As I find it rather disorientating not having them, as it makes it more difficult to know which comments to read.
We could always have a CSS style to hide them for people who don't want them. Also I believe sites like Reddit 'fuzz' their points displayed to help prevent gaming the system.
(my first post. Thanks to everyone who contributes, it's been an incredible learning experience since I learned about hacker news 8 months ago. And I say this as a non-hacker. This site has been immensely practical.)
Given the demographics, I'm sure the ratings will be used by someone for something. :)
I'm not arguing to show points. It's fine without the points. Just saying that old pages are valuable to me.
As an example, when I got interested in GitHub last year (note: I mean as "what are they doing in this space and where are they going", not "what does it do"), I seriously went to searchyc and went through the Hacker News archives chronologically, skimming every single thread that has ever talked about it; it took days, but it was incredibly worth the time.
This has become such a resource for this sort of thing, that I've been trying to "get to know" the people I interact with here, building a tagging framework (browser extensions) that I can use to add little notes to users, allowing me to get a better feel for who they are, rather than some anonymous user: if nothing else, it helps me remember at all times that these are real people whom I am interacting with ;P.
So yeah, I guess I'm rambling now, but what I'm trying to say is: the archives are important. They may not be something you use every day, but when you do find a reason to use them it is one of the most valuable resources I currently know of, and I have to see it labeled as something that there is no point in improving due to "lack of use".
Curiosity?
(Once upon a time I would just upvote, but that is now of limited usefulness in signifying agreement.)
I find, however, that reading subcomments thoroughly is the one and only way to know which are gems and which are just popular cheap shots. There is no royal road to learning mathematics,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Road#A_Metaphorical_.E2.8...
and there is no way to get good information out of written material except by reading it carefully.
After edit: for readers who haven't seen all this before, here is historical background on why Hacker News changed the interface to not showing publicly the karma score of each comment about half a year ago. The site founder, pg, asked for suggestions on how to "stave off decline of HN" in a thread he opened 197 days ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
He then announced and experiment of not showing comment karma scores 189 days ago,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333
noting that he might change settings back and forth as the experiment continued. 186 days ago he opened a simple yes/no poll about the experiment
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039
and 180 days ago he replied to a question with a preliminary report on how voting behavior has changed,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271
and now today he has said that he is satisfied with the results of the experiment. He runs the site, and I defer to his judgment about how to run the site, but I must say that I agree that the site has improved since visible comment karma scores were turned off. I can still see MY OWN comment karma scores, and so there is still a reason for readers to vote--to guide the behavior of other people posting comments so that the site guidelines
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
are fulfilled in letter and in spirit and this is a thoughtful, civil community.
Without, I have to read everything, including these 'popular cheap shots'. And as many have stated (but i can't really quantify-- because i can't see how many people are voting them up!) there isn't the time or the inclination to read everyone's posts.
-Those who read every post & up/down-vote each one on its merit.
-Those who scan the page quickly & read the comments with the highest votes.
The problems is, how do you tell which kind of user is voting when comes to ranking a comment? I would argue that a vote from someone who just scans the top rated comments is less useful than a vote from someone who has read the whole thread. The chance of gems being left languishing in a corner decreases with many eyes hunting for good content.
By being the second type of user you are essentially out-sourcing your opinion of a comment to the crowd and assuming everyone else is not doing the same thing.
Do you also believe that employers should spend a few days with each applicant before making a hiring decision? Would Amazon be better without product ratings? You could apply your argument to this situation and say that Amazon is better off without ratings because the best products may not get rated.
Services like Google, Reddit, Facebook, and Amazon owe much of their tremendous success to the fact that they provide users with effective screening mechanisms for the internet. We all benefit from lower information processing costs.
Have you considered allowing users to turn karma display back on once they have reached a set amount of karma, much like other features (such as downvoting)? I imagine that, as long as the threshold is high enough, users would have learned how to be a benefit to the community by that point and, in addition, it might remove some of the psychological tendency to "score points off of someone" if only a subset of users can see those points.
However, I'm not against allowing users with a certain level of karma the choice to view karma scores on threads if they really feel that HN is better with karma on, which it seems like a fairly large subset of users (or at least a significantly vocal one) wish for. I think that StackOverflow's successful moderation policies (and, to a lesser extent, HNs own) have sufficiently demonstrated that extraordinary members of a community can handle the responsibilities that come with increased privilege.
For example, I suspect that, if pg allowed individuals with high karma, such as yourself, to choose to toggle an option such as "view karma scores", no flood of dumb comments from high karma individuals would suddenly manifest. Further, I think that the transition from default karma displayed to our current situation has allowed anyone who has invested significant time in the community an opportunity for introspection that wasn't previously available. I'm now able to evaluate, personally, how my comments and behavior were effected by the display of karma and I'm less susceptible to the psychological effects as a result.
Of course, even if there isn't a significant negative aspect to allowing high karma individuals to view karma scores, it's still hardly worthwhile unless there's some kind of positive impact as a result. Perhaps mollifying the community would be enough of a benefit? Maybe a more pro show-karma individual would be better qualified to comment on the potential upside. My feeling is that it's possible that some subset of HNers exist whose experience with the community is improved by having karma scores enabled and, as such, it would be beneficial to allow them the possibility of a choice.
P.S. You guys want an intern, yet? :P
It would presumably solve the problem of fights turning into a series of sibling replies or spreading to other threads where the participants see each other.
The way it's currently set up, there's been a couple of times I've been having a valid conversation with someone, but then run into the wall of not been able to respond directly to them - no fight, no flagging, no reason given.
Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair enough.
So, is there any way of getting back the utility, without increasing the fights?
Maybe show points, but with a time lag? Show points, but just in bins (maybe logarithmicly binned?) You trust users above a certain karma threshold with downvote, because they've learned the ropes; maybe display points to these users? People that get in fights, and hence are downvoted, won't see points?
Now, a tool that judges what you are reading is useful, but is it good?
That is not the primary reason that I want points back. I believe that allowing people to signal their opinion with public upvotes discouraged redundant posts, and that visible upvotes encouraged participants to let their arguments stand rather than creating unnecessarily deep threads.
A secondary issue is that votes were a valuable part of the signal in many "Ask HN" threads.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039 186 days ago
prefer points: 2355
prefer no-points: 1763
prefer points: 2717
prefer no-points: 1703
EDIT: succinctness and formatting
EDIT 2: Not sure why this is being downvoted, I simply found and linked to the polls mentioned above, because I couldn't remember the exact outcomes.
My guess is pg just hasn't gotten around to hiding the results from everyone except the poster.
In other words, the only content in a poll is the numbers.
Polls without results lose more, but some would argue[1] that there is no royal road to understanding what others think, and that the best way to use polls is to simply read the possible responses and ignore the results.
For example, [1] believes that if you saw a poll on "which database do you use?", you should ignore the poll results and researching each option on your own. The person he is replying to is advocating researching databases in HN popularity order.
Voting is a mini-poll on a comment. Without a result shown there's no point in voting.
The primary purpose is to push a valuable comment up towards the top of a page (or, conversely, push down a non-contributory comment).
I thought things were ordered by datetime according to the top node of the thread?
In essence, people have a mental concept of how high or low they feel posts they are looking at are, and adjust, possibly very subtly, possibly without even realizing it in a way that they would explain if asked, their behavior to cause the post to hit that target, as opposed to showing their true interest with an up/down.
(For a reference on users discussing this effect, and some commentary from PG about having seen this effect on the high end of comment karma scores, see this example thread from another post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271 .)
How peoples' behaviors change is complex. On the one hand, you may see "your side" heavily lower than "the opposition", and decide "ugh, it's pointless". On the other, you may go "ok, that's just not fair", or "help out the team", and make extra certain to vote on that specific poll.
Due to these attitudes, which are pretty much the same things that are driving the changes in behavior with respect to comment voting, you don't get accurate information with public live polls. This really is the same effect, and should be thought of and treated the same.
Now, making the entire poll /permanently/ only visible to the poster would mean, as you say, that the poll becomes meaningless. However, I would say that's a strawman: there are numerous other ways to handle the situation that still make sense.
Example: polls could be private until they "time out", at which point the poll is no longer votable on, and the data becomes public. Frankly, this seems correct, and I'm glad dlss brought it up (although apparently people disagree with the way he worded it or something, which seems silly).
(I also think that this behavior would dovetail very well with "show the comment scores after people can no longer vote on them", which came up elsewhere in the comments for this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122362 .)
http://files.jjcm.org/example1.png - Here we see a comment as it is now on HN. At the moment, I dont know if my page has a legitimate problem or not.
With comment scores, I'll immediately know whether the problem is universal ( http://files.jjcm.org/example3.png ), or if it's simply isolated to a specific user ( http://files.jjcm.org/example2.png ).
This is an issue that I find I encounter time and time again on HN. While comments are sorted by best score at each level, between indentation levels there is no way of discerning which is more highly ranked. I think having a system such as feral's logarithmic bins would be a nice middle ground here.
Social proofs are bad. You should be reading the comments and then deciding what is interesting and noteworthy, not looking at comment scores and then reading and then "deciding" after your opinion has already been influenced by the group-mentality of popular opinion.
> Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair enough.
I don't think that's a fair comparison, see above.
> So, is there any way of getting back the utility, without increasing the fights?
This is not the utility you are looking for. waves hands
In all seriousness, this kind of short cut seems nice on the surface but in reality is a bad habit: social proofs are misleading and bad, e.g. leading to groupthink. Hiding comment points was, in my view, a very good move. I certainly noticed an improvement after it happened and I think it's something that is needed in order to maintain a richness of quality in the comment threads.
Respectfully, I disagree.
Its a core idea of this site, that the community does a good job of surfacing interesting interesting content; what appears on the front page is what has been upvoted sufficiently. I presume you wouldn't argue that HN users should read all submissions, and decide what is interesting and noteworthy for themselves.
You have a point, in that there may be feedback effect with comments.
Personally, I don't think that a comment being highly rated seriously effects my judgement of its content. It does, however, draw my attention to that comment.
I would argue that comment scores should not be optimised to give the most accurate rating to comments, so much as to filter comments - e.g. draw attention to comments that are interesting, and might otherwise be overlooked.
As such, if there is positive feedback in good comments being 'overvoted' I don't see a problem.
I accept that this is a subjective perspective, determined by what I want from HN. I want to use the smart community here to quickly learn important information, and gain insight; as such, I don't really care whether comment scores are 'correct', so much as whether they are useful.
As others have said, the ability to see the wider community's aggregated opinion on a particular set of conflicting comments, is also useful, where I lack the expertise to evaluate them myself - but I wouldn't be casting any votes, in such a situation.
There is a subtle feedback loop in there. After all, a comment that draws your attention will then be more likely to be upvoted by you and people acting like you.
E.g., if there were points in this thread, I'd have a much better idea what the 99% of non-commenters thought about points...
Just to note, they don't necessarily draw your attention to the best comments, just the ones that have been visible the longest. If you come across a post with 800 comments and the top post has 300 upvotes, how much less likely are you going to be to post a comment or thought? Removing the score both makes it less intimidating to post, and also increases the likelihood that people are going to find your post-- each user has to trawl through the top level comments on their own to figure out what's good, as opposed to stopping as soon as they hit the 1- or 2- upvoted comments at the bottom of the page.
Of course PG has presumably actual statistics about this.
One often gets a lot of votes for a low value comment, something like a clarification. It's clearly valuable but before people would see that the vote on it was say at 2 points and wouldn't vote it up as that would be the right level for such a comment.
Comments that would have been -1 before now appear to be faded to almost nothing. I've no idea what that means WRT downvotes but presumably it means most everyone hates the opinion in that comment.
I personally don't care about fights, they're usually confined to a single nested thread which is easy to skip right over. What I can't stand is not being able to judge consensus on topics in which I'm inexperienced. In that regard Hacker News has gone from being my main resource for diving into new topics, to being near the bottom of my list of resources.
Removing points hasn't merely reduced HN's usefulness for me, it's put it in an entirely different category. This used to be a place for me to skim and read an entire thread, top-to-bottom, and provide insight where appropriate. Now, if anything, I read the first couple comments and move on, because I just don't have the time.
I am really curious to know how the number of fights is measured, though. Is there some sort of sentiment analysis on the comments, comment statistics or it's just PG feeling?
Simple example:
> Ask HN: What's the best way to perf-test my server?
> comment X: I use httperf, it has great features and is very robust.
> comment Y: Check out Apache Benchmark (ab).
There is a huge difference between whether comment X is marginally higher than comment Y (i.e. it has slightly more upvotes), compared to if it's a factor of 2-5 or more. In the former scenario, I know to spend an equal amount of time evaluating both, while for the latter scenario, I know one project has much greater user-adoption among the HN community than the other (or at least more passionate adoption).
Likewise, if a comment thread has a question that has 50 upvotes, then many more people seem to be interested in that particular facet than another question with 3 upvotes.
My point is that comment points provide an additional form of context. I actually want to know "what the cool kids think", because that in itself is useful info. In most cases, I take it with a grain of salt, but that's really up to me. If other people misinterpreting comment points, or abusing them, means I can't have them... well, that's a shame. HN will continue to be the fraction of its former self for me.
It isn't even a representative sample of "what the cool kids think". Even cool kids get bored with repetition. For example, once upon a time almost every XKCD got linked on the HN home page, but due to tacit agreement (and, perhaps, intervention by Our Invisible Friends The Moderators) this almost never happens anymore. And yet everyone I know continues to routinely read XKCD. It's not uncool or anything. It's just no longer new.
Similarly, Lisp and Erlang make far fewer guest appearances on the HN homepage. Should I conclude that these things are now uncool? No, just that time has marched on, and HN has grown and changed, and the makeup of its increasingly gigantic audience has shifted.
If you want to take a poll you should try to find someone who takes polling seriously. Otherwise you're better off with un-numerated anecdotes. At least an anecdote doesn't masquerade as data.
And the data was useful to me, in my own interpretation. Why is everyone so determined to convince me that comment points weren't useful to me? You're not qualified to determine that, because you are not me. And I'm telling you, they were useful to me. I can't make it any clearer.
Frankly, how I interpret the data is none of your concern. If you're afraid that other people will misinterpret the points and assign some false value to them, I can't do anything about that. It's simply a shame that the solution is to take away data from everyone, because you're afraid some will misinterpret it.
But hey, if making HN less useful for me makes it more useful for everyone else, then I guess you can disregard everything I've said.
Just give people a way to flag inappropriate comments, and then you've got pretty much the same system as we currently have. Early comments stay up the top, and there is no way to tell which has engaged the community apart from volume of response. Inappropriate comments get flagged and with enough flags they die. Get enough unflagged comments under your belt, and you're 'participating' and are then allowed the escalated priveleges.
A month later, it was a 50/50 split.
I'm incline to believe now that the trend would suggest more people are happy without the points.
This would still allow some way to see the relative opinion of other HN users, but hopefully with less problems than you saw with the direct points system. (personally i was ok with how it used to be).
Whilst here could i request a minimize thread button (like reddits); without it allows anyone to hijack the top comment's popularity (and overly/improperly focuses discussion around it), at the cost of the guy who properly started a new thread.
Like others, I found it very helpful to be able to gauge the general consensus on a topic by the number of points each comment had. If the price for that is having to skip over a fight or two, I'm pretty okay with that, personally.
You're saying people - major contributors - were leaving the site because of incivility/hostility? I can't recall hearing of anyone doing that?
All you have to do is note that the majority of quality contributors here are civil and polite to see who's going to leave if the civility of discussion decreases.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...
