric for "broken" is the quality of HN. Make an argument don't just say things.

If the quality of HN is a metric, HN is horribly, horribly broken. The quality has been steadily declining until a few months ago when it bottomed out somewhere around the quality of r/atheism.

Take the top voted item from any time maybe 6-8 months ago, and another from 1 month ago to today, and compare the quality. HN used to be full of good stuff, now it's "How i made 200M in 15 minutes by writing Github for Mint in the Cloud (YC S12)" and "How Ruby is better than Python because i wear a fedora and skinny jeans". I'm just here for the 1 or 2 good submissions per day, and hoping it will get better.

Sir His Grand Amazing Great Majestic Greatitude of Fancy Amazingness doesn't seem to want to fix anything, though.

That just isn't fair at all. He clearly wants to fix things. That's why he's experimenting.

How does hiding scores reduce the quality of content on HN? I'm still not seeing any relationship between the issue and what you're complaining about...

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