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The way it works on Perlmonks(.org) is that you don't see points on a comment/submission until after you've voted. If you want to see the score you can do a "null vote". I definitely think this is a better way to handle it. I really can't think of any reason why you'd want to show score before voting.

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>I really can't think of any reason why you'd want to show score before voting.

It really depends on whether you see yourself as a Hacker News reader, or as a Hacker News editor. It's just like Amazon: If I'm a customer, I want to hear what everyone else thinks about something. But if I were hiring someone to be a professional reviewer for Amazon, I'd hide the other ratings to make them as objective as possible.

So here are two ways ratings make HN a more pleasant experience:

- If I have limited time to go through HN, I want to be able to zoom in on the comments others judged to be of the highest quality.

- If the comment is on a topic I have little familiarity with, it's often hard to judge its accuracy/validity on my own. A decent number of votes gives me confidence that the person is right.

So in these respects, it's just like Google rankings or Amazon ratings.

Having points probably does cause some amount of groupthink. I bet hiding votes would scrunch the distribution of votes around the mean.

By the way, if HN's database contains the exact sequence of upmods/downmods for a particular story, e.g. 1, 1, -1, -1, -1, 1, ..., it would be possible to test how much groupthink is involved by modeling the sequence of votes as a random walk and testing how much the probability of an upmod/downmod is conditional on the current number of votes. Or, if HN starts hiding votes, you could analyze how this affects voting patterns. Sounds like an interesting college stats/psychology project for someone :)

>> I really can't think of any reason why you'd want to show score before voting.

When I vote (here), I'm pushing a comment towards an idealized score. To make the decisions "do I think this is rated too highly" and "do I think this is rated too lowly" requires knowledge of the current score.

This closely matches the way I mod comments as well.

Yeah, that would work too. Didn't think of that, but that sorta gets the best of one world and a good part of the other. You still get to see the points eventually, but it doesn't influence the voting.

The reason that you would want to show the score before voting is that HN isn't all about voting and karma. If someone were to just want to read the best answers to a question, they might just scan by score for the highest ones.

Maybe there could be a manual-override for one page. But it would make you be conscious of the fact that you're going to bias yourself by doing it. It would be for people wanting to read but not really vote.

few things wrong with that: a) HN presorts comments more or less by karma rating, you pretty much know where everything will wind up before voting. b) it also changes the color when you start getting negative points.

So sure you may not know that something is at 1 or 500 points, but you you sure can guess

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