New Comment Features
ycombinator.com
ycombinator.com
i bet discussion interestingness improves by removing the username and points.
the advantage of seeing points is the same as seeing orange usernames. it allows people to decide which comments they want to read.
I think if you're going to read, you might as well read everything that isn't grayed out with downvotes.
Not too important but, to quote our house dev motto, "behavior contrary to specification mandates a bug report no matter how minor the deviation is".
[Edit: I refresh this page and am seeing it sometimes highlighted and sometimes not highlighted, so I'm not sure if my bug report is accurate or not. Apparently the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to bugs: attempting to describe one changes its behavior.]
And here's a theoretical underpinning to explain so it doesn't come across as simply a subjective design choice: coloring objects darker or lighter with different shades of the same base color to show intensity is one of the few principles I remember from an Edward Tufte workshop from a few years ago. Varying levels of saturation indicate a shift in degree, whereas different colors altogether imply that the objects are of differing qualities.
Applied to the new commenting feature, darker colors would imply more "solid" feelings of trustworthiness, similar to how trolls already get washed out with the lighter shades.
Similarly, that explains another thing wrong with the highlighting - "alarm" colors like orange, red, yellow etc indicate that something's wrong, whereas bolding or darkening the names wouldn't imply that at all.
Trying to suss out good and bad comments reminds me of the 37signals Troll Cap and the "Good Comment" crown:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/introducing_the_troll...
http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_crown_of_royalty....
The issue, as I see it, is not so much the posts as the voting. Which varies wildly and is fairly indescriminate. A worthless but sensationalist message might get lots of upvotes whilst a shy but informative message will get missed.
I suggest it is the voting practices that need to be addressed. I vote very rarely on messages (maybe once or twice a day): making my approval something "to be gained". I know others use that approach too - and I think it makes things worth much more.
Ideally (IMO) a good situation should be one where a post with 5 votes should be stunningly good and 20 votes a "once in a lifetime" achievment.
Some ideas... - Vote weighting (Karma or average Karma effects the weight of your vote)
- Include "Downvotes" next to the total. This helps identify messages with a lot of disagreement (i.e. something with a 1 might have 20 downs and 21 ups - that is worth taking a look at).
- Im not sure how you position the comments (never tracked them in depth) but I think you could try
- - New comments stay at the "top" of the page for a set time (an hr perhaps?) before being ranked properly.
- - Ranked posts: push all negative marked posts below -1 to the bottom. All positive stuff to the top marked on activity (a combination of the direct replies and the number of up&down votes)
That doesn't totally fix the problem but I suggest it might have an impact :D
Everyone can vote posts up or down if they like. There is a feature which statistically analyses how your votes correlate with other votes, and you can choose to see votes that the analysis predicts you will find interesting and worthwhile based on what you have liked seeing in the past.
You could take that farther and create a "pool" of good users who vote and comment in keeping with the HN style (a pool that could, of course, grow over time) and if your voting habits correlated to them your vote began to be worth more.
Subclasses might not be such a bad idea at all actually, after all there are different coffee shops for different tastes as well. If a site could be made to automatically appear as a place that caters to your 'taste' that would be a pretty awesome development. Everybody would feel right at home.
I think the behaviour I want is exactly that required by the Netflix Prize:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_prize
although rather than rating comments 1 to 5 I think I'd probably just have three levels (don't appreciate, neutral, appreciate).
Some people are here for startup stuff. Some people for codign/programming stuff. Yet others (though probably a smaller demographic) are here for social stuff. And more.
Plus others are here for a mix.
Some way to tailor what you see would be awesome! not too much that each "genre" is different but enough that the posts or articles you want to see are at the top :D
A recommendation system is even worse. That actively encourages people to look only at the path of least resistance for them. It means less emphasis on people who argue valid points that you don't want to hear and more emphasis on groupthink.
If anything, the trend should be reversed, and people should feel freer to give their opinion without a chance of whiplash.
Has the idea I proposed (essentially the Netflix recommendation system) ever been tried before for a comment/story posting system? If not, why not go the whole hog and try it? Let's see if it works.