To buy in to it I'd have to see some evidence that the hypothesis is supported in groups similar to the population of active users of HN. What I see is that a lot of main contributors are bought in heavily and so are unlikely to leave. It is these users here that are like the group in the article of whom it is said:
"The challenge to their belief presents an immense cognitive dissonance; they must find reinforcing thoughts to counter the shock, and so become more fanatical."
[at http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...]
I warrant that those who are most civil, in this context, are those who are effectively 'fanatical' about maintaining the group as a useful communication tool.
Basically the evaporative metaphor requires you to decide who the fanatics are and you can spin this in different ways according to the result that you wish to forward.
There are several comments in this very post where the user is being civil and polite, yet their commentary is faded out. One of them is even dead.
It leads to a feeling of randomness, and the sense of popularity being more important than insightfulness. On a site dedicated to the mavericks, it's a curious mechanism to enforce toeing the popular line.
I find upvotes to be an incredibly poor indicator of comment quality. It's barely useful as a sorting metric and fails almost completely as a filter. Worse, it's information that distracts attention from the actual content of the comment.
The problem is that there are some rather heavy casualties that come from not showing points.
- It's very hard, if not impossible to scan a thread for good comments. Busy people don't have time to read through a whole thread to pick out the good comments.
- I did a back of the envelope calculation here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2569997 that shows that there is no way to assess the scores of around 50% of the comments. If there isn't a good way of assessing which comments are deemd good by the community is the system working properly?
- When a poster postulates something and is refuted by a sibling it's impossible to know who is right. Points give you a gauge of what HN as a community thinks. For instance, if a user comments that you should always use Bcrypt and a sibling replies that this is simply wrong I don't know what is right and wrong, even though it may be obvious to someone knowledgeable in encryption. Points give you a good header.
- When you don't show points people tend to vote less. Without having seen the numbers I'm confident that voting has decreased significantly. If noone is voting (or even worse, only a subset of opiniated users vote) then we're back to a threaded discussion ordered by randomness.
- As I remember it one of the original reasons for hiding points was to stop the "piling on" where already popular comments got more upvotes. You posted at some point that comments which had a lot of points before actually have more points after the don't-show-points change.
Hiding scores to reduce arguments seems like a very crude and inelegant way of solving the problem. You solve one problem but effectively render the scoring system useless in the process.
Instead of having just the sum of all the votes (points := up - down), it may help to keep both up and down values as they would encompass information about both usefulness of a comment as well as how controversial it is.
Then I realised that slashdot was probably closest to what I was after ... then I started going back to slashdot.
Fair enough.
I feel pretty unhappy about it though. As something of a data-geek, knowing there's data I used to get (and that I personally found really useful) that you have chosen to withhold... I don't feel good about that at all. Especially when you did it to solve a problem that I didn't even notice.
After edit: Here's a link about how to install ARC, which includes the forum software.
http://arclanguage.org/install
See this GitHub link for more information:
https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/how-to-run-news
(I have never read the source code. I learn about how the software works here inductively, by using it.)
In reality you would get situations where someone would post a thoughtful and well-reasoned comment (2 points) and someone would reply with a very minor correction (12 points).
It also seemed like "wars" were fought over points too, purely anecdotally.
My own experience is that voting now seems to be more rational. People seem to upvote when something should be upvoted (my guess is that this topped out before if someone thought a comment had too many votes). When something is negative, it's indicated so it doesn't tend to get downvoted into oblivion.
As for curating interesting comments to the top, this happens now and seems to work quite well.
I just wish there was a way to:
- Look at comments you haven't seen yet; and
- Filter comments by "quality", sorta like Slashdot has. The meaning of this can be vague and "quality" doesn't have to be a straight point measure but I'd like to see a way to just see the best comments, particularly when there are 300+ comments.
I find this handled helpfully by http://hckrnews.com/about.html
To better illustrate this effect, let me present an example. When I'm reading a comment and it makes an initial impression on me (good or bad), I have to decide whether I'm going to vote on it (if I'm unsure, I'll just leave it unmoderated). When I see the score, it gives me more confidence in my opinion so I vote more.
