Wow, I hate this feature. Comment karma was already implicitly self-reinforcing. Now HN has reified that in the UI. Can we opt out of being highlighted?
* 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.
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.
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?
Doesn't factor in a bunch of things, but it does also cover posts on unpopular threads as well as bad times.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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....
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.]
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.
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
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.
It's much like startups. Many of them fail, but the ones that succeed tend to succeed big.
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 ;).
The new system actually encourages me NOT to comment on less active threads, because it's going to hurt my "average score."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
@-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 )
Difficult to quantify. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
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.
Making it virtually impossible to 'punish' idiots.