Ask yourself: has content recommendation ever worked? I've never seen an "If you liked X you'll like Y" work for any original content. Even for movies/books it's shady at best. Working with something as complex as comments is too tricky to make worse. How do you measure tone versus stance versus wit versus writing style? They're all elements of what I look for in comments.
The easiest solutions are the simplest ones. Complexity only serves a purpose when there's a simple cause behind the complexity. Adding algorithms when there's no need will only make things less reliable.
Another approach would be to normalize the comment's score against the other comments on that story, and use a threshold on that. If there were 4 comments with karmas 1 to 4 and another story with 100 comments from 1 to 100, the 4 on the first would be just as good as the 100 on the second. That might be too much work, though ;)
comment karma / min (1, max (story karma, 10)
But your normalization idea might work better.
Forget commenting on anything that won't hit the front page.
Also forget commenting later on in a story when it gets stale. Best to hit a hot story when it is fresh and a lot of other people will be piling on later.
That's the point, guys. If the karma/colored system didn't affect user behavior, it wouldn't be there
It's much like startups. Many of them fail, but the ones that succeed tend to succeed big.
What's weird is, why are you still thinking about this? It was weeks ago. Life is very short.
I am not the only one who remembers some of these things. pg does too; he linked back to a time he punished me for having fun. Personally, I find it interesting, and I enjoyed this thread. I have an ongoing debate with a friend about how email lists should be moderated, and this stuff is relevant. And I got to see interesting attitudes like SwellJoe's. I didn't predict a reply like that.
In the end I don't think it matters much either way - the really fun conversations you do for the sake of talking, not for the karma. But this system still subtly discourages those sorts of exchanges, which is a pity.
So, anyway, why did you ban xlnt and qqq, but not this account?
Edit: Usually that's how the software catches multiple accounts belonging to the same person, but I went back and looked, and in this case you (as qqq) outed yourself as curi.
edit: Oh. I've outed myself lots of times...
Out of curiosity, have you ever stopped a conversation just because it was getting exceptionally long? At a certain point does that mess up the table layout?
You further ridicule the comments you disapprove of as "yes-i-did-no-you-didn't" style comments, knowing that isn't literally true in some cases.
PS YC and searchyc are both very slow for me. It's hard to find anything. If I could just search for posts by pg with certain keywords then I would give you better links, but I can't.
That's the kind of thing that pg is talking about.
Please note that your accusations against me are covered under this, so can be safely disregarded.
No doubt you will complain that I am arguing pointlessly. But I think this is fun, and that my comment is true. It is logical that if you admit to posting badly, then your claims in that very post shouldn't be accepted.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138275
What he was replying to is deleted. But it doesn't matter what it was. pg objected to "filling up comment threads". I didn't know they could get full...
You can't maintain he's fully supportive of long threads, and also wants to avoid noise and clutter.
Make it take thread age/traffic into account too. I don't want to worry about posting in dead or near-dead threads.
Overall, though, if we can figure out how to implement this without discouraging good commenting, it could be a pretty nice change.
My biggest problem with the system as it stands is this: there are two HN posters who I think of as exceptionally insightful, prolific, and committed to the maintenance of the community, and one of them doesn't have a highlighted name -- I assume because he's posted a lot in low traffic areas. That's a major bug.
But if there does start to be a problem, it will certainly be visible.
However, as you note, I decided "ehhh" and still replied to you right here anyway ;).
I for one think this is a good move, though the best part of the recent change is not so much the username highlighting, but the capping of negative karma at -8.
Referring to the recent thread where I was being seriously downmodded, with this cap I probably wouldn't bother defending myself (and creating all that "waste of space"), because -8 or -16 is not all that much karma.
Thanks!
I think this makes the comments more compelling, and helps us to get to know the other users a little better.
i completely agree. it might explain this in the guidelines, but it needs to be written right where people evaluate. maybe the first time someone votes they get a pop-up with the vote guidelines, kind of like sudo. it pops again once every two months as a reminder.
it's really hard not to see voting as opinion tallying rather than comment goodness. that's what voting is used for everywhere else.