If others fall victim to this similar pattern of behavior we'll wild variation in comment votes and we'll see scale free behavior of votes (i.e. preferential attachment, comments with higher votes will tend to get more votes).
The reason probably being that when you look at a commentscore you assess whether it has the right score, and if it doesn't you vote it up (or down). If you can't see the scores you can't do this.
Why vote? No one but you knows you did. The comment owner gets a number showing only assent or dissent which usually is irrelevant to their purpose for commenting.
(See I have to do this, otherwise there is no way to indicate assent. For PG to know this is popular, if he just looks at the regular site page, he would need a huge string of such comments.)
I would leave the top comment both as introduction for the new thread and at its original location, with a link to the new topic.
I also think it might be possible to somewhat automatically detect such branches. That would make it easier for the 'some' that get this power to detect them.
However, if one has such software, it might be better and easier to 100% automatically collapse all candidate threads with a generated remark "this appears to start a new topic", ideally with keywords describing what the topic is about)
The comments still form an N-ary tree. Useful top-level comments also take not-so-useful comments on them to the top. With the points visible, I could tell just by looking. Given the lack of time, I now find myself reading just the top-level (not top-on-the-page) comments.
How do you know?
All I see is some fading, which presumably means a comment has been heavily downvoted? But for all I know it could mean the commenter is new, or they're generally downvoted, or something else (perhaps it's cold in their city?).
- low effort for drive-by downmods (there are stupid numbers of comments blasted to nothing despite being insightful or informative)
- upvote doesn't distinguish between 'I agree' and 'hey, this is really informative'; the former is mostly meaningless, the latter is useful
- single downmod diminishes what you said and makes it harder to read (on an already low-contrast site). Hardly fair given the ease of 'drive-bys'.
The forum I spend most of my time on has a reason required for the mod - it's not this brainless +/- system that the web is moving towards. You get an idea why people are up/downmodding, and it raises the bar ever so slightly so that it takes actual effort to mod (that is, critique) a comment. The displayed point value is also capped - while the user gets the karma for the mod, it's not displayed beyond a certain cap.
Mostly I see the benefit of this system as stopping mindless up/downvoting - requiring the tiniest bit of effort produces better quality results. Still not perfect, but much, much better.
Also, what you characterize as "drive by voting", I think of as being "lightweight feedback". Sure, we could make things a wee bit harder so a (much) smaller fraction of people would vote with with more deliberation, but I'm not sure that actually improves things.
Seriously though, this is a problem I think a lot about. One solution that keeps popping up in my head is implemented in an OS forum somewhere (don't recall specifics), so that each comment can be marked as informative/funny/shocking/etc instead of mere upvotes.
Downvotes should go along similar lines so downmodded people don't have to beg for reasons. If "it makes boring reading" [1], don't make people write it!
The "lightweight feedback" is "throwaway feedback", because you really only see how unpopular a comment is (is it dead yet? oop! there it goes!). Only the owner knows how popular it is, and even then, doesn't know if it's just a bunch of 'yeah, me too!' or 'that was informative or insightful!'
The most egregious example of 'why is this modded so' is this comment, so much so that I've stuck it in my profile:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3087822
The thread was about RMS and what an eccentric he is, and about his comments subsequent to Steve Jobs' death. The comment is defending RMS using an oft-quoted verse of Jobs', where he defends mavericks making their own rules and violating the status quo. The comment makes a very insightful link, and is not offensive or malicious. Yet it's downmodded to dead status, something that other comments in the same thread didn't have happen despite being much more fractious. Why was it downmodded? Who can say? It's probably fanboys, nothing else makes sense from a mature point of view.
Which reminds me of another issue with the mod system: it's totally anonymous. There is no accountability. You can diminish someone else's statement without giving a reason why nor standing behind it with your own name/pseudonym. Again, the forum I come from gives you the option to see who modded a comment whichever way - which while there is the occasional problem, is overall a significant net gain for an online community that strives to keep things mature.
