Ask PG: Has comment voting gone down since you hid scores?

26 points·breck··4 comments

I used to be able to judge whether or not my comments were well argued or useful by the comment score. Lately my comments have gotten very little points.

Is this because they are crap, or because voting has gone down since points were hidden?

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I did a quick check a few days after the change and IIRC voting was down by about 20%.

Thanks. I wonder if the positive skewness has also gone down.

I'd guess there's less "piling on". Previously if a comment had a high point score, you would stop to read it, and thus probably vote on it, causing it to have an even higher score. The new system lacks that positive feedback cycle. Top comments still are more likely to get upvotes because of their page position, but there's no easy way to distinguish how much better comment #6 is compared to comment #7 so comment #6 will get glossed over more under the new system.

It could also skew the other way. Previously, I would often refrain from voting up a good comment if its score was already "high enough", so that my vote on an equally good but lower-rated comment would have relatively more weight.

Have you considered the possibility to add more than just up/down votes, but also "agree". I notice that oftentimes people downvote valuable comments just because they disagree, but are too lazy to write a reply (but they don't upvote them when they agree). thanks.

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