Ask HN: Visible Comment Scores - My Biggest Problem
Bottom line is that since the display of comment votes was suppressed, I feel like the inertia of early comments is too strong. In summary, I believe there is psychology behind voting on comments whose scores you're aware of that allows users to evaluate the proximity of a comment's score to the 'right' score for that comment.. as opposed to making just a boolean thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision on whether the comment is good or bad without relative context. It's flawed.. the point of the scores are to seqeunce the comments, so not being able to see the scores leaves the reader without any context for making a decision.
Here's how it affects me: I visit the comment thread on a post early-on. Maybe there's 6-20 comments, I get a sense for how the discussion is going and if the story is interesting to me I often want to revisit later to see what people have to say. Since comment scores were suppressed, I'm sure that the likelihood that the comments at the top of the list are much less likely to have changed. That is to say, there's a greater weight now placed on commenting early, and it's hurting the ability for voting to reflect the quality of the comments in the thread. I'd expect a system to stabilize and for the comments scores to become more useful and relevant over the life of the thread, not to begin polarizing in the very beginning of the thread's life. I think this is the biggest fault of the comment score change, and the reason it ought to be undone.
It ought to be provable. I'd posit that if you were to look at timestamps of comments before and after the change you'd find that it's now much more likely for comments with very early dates to appear at the top of the list than later ones...
That said, I feel like if I'm gonna complain I ought to provide an alternative. The comment scores are hidden for a reason, so what would I replace them with? I'm not sure. I've seen or imagined a couple of things that I think are worth trying. One is to quantize the displayed comment score.. "0,1,5,10,20,50,100" or something. That's an interesting idea. Another thought that intrigues me is to weight the comments score by the karma of the scorer.. giving well-respected user's more say in the value of a comment. I wonder if a combination of the two might help us arrive at the 'best' display of compelling comments the fastest.
At any rate. </diatribe>