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I have to agree that the "orange names" are ripe for potential abuse. As someone who has read HN for over a year now, and just signed up to actively participate, the "orange names" somehow feels like encouragement for me to not participate.

Maybe it's a self esteem issue (I blame my mother) but I suspect that some people will skip the "gray name" comments and only read the "orange name" comments. I know because I did, and I didn't even know what the orange was for until I dug. If I make a comment in the forest, and no one is there to hear me....

I understand what the goal was but, ultimately, I find myself longing for the old days.

By the way, I upvoted the OP, and I tried to post above the fold, but the OP was too darn long. <== Sarcasm there. How'd I do?

and to preserve your "orangeness", you might as well fire off smartass comments as they occur to you even if they don't contribute to the conversation. it's the HN equivalent of rewarding thats-what-she-said jokes, and it'll just be a different kind of karma whoring.

slashdot got this particular issue right (at least in the early 2000s, before their digg-envy took hold) by not awarding karma for anything modded up "Funny". while these "funny" comments -- usually brief and snarky or perverted -- would still appear +5, there was otherwise no long-term incentive. unfortunately there's no analogous control mechanism here (and copping slashdot's mod system altogether seems too heavyweight.)

there was also a karma cap (+50?) above which your comments would start out at 2 points instead of 1; otherwise there's little point in accumulating more karma than that.

their moderation faq is worth a read (skip about a third of the way down to "will you delete my comment?"): http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml

also, some winding threads are really interesting (and vacuous ones are easy to skip) -- i don't know if it's worth the tradeoff to cull them.

(yes, i'm replying to the top-modded post so my comment goes above the fold.)

There must be some way to get a 'best of breed' without going through all the growing pains and frustration that come with setting up a community and then to see the inmates take over the asylum.

I also like to think that /. and HN appeal to a completely different audience, and the whole 'points' thing may be detrimental to that. As far as I'm concerned it could be completely under water (as in invisible to users of the site) and just used as a way to give/remove functionality and to influence sort orders and things like that.

Putting my graduate student hat on, it seems like what HN is faced with is a problem of mechanism design. If we can agree that the goal of HN is good news and discussion (and defer to pg on the details of exactly how those resolve), then the question is how to design comment/karma features so that the best interest of the community aligns with the best interest of the individual poster.

pg doesn't mention the implications of gaming (in this context, flaws in the mechanism) in the newsnews announcement. I haven't had time to read the entire primary thread, but if anyone has pointers, send them my way.

Also, if any game theory type people are around know more about mechanism, would be interested in what you think of the new commenting features.

Initially this struck me as a counter-productive and elitist measure, but it didn't take me long to swing to a positive reaction.

Really, I want less crappy comments and more good ones. I've been skimming comments for months now, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I am simply not that interested anymore.

Hopefully people do hesitate and refrain from submitting a comment, because that is probably a comment I don't want to see. In the end, if someone really cares, they will post a comment anyway, and that should give the 1 point comments more perceived worth (maybe I will no longer treat them so harshly during my skimming?).

This new system validates group-think, IMHO. I used to come here for diversity of opinions.

Edit: As I don't care that much about conforming my votes tend to wildly swing positive and negative. But the most insightful ones tend to be in the lower numbers. It's lame.

The problem is that highly rated comments are not necessarily good ones. The comments that get the highest ratings are usually snappy one-liners or the guy who posted first on the thread. People can't be trusted to use voting correctly unless they know that their actions must stand up to some sort of scrutiny and that it's a privilege.

What I think we should have instead are

1) a clear set of rules for when to vote something up, and when to vote something down.

2) All comment up/down votes should be publicly visible.

3) There should be a group of people chosen by HN who are extremely well-versed in knowing what a good and bad comment is, according to the principles of the site. When these people vote a comment up/down, then it lowers the karma of those who voted the opposite way of this person. If someone's karma is low enough, they can no longer vote up/down on comments.

The comments that get the highest ratings are usually snappy one-liners or the guy who posted first on the thread.

Speaking as someone who, from the available evidence, can't clear his throat in print without a five-paragraph running start [1]: What exactly is wrong with one-liners? They are mercifully short!

Yes, it's possible for a social news site to be completely taken over by short-form snark. But HN has resisted that pretty well so far. I mean, I haven't given up yet. And, frankly, it's far better for half the posts to be one line long than for half of them to be four-page harangues.

I will also note that my tendency to leave multi-paragraph monoliths in the comments hasn't hurt my ratings any.

As for the tendency of people to get upmodded farther if they post sooner, or if they respond to things that they also upvote: Last month everyone was complaining that too many submissions fall off the /newest page without receiving any upvotes or comments. What's wrong with having an incentive that prompts people to analyze the new submissions as soon as they come through the door? That's valuable work!

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[1] To quote Pascal: "I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter."

There's nothing wrong with snappy one-liners getting modded up. It's just that there are so many thoughtful, intelