Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm not able to quickly find gems within subcomments without actually reading thoroughly

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.

With points I might have to read the odd 'popular cheap shot' when finding gems.

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.

But you are showing that with points shown you have two tiers of users:

-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.

All of us are using imperfect heuristics to select good content to read. Just the fact that we're reading HN instead of some other source right now is an imperfect heuristic. There's just too much potential reading for anyone to read everything equally.

That is a good point & I don't know what the perfect solution would look like, however I do think it is understandable that PG has decided to adjust the system with a view to improving comment quality.

So you think all internet comments need to be read in order to learn something?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com