I've never seen "fights" over karma scores, especially over the difference between +2 vs. +20 (downvoted posts are visible by color). Usually posts about upvoting or downvoting (i.e. "Why is this crap at +20?" or "Stop downvoting me" or my favorite, "I know this will get downvoted but...") get downvoted hard and people learn that the community dislikes them.
That does not mean that we need to cripple everyone in order to prevent fights.
These "fights" do you have any sort of metric that backs up your contention?
IMO people downvote on opinion a lot more. Now the only time I vote is to upvote someone who's faded out (I'm assuming that's what fading means) and who is usually making a point I disagree with but nonetheless a good point clearly made. From a UX perspective the fading of comments sucks.
Vote blindness makes the whole site of far less worth to me.
smartest comment
--smart reply
----more discussion
----more discussion
------correction on more discussion
--smart-ish reply
----more discussion
----more discussion
----more discussion
------not-so-smart reply
----uninteresting reply
----downvoted comment
------comment on why parent was a bad comment
------another comment that's essentially the same thing
----a bunch more downvoted comments
2nd smartest comment
[etc.]
A possible solution could be to collapse all the replies except for the few quality ones and show a [more] link, much like reddit.
EDIT: This very comment exemplifies my point perfectly.
A javascript +/- button to collapse and expand threads would be perfect. The indentation is just too subtle, and it's too hard to follow the thread in bigger discussions (which are often the good ones worth following).
Somewhat unrelatedly, I would think that comments should get extra points if they spawn a lot of discussion. I mean, that's what the points are for, right? This would credit the original user's karma for fulfilling the goal of the site, but more importantly, it will bump up the entire discussion higher on the page to better reflect it's value. (Though I don't know the algorithm that orders comments, so that part may already happen)
Reading more than a couple levels deep on a highly-discussed submission is no longer reasonable, since you can't tell what's insightful or not. Myself, I now only read the top-level comments and maybe their children.
Please add back the "by " in front of each comment. It was useful because if I wanted to see all comments by PG on a page, I could Ctrl-F and just look for "by pg" but now I can't -- if I just search for "pg" I get people talking about you, rather than only comments by you.
A very small UI tweak probably to remove clutter, but it served a purpose, albeit a very small one. :-)
-David
The page that you're talking about will display all of the threads they've commented in at the same time.
They're close, but not quite the same thing.
EDIT: Well.. unless it's an "Ask PG" :-)
If I remember correctly, you were seriously considering this.
Personally, I like it better without the points now. But I do still wish there was an indicator of high-quality comments (I think you said you were considering an orange dot?).
I think we've all seen this pattern of fame at any scale: Smart but unnoticed person finally gets attention for their work, people notice this and the person appears smart and worth listening to, after time the person's focus shifts from the smart work they did to work maintaining the reputation of being smart.
I think it's great to get some form of acknowledgment that your ideas are generating positive feedback, this encourage thoughtful comments and provides a real reward to those primitive parts of our brain that want to be the big monkey. But any further and the big monkey starts to be the one doing the talking.
I suspect I am not the only one who uses downvoting as a way to sink unwanted comments down the thread, but since newer comments are given a position boost, it is not always clear if a comment floats near the top because it is popular or because it is new. It'd be nice to tell these cases apart (as a short-term fix).
This is a telling admission, in my opinion.
I love the newer, non-points display. Skim through the comments and read the ones that seem most interesting to you. Otherwise, the discussions quickly degrade into thoughtless popularity contests.
A comment that used to get 10 points, now gets 15-20.
Why not have these be visible by the people who want them, and invisible to people who don't want them? Perhaps "off by default" but something that can be enabled in registered accounts.
Even 'registered accounts with high karma'. /selfish
I just tried to submit a story for the first time in a while (weeks? months?) and got the error "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
On reddit they say its an antispam measure, whereas here its a key part of the ranking algorithm.
Those two things are one in the same.
Fair point.