The new system actually encourages me NOT to comment on less active threads, because it's going to hurt my "average score."
Also, consider that people so concerned with karma that they would be dissuaded from participating in a worthwhile discussion are among the least likely to have worthwhile discussions.
One idea would be to invisibly boost the ranking of comments by orange users, at least at first (we don't want to give a bad comment more credit just because the commenter has made good comments in the past). Let a new comment by an orange user rise for the first hour or so, and then drop it back down to where it would be if it was posted by a normal gray user.
Difficult to quantify. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
With average, witty, or emotionally-moving one-liners will gain a disproportional impact as they are easiest to upvote, and as such, these items tend to be runaway karma-catchers.
So I just want to say thanks for slapping me in the face with your witty self-referential one liner. I have learned my lesson.
I've had my news.yc account for almost 2 years now, and it has always worked this way. Pithy 1-liners get upvotes; longer thoughtful comments often languish.
We're all in a hurry, so we're more likely to read shorter comments. The longer a comment is, and the more it makes us think, the less likely we are to expend the effort. The most valuable comments are ones that can change our thinking, and by nature such comments will seem wrong or unimportant when we look at them with our current thinking. The problem is human, not technological.
It's easier for me to change what I do than to change what others do, so I've adjusted my comment style to be shorter. Sometimes that means I pass up the chance to share deep thoughts. Other times it makes me more effective. For example, both ericb's and my comments made the same point, but mine drove it home better, didn't it? Upvote with a clear conscience. :-)
I also try to be more concise with my comments. Often times I think I have a point to make, but after writing quite a bit I realize that I'm just reasoning in circles and have no ground to stand on. If I can't state my point briefly (and then add elaboration to support it), then maybe I don't have one.
It says something about a site whose culture can make me abandon a position because I realize it's unfounded as I try to articulate it.
As for the one-liners. I'd like to qualify that I'll still upvote them if they are truly insightful, but I'll think twice if they are merely witty. As you say, good comments teach us something new.
Yes, I think it will help improve the quality and perhaps brevity of comments, and I think it sets up a visual caste system.
Writing and getting comments upmodded make me feel a little better - a little recognition but reading comments (or listening to them via TextAloud) is why I read News.YC.
I comment frequently but sometimes sporadically, and I comment to try to add value to a discussion (e.g. point out something I've read before) or sometimes for the heck of it. I think it's good to express opinions.
I remember at one point making it onto the top 100 'Leaders' in News.YC and it felt great. I felt like I was competing with swombat for the bottom 5 spots. I think this was around when swombat had 1300 or so karma. He now has 4924! Amazing. Consistency. It is nice to be recognized but it is fine with me to just be a small fractional part of this community, and it is hard to be consistently be a quality contributor (like swombat and others).
I fired up a Google spreadsheet to see why I wasn't orange (3.04 with highest thrown out vs 3.64 included).
when i first came here i loved seeing my karma grow. it gave me a feeling of acceptance that reddit's meanness never could. (i found the content more interesting, too, and of course hope that i'm part of that, just as you do.)
i say karma should stay private. it is useful for personal gratification. the path to good discussion is humility and insight.
If you want to skim for good comments, this feature helps you do so. This feature helps to highlight comments with few points that might be of merit, because the poster tends to say good things.
I'd advise that if not being orange hurts a person's feelings, that reflects on the person's state of mind more than anything.
Bottom line - if the orange color helps me find better comments, faster - it' a good feature.
This feature prevents you from seeing their comments.
As long as I take the time to research my answers, and as long as I take time to find and flag duplicate submissions, my name will never turn orange. That means that people like you who skim for the orange will never value my other submissions.
<fx: shrugs> Maybe my contributions are of no value.
the previous commenter makes a good point about mental state. I was pointing out the same effect. if everyone here was mature and not-defensive and self-confident, then we probably wouldn't have so much trouble with moderating discussions. most people here will skip over the orange fine, but i believe it may exacerbate karma trolling and feelings of ill-will.
The problem is that gauging worthiness of something is a very difficult, even -- or especially -- when human judges are involved. I think of this as a first stab at a very complicated problem; making sense of votes made for a variety of motivations, not all of them what this algorithm is trying to isolate and encourage. I suspect several iterations will follow.
