Ask pg: Have the comments improved? | Hacker News Reader

Ask pg: Have the comments improved?

22 pointscrasshopper19 comments

Several weeks ago, PG lamented that comments had gotten worse. PG asked readers for suggestions of what he should do to make comments better.

Now at least some changes have been made. Would you say the comments have improved?

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I got rid of points to decrease contentious back and forths. I feel like that may have happened. At least, I feel like I've gotten dragged into fewer such threads.

Has anyone else noticed a trend either way?

I feel that things have improved for the better since the points disappeared - more to-the-point, less "I can't believe I've been downvoted for saying this" threads (even though everyone DOES know they were downvoted ....)

That's strange, right? Did HN just demonstrate some law of psychology? "Public shaming is decried; private shaming is tolerated."

I was originally skeptical about point removal. That's valuable information. But now that the site has been this way for awhile, I think it's a net win. It feels like people were using that information for bad purposes -- voting with the herd, voting to get a comment where it "ought to be" rather than just voting up or down on merits, and so on.

If comment scores were to return today, I'd feel bad about it. At this point, it feels like my comment scores are private, and generally nobody's business.

I don't agree that people were following the herd. If I genuinely disagreed with a comment, no amount of others upvoting would change my stance. To me, it was just an easier way to filter comments worth reading (or at the very least start from there).

I no longer read comments. Points acted as an editor's cue on high quality content to read. Maybe more good comments are produced now, but it's no longer possible to find them without reading everything.

This exactly. I've found that I read less comments and skim over them because it's hard to differentiate the good view points from the rest. I know the most voted comments should float to the top but not having points just makes the discussions less interesting to me.

Would ordering the comments based on points solve this? Ie. highest scoring comment at top.

They are in part. The comments are ranked by votes and time and probably some other mechanisms pg implemented. I think the reddit hot method might be better.

I'll upvote this as well. I would prefer the points system back in place.

There are still many stupid comments, but I think at least one flavor of stupid that was there before is now gone. Also, I find fewer stupid comments at the top of each page.

This was enacted during what felt like an apocalypse of comment stupidity, and it's down from then, but still subjectively up from a year or two ago.

The quality of comments here that I read has dropped dramatically. This probably does not reflect a decline in comment quality, but rather, is a result of having lost the primary filtering mechanism by which I decided which comments were good enough to be worth reading.

I like it better now. It reminds me of the old days, when I would just peruse comment threads at random, or else read comments from particular users (e.g., pg, paul, patio11, etc.). I think this because eliminating points seems to have discouraged a certain category of user from commenting.

Can't we have something like this? -- Those who want to see points, could enable it, but then they would not be allowed to upvote/downvote. OR they could still vote, but their votes won't be counted (or given less weight-age?).

Does it serve the purpose for both the sides? What are the potential caveats in this?

Potential problems: 1) people would set up two accounts, one to look at points and one to vote (and then log into both of them on separate browsers). It would be possible to modify the site to detect this, but that would be extra work for pg. 2) It would take less than a week for a browser extension that did this automatically (putting points into a page) to be released - there's already one attempt to build a database of points with an extensions (it records the score of points of anyone who has it installed and makes that information available to others).

It's a good idea on its face, but it wouldn't work.

I think that as HN becomes more popular it is only natural for the quality of the comments to decline.

Pretty much. According to Hacker News News [1] unique visitors tripled between April 2009 and February 2011.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

If HN can shunt bad comments to the bottom, that's a service to readers.

While on the topic, I've been wondering today if there is any concept in place concerning how to measure the desired improvement. If not, how does one determine "are we there yet?"

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