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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Re voting: I agree - it's a weakness of the mechanism. I've posted a lot about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Re "certain users": I don't see it that way! I'd prefer this to be a place where anyone can post about anything, and if their comment is insightful, that is what matters.

Re "US only": last I checked, US users were only 50% of the community. It may be less than that now.

Re brigading: it's definitely not allowed, and we've worked a lot on trying to stop it, but it's a hard problem.

Re non-technical discussions: I couldn't agree more, and we work hard to encourage that. Even to the point of various secret agendas.

Re sections or categories: no, I don't think that's in HN's DNA. For better or worse, this site is organized around a single front page that everyone sees the same way. Past explanations here if anyone is interested: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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Completely agree on the “certain users” thing. The UI de-emphasises the author of the comment. There’s no profile picture or “checkmark” for us to recognise and reflex vote. That’s a good thing! There isn’t a concept of following certain users, another good thing. If there was, we’d have popular users “dunking” on unpopular ones and having their opinions confirmed by their followers showing up to vote.

If anything, HN threads reward people who comment early. I’ve noticed the users with most karma are also extremely online and comment on a lot of threads early. If the thread becomes popular, their comments get more views and karma than someone who comments later. Even here, HN tries to mitigate this effect by giving every new comment in every thread and sub-thread a few minutes at the top when it’s new. This encourages people to comment even if they’re late to the party.

More could be done like removing the list of top users or moving profile karma a couple of clicks away, but HN does more than most websites to de-emphasise power users. That’s why I comment here and not elsewhere.

People sometimes ask us to remove all the points and karma stuff from what gets displayed. Do you think that we should?

I don't really check anyone else's karma, so hiding others' wouldn't change my behaviour.

I am vain about my own karma though. Maybe a UI toggle to hide my karma so I would care less about it?

That is what I intended to point to. I believe karma/points could be hidden and maybe that semi-hidden leaderboard page as well. I would not even want to see my own karma really.

I feel like if karma was removed, the "created" date should be removed as well. I'd certainly welcome the change and do not see the benefits of karma. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

instead of a karma number, it would be better to have a different indicator. still count karma in the backend, but display only a percentile, or a number of symbols depending on the karma compared to other users on the platform. For example, relatively low karma would be `+`, high would be `+++`. Something that is very difficult to game and gameify, while still giving a nice little indicator of activity and whether someone's other comments are liked here.

Or just make the user karma a simple average over all their posts and comments. Anything but a straight number that goes up each time!

I use my own karma display as a way to check if its likely i have new replies.

This is an excellent suggestion. Coupled with hiding username (which is even more of a radical change) I think the forum will be even better.

usernames I do like, personally, since some people I know are on here, and sometimes a comment's content changes if the username is known to you, e.g. WalterBright.

I would advocate an even more radical change: Remove the username from posts and comments, at least by default.

If the purpose of this site is exchange of ideas (rather than personal interaction), who wrote something should never matter. Only what was written matters. Discussion threads become collectively sourced arguments rather than ego battles. Take the identity of posters out of the equation.

In the rare cases where it matters (e.g. "Show HN" threads where the author offers to answer questions), it should be no problem for people to explicitly identify themselves ("author here"; this is mostly already happening anyway).

An idea I had: Have some way to reflect whether the OP of a reply messaged the reply or not. i.e. If UserX posts a comment and UserY replies, under the UserY comment have a single, empty line for UserX's reply where UserX's comment will appear if UserX replies. Edit-Or text "no reply" then a "replied" link once done along with the other "top line" links.

I think that would underscore that what appears to be a conversation between two people is not. That's important and I think often lost in online discussion. If UserX doesn't reply they might have been persuaded to UserY's position and one way of signaling that is to not reply. Meanwhile there's very likely someone who will read a well reasoned and backed up comment and nonetheless disagree, and they're most likely to reply given their disagreement. More so in the age of bots. The aggregate effect is for discussions to be weighted harshly negatively to the point of destructively.

Edit-I'm not very aware of the "famous user" effect. Sure there are usernames I recognize, but it's few, and the UI doesn't seem to give them much weight. I 'worry' more about the criticality of the site.

How would you know it was Dang that was moderating, or some stripe ceo replying to yet another deplatforming post?

With comments, HN is a community. Whiteout comments, HN is just a bunch of black pixels on a grey background.

I'm tracking in my head a few hundred of users. I don't know the exact number because I never made an written list. Some users make consistently good comments in some topics, and it's an important signal for a discussion.

For example. ColinWright is a mathematician like me. I usually skim the math posts but he reads the whole post. So when he make a comment in that post it's usually accurate. If he says that in page 3, second paragraph there is a huge error, I just go to page 3, second paragraph and there is surely an error.

Nobody is perfect, but some users have earned a good reputations in some topics. I classified others as clueless enthusiastic, others as troll/morons/crackpots. Other are just unclassified. It's topic specific, so I may think a user makes good comments in one topic and regular comments in other topics. (I don't remember any case of good comments in one topic and really bad comments in other topics, but I have no formal list to check, it's just a fuzzy memory list in my head.)

Maybe usernames could be hidden at first and then be revealed after a timeout.

We do need a way to distinguish participants so we can correlate replies to earlier comments of the same participant; otherwise it's way too disorganized as you don't know which voice is which.

Revealing usernames eventually is right, I think, because clicking through to see how that person describes themself (job, hobbies, etc) is an interesting dimension to their comment.

I think it's important for conversation to see if you're replying to the original author or a new participant. Both types of comments are valuable, but the original author can clarify their comments, whereas a new participant may be misinterpreting them, or going in a different direction entirely.

Also, for better or worse, I think people put more effort into making things (including written comments) that are attached to their identity in some way, so usernames increase quality.

Karma is still part of the skinner box that keeps me commenting. I'd rather keep my addiction.

Regarding voting, how about swapping to a two axis system, one up/down for agree/disagree and one for contributes/doesn't contribute?

I think for many (most?) people that would just result in them always voting +2/-2. Because stuff you disagree with is wrong (-1), and wrong posts don't contribute (-1), and likewise for agree/contributes. At least those are the heuristics that were preconfigured in my irrational monkeybrain.

Also when someone does say something I agree with but that does not contribute ("most grass is green") I wouldn't want to reward them with a +1 agree either, just punish with -1 doesn't contribute.

That's not what I've seen in places it's actually used. Get a decent mix though I agree the directions generally correlate and you'll rarely have a negative in one without the other.

Then perhaps based on user's voting history, it could be calculated how likely a user is to always vote +2/-2, and how likely to actually differentiate between both axes. This could then be used as a multiplier for user's votes on the contribution axis.

It would probably require hiding comment scores though - otherwise it'd be easy to observe how the multiplier changes and game it.

There already is ‘disagree’ and ‘super disagree’ (flag).

a crazy idea, maybe, but the simple up/down voting on a comment could be replaced with a different mechanism: speak your disagreement or agreement. later, say an hour later, a gpt-powered system quantizes the comment for substance/information and executes the up/down voting.

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