It is funny how many times the HN community it trying to protect themselves from 'noobs', I feel like they push the more casual users a bit further away.
The intention is to help n00bs become casual users, and some casual users to become respected members. You are definitely more of a casual user approaching welcome member.
I've been here less time than you - these are simply my opinions.
Doesn't factor in a bunch of things, but it does also cover posts on unpopular threads as well as bad times.
I do think though that this is basically going to result in the "orangemen" being upvoted into the stratosphere simply for being that colour, regardless of what they say. I don't think an overt display of what is essentially "I'm pg and I approve this message" is really the right way to go, but I applaud his effort.
I think I have to come down on the side of not liking the feature, but I'm not sure I'm right about my reasons for not liking it. I've always thought one of the great things about reddit and HN is that identity of the poster is understated. It's not anonymous, but it's possible to read comments without seeing the user who posted them. Every comment thus stands alone and is judged on its own merits. "Bad" users get a fresh start with every post, and "good" users have to say something interesting or not at all. Now, I have some sort of stamp of approval the moment I post.
Then again, most people are idiots, and if software can make it more apparent who the idiots are, maybe it'll make it easier to tolerate them when they start showing up here in larger numbers.
Anyway, I have a suggestion for PG, not that he'll notice it this deep in the thread, but:
What if we could add certain users to a "favorites" list and then any posts they make would show up to us as orange. I've got certain favorite posters on here who I like to read and other people who I do not like to read. Some of my favorites are orange, but then again some are not. I know this may be hugely complex from a technical standpoint, but that's my big thought for the day.
Edit: On re-reading my post, I'm not trying to come across as an ass SwellJoe, I was just trying to be witty. I guess if I have to clarify that, it didn't work :-)
(11 minutes later ...)
Here it is ...
http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/18/google-chrome-adds-greasemo...
http://mashable.com/2008/12/15/google-chrome-greasemonkey-sc...
In addition to highlighting their user names, I'd love to see their submissions highlighted.
Have you ever looked at the submissions of a user and thought, wow that's way better then the HN frontage right now?
Anyone remember what happened to the Blues and Greens in Rome? To the Eagles and the Rattlers in the Robbers' Cave Experiment? If not, see here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/01/the-two-party-s.html
There's a huge difference in human psychology between a gradient and a divider. Not that this is necessarily a good idea anyway - it encourages people not to post on old threads, or even not to post too far off the top of the page, etc. But in any case - if you're going to do it at all, make it a gradient!
Making it a gradient makes it really hard to tell who is setting a good example and who isn't.
Rather than a gradient, I'd just like the option to turn it off, even if that option is only available after 50 karma or something. To me it is visual noise.
Even better if it was visible to a user up to X karma and then disappeared past that. Then it would serve its training purpose without leading to a long-term two-tier culture here.
Don't be silly pistoriusp, after being here for two years I'm not surprised your last 50 average comments karma is not 3.5 less than your last 25 average comments karma. Your definitely leveling off, which should be fine. Although there have been many more users lately, so perhaps there is karma inflation that should boost your average karma over time.
* it strongly encourages gaming and groupthink, already the biggest problem with social news sites, especially karma-based ones, while discouraging controversial opinions
* it makes those without highlighting feel less welcome or that their contributions are less worthwhile
* it adds excessive weight to the opinions of popular members, and as noted elsewhere this causes a feedback loop
IMHO karma should be a subtle thing, used gently. Shoving it in users' faces is the worst possible thing to do with it.
I don't like sounding so negative, because I appreciate the work and thought that has gone into making HN the great site that it is. But I'd like to keep it great, and I think this is not a good way to go about it, and a bad road to go down.
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://news.ycombinator.com/){ .comhead a font { color: #828282 !important; } }
(how to create a user stylesheet: http://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/user-style-sheets.html )
Making it virtually impossible to 'punish' idiots.
I'll observe empirically if that's what happens under the new system. It looks like it could be a risk (as with this comment).
