Ask HN: What if usernames were only visible after you have voted on a comment? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What if usernames were only visible after you have voted on a comment?

19 pointsnextstep6 comments

Recently, it feels like HN discussions are dominated by a minority of commenters. I am worried that comment threads are less valuable when they are dominated by a few voices. People begin to up/down vote comments based on who's saying them, and not on the merits of the ideas being presented.

What if our usernames were obscured, at least until our votes have been cast?

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Who posted is often relevant to judging the response, e.g. PG in an "Ask PG" thread, grellas on a question of legal organization etc.

It's not that I don't sympathize with the sentiment behind the suggestion. I just don't think that increased anonymity would be an improvement to HN.

Everyone has an opinion, but everyone's opinions aren't equally grounded in knowledge and experience.

That would be very annoying. Whether comment threads are valuable or not has less to do with the diversity of the commenters than the quality. A hundred random responses are far less valuable than two well-informed and well-written responses.

I would stop reading HN if we could no longer see who said what — as it is, a lot of my reading is through HackerFollow. I get more out of the site that way. To be blunt, some commenters are better than others.

I already find it difficult to handle the threaded reply layout on long pages. Adding this would only make it worse.

Good on you, OP, for posing the question though. It's a good question to ask, I think. I just happen to think otherwise (and agree with chc).

What would be annoying? The comments with the highest votes would still be at the top. He/she said nothing about randomizing the comments. The only effect of the idea would be to eliminate "celebrity" votes.

Who cares if the comments with the highest votes are at the top? That's just as true of /r/lolcats. I care about how much trouble it is to find good content.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Given a practical and insightful essay on the day-to-day running of a business and a picture of a cat in a funny pose, most people will vote for the cat every time. Making it harder to find good comments will only exacerbate this, because it's easy for the cat-lovers to find silly pictures, so to speak, while carefully reading every comment on every post for insight takes more time than most people have to spend on an Internet forum.

In fact, I'll go further, although tentatively: I think authorship is probably a stronger predictor of comment quality than votes are. For example, blind contrarianism will almost always take the top spot in a thread — at least for a while — and even mildly criticizing Apple on a thread where lots of Apple fans happen to be will get you several downvotes. There are so many factors besides quality and authorship that affect voting — the mere popularity of a comment's sentiment is often enough to trump everything else.

(EDIT: Thanks, anonymous downvoter, for making my point for me!)

I can see how that can be an issue. For me, and this may not be true for everyone else, I would rather who is posting not dramatically influence how many votes they get, because I want the comments with the most votes to be the most informative and valuable.

I don't agree that this is a good solution, because who is posting can be important to context.

Plus I think good comments tend to head to the top, and may create conversations... that's why you can reply to comments directly.

Basically you should:

Don't be afraid to make comments.

Vote for comments you think are good.

Explain when and why you like a comment to encourage others to vote for it.

I think you might have a more productive post if you submitted the issue, instead of floated a particular solution.

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