1. The quality of the post.
2. The time since the article was posted, it's arrival to the front page, etc.
Not all insightful comments are modded up the same, for this reason amongst a number of others. If someone says something smart, but says it late, the net effect will be to drag their karma/comment ratio down. I'd be concerned that this would prevent people from making good points when they run the risk of insufficient eyeballs.
(It's not the computation itself that's the problem. The problem is that it causes a lot of stuff to get loaded from disk that would otherwise not be.)
I just went through and (roughly) calculated my average. I am just over the threshold. Which creates an interesting scenario: A couple of stupid comments from me and I will fall below the threshold.
That creates a really great motivation.
So, if you add this feature back, it might be worth it to run some reports to see if there is a "sweet spot". Not to mention it would be really neat to see the distribution of average comment scores.
Also, no "Funny".
That being said, 90%/10% is a fantastic signal to noise ratio when compared to the rest of the internet. :-)
Either way, I would argue that while the upper bound on exacerbation isn't high, the same is true of any potential mitigation. At the end of the day, I don't see the major problems subsiding much, and it's not just one-line zingers, but, say, uncharitable comments that piss people off and provoke deep threads of people talking past each other. There's nothing more unpleasant in online communities than being the recipient of an uncharitable reply, and feeling compelled to defend oneself. (I say this being guilty of uncharitable replies myself.)
Use the 'karma' counters as an internal mechanism to reward users with extra features or to remove those features if their karma drops below the thresholds again because of misbehviour. Use it to sort the submissions and the comments possibly using some kind of weighting system so that the 'good' content (content by long established users) bubbles to the top, it gives newcomers something to strive for.
But don't make it visible, remove the points from the header of the site, keep it under water. Why?
This is why:
- good 'karma' need not be shown, it comes across in every posting you make, because you are supposedly showing good judgement in your writing, not in the 'colour of your name'
- there will be no timidity for rookies to speak out against 'old timers', similar bs happens on ./ where your UID number seems to be the arbitrator of the discussion
- karma has some meaning outside of HN, and if I take that meaning correctly then you're not going to get any for showing it
- karma tends to self-reinforce enough when used as an underwater feature, it will self-reinforce out of control as soon as you make it into a distinct mark
- this feature to create a distinction between the 'top group', the 'incrowd' of those who are 'better' and 'the rest' (the unwashed masses or whatever you wish to call them) will be an incentive to game the system, if it is underwater such an incentive is not present.
I've been an avid reader of HN headlines for some time, but only started joining the comment conversations in the last week or so.
Discarding the top-karma comment, I've made 13 comments with an average karma of 3.08, ranging from 1 to 7.
Here's what I am observing about my instinctive, not particularly thought through reaction to the change in terms of future commenting behavior:
- I'll likely avoid what I think are low-value though not offensive comments, the throw-away chit-chat that is likely to just stay at 1, and which could be considered either acceptable pleasantries or distracting noise.
- I'll also be more likely to avoid commenting on threads with many comments already, for fear that even a high-value comment late to the conversation will get overlooked and drag down my average.
- I'll think twice about commenting on new submission, which I've found to be a good way to get in early on a conversation, but which will be more risky in future given that the submission may never get noticed, leaving me with an unnoticed 1-karma comment that brings down my average.
- As I scan comments, I will instinctively skip through to the orange users. As a new user, I provisionally assume these are the users who (1) have, on average, higher-value comments and (2) which collectively define the personality and social norms of the community which I'm seeking to be part of.
- I think I'll learn from the orange users in terms of community norms, but I don't think I'll actively conform my opinion to theirs. In fact, my assumption so far is that this is a community that values merit-based argument and substantive discussions, not just "I agree" or "I disgree" type discussions. I suspect I'll conform more to the style and approach of the orange users in making arguments, not to their opinions and views as such.
Are the behaviors above good or bad? Intended by the community or not? If they encourage me to seek out fresh, likely to be popular conversations and add to them in a way that meets the approval of the community old-timers without groupthink in terms of substance (which I'd like to think would not be particularly appreciated around here), I suspect that's a good thing. But I do have a concern about my hesitance to comment on older threads (a hesitance which may be acceptable, since perhaps those conversations are effectively over) and new submissions (a hesitance which may be detrimental).
Not implying that the orangey folks think as a herd, but it is possible that, by virtue of their prettier coloring, people will be more inclined to follow their lead, and think their opinion the more correct one.
What I find interesting is the + and - votes often appear to be attempts to deny or affirm the truth of the post in opposition to its actual truth content. Its as if mere expression of an opinion contains the expectation of being able to coerce reality to agree and that a counter opinion can cancel that effect. Its Postmodern philosophy in full flower. Kant would be proud of his intellectual children.
Thankfully, there does seem to be much less adherence to Postmodern philosophy on this list compared to others which is why I bother with this list. However, the philosophy lives deeply inside the Karma feature.
The fact remains, that throughout history, what most people believe to be true has little to do with what is actually true. Any new truth that is discovered, is discovered first by a single individual. If that truth is fundamental, it will be rejected by "common sense" and "consensus" until at least one generation has passed - likely several. So also a crackpot notion of a crank will take at least a generation to pass or at least the death of the crank. The age of a "truth" has a poor correspondence to what is actually true.
The net of this is each is responsible for filtering the noise coming at him and finding the few gems of truth it contains. There is always the possibility of being wrong. Karma scores are simply irrelevant accumulations of noise signals. Sorry, that is the nature of the beast.
I was just going to edit my comment with a link to searchyc.com. It tells me, for example, that my average comment score is ~4, but that my last few comments have been unusually unpopular (or at least unnoticed), which I assume drove me below the threshold. Maybe it would be nice to take the maximum of a user's all time average and average of the last 50 comments - that way users who have historically made positive contributions are given a little leeway to voice unpopular/controversial opinions.
EDIT: Odd, now the edit link is back. Maybe a weird effect of caching or something.
I know what I have to do to game it (reload /newest and look for stuff that is generally interesting and I understand, contribute a neutrally toned slightly technical comment and not follow up or reply to questions), but I will not be doing it (much) because it it goes against two things that I value about comments here:
1) It's a friendly place to converse and ask legitimate questions without getting RTFM or LMGTFY (unless your question is reeeealllly dumb)
2) I value contributions that are presented later, even if they're not as highly scored (this, of course, the reason that comments aren't sorted by raw score), and I don't mind tagging something onto an article, even if I'm joining in late, provided I think it's a net contribution to the site.
Consider using an average over a median range, i.e. sort comments by the score, trim top 10% and bottom 10% and then compute the average. This basically ignores occasional flukes, both positive and negative. Specifically, it rewards for consistently scoring well (and not just once) and doesn't punish for an occasional negative score.
I don't know if it's a useful feature - I'll give it a few days and see if it starts looking natural - but it's not one that's creating any more of a skew than the leaderboard is currently.
The other thing to do is to comment on new stories (which I do) but due to them not being as often trafficked those can also go unnoticed.
Generally, I can still get karma, but most often I get Karma by saying inane things or being early to a post. At most other times I'm shit-outta-luck.
To me this seems to be contradictory to the way HN is supposed to work.
Maybe (probably) I am reading too much into this but it just seems to be reinforcing a kind of Ad Hominem discrediting of submissions.
In fact I think it would probably be more interesting if it went the other way, don't show names at all on submissions. Maybe revel the name only after say 30 minutes from submission time.
If HN's goal is to avoid becoming redit/digg... why implement the same ideas as they have?
(I probably just lowered my post-karma average, but that comment was way too funny not to react to.)
I didn't believe I had an average score of less than 3.5 (not to brag or anything... it's only 4.4, for the record ;), so I went back to average my last 50 comments scores, and on the 2nd or 3rd page I noticed my username was finally orange.
Anyway, it seems to be ok now.
* Having longer debates involving fewer people.
* Commenting on new posts that may never make it to the front page.
* Commenting at the "wrong" time of day.
* Commenting on fringe issues unloved by the crowd.
* Adding a comment to an already long comment thread.
[Edit] I don't mind scoring low at all (I do mind negative scores). That doesn't keep me from doing all of the above. But being visually set apart from people who, for whatever reason, do not do these things as frequently as I do makes me think I'm in the wrong place.
Vive la Révolution! Down with the dark orange ones!
The new orange badge-of honour has motivated me to become more insightful, witty, helpful and technically adept... but I want to know how much more ISWHTA I need to become to hit the threshold.
There's actually a serious point to this, some people will be quite serious about wanting to "go orange" and I think that's a fine aspiration. Unfortunately, the system as devised is likely to penalises two types of comment:
1. Commenting on slightly older stories - the comment is less likely to be voted up (or down) and will therefore harm the commentor's points average.
2. The "Thanks" comment. I have on occasion posted a quick 'thank you' to someone for answering a question. I wouldn't expect that to be voted up - it is not interesting or insightful, it's just an (almost private) message of appreciation for some help. Saying "thanks" reduces your average.
If you want less of that type of behaviour then, fine - but I suspect that these are unintended consequences.
Somewhat related, I would really like an abstain feature not just because I like the idea of hiding votes, but because if I see an arrow I feel the need to click it until all the arrows disappear. An abstain button would help when I don't want to upvote and don't have a downvote.
If only few people read a posting, only few people will upvote it. So even if the comment would be valuable for a high traffic posting, it doesn't really get any points.
Something that I really like about Hacker News, is that you can find lots of stuff on the second or third page that doesn't appeal to too many people, but is still interesting. Now, if you comment there a lot, it will decrease your karma.
IMO these comments can be more valuable to those interested than it can be appreciated using points (esp. for Ask HN/YC posts).
Anyway, this is not a rant, but a suggestion. What about not showing some comments? I mean, I sort of already do this on my own, but why not choose a random subset of comments (and their corresponding threads) to display. Make the frequency dependent on the score. At the very least, would it be too much to ask for disclosure arrows? For example, the first thread on this page was entertaining for the first 4-5 comments. After that, I just wished it would go away, but instead it continued for another 3-4 pages.
Anyhow, for the time being I'm kind of curious how a community run by self professed geeks, with the express intention of remaining a community for said self professed geeks, fares in the long run...
...should be a fun ride
I think it's a great idea over all. I think it would be better though if all new account were automatically redirected to the welcome screen upon registration. That would make sure it's read. Right now it seems to be a little too easy to miss.
I can see the reasoning to limit it to the first day, however I would argue that the link isn't that intrusive and should probably stick around until the first comment or some karma threshold.
I certainly did not post within the first few days (if not months) and a quick reference to the guidelines would be handy. (actually i post so infrequently that having it always there would be handy)
While people will argue that it's only a colour, it is still a line in the sand that has been drawn and it will (if even slightly) penalise people that access the site primarily in offpeak times as their comments may go unnoticed when people scan threads for orange names.
I think that in any society you tend to find people you agree with and disagree with, and then become biased in your opinion of anything they say/suggest.
Does it really matter who posted a comment? You either agree with it, or you don't.
Source? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347
3 points by pg 57 days ago | link
Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392267
1 point by palish 57 days ago | link
There's nothing wrong with using the arrows to express agreement or disagreement.
14 points by pg 354 days ago | link | parent | flag
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
It intuitively highlights for me low-scoring comments that I may want to read.
I'm honestly not too sure what the orange adds to the mix. Personally, I think it would be more useful to have the score displayed in the user's profile. I tend to check a person's profile if I think they're new and here to troll; that would help verify or disprove that (for me at least).
I don't know exactly why I do this -- just want to know a little bit about who I'm talking to.
Yes, I am an unbelievably huge dork for knowing that.
I really love the "0 karma" feature from sites like this one: It helps very, very much not to waste too much time here, given that I never learned anything substantial on places like this one. May I cite some better teachers:
- books
- real persons
- live discussions
- pubs
- restaurants
- (last not least) my family(!!)
For people like me, who every now and then make completely unpopular comments (with some negative consequences, at least mathematically speaking), it would be nice if we could get more and more invisible (I mean the user name), because unpopular folks really deserve absolute invisibility! (Take that, lst!!)
Please down vote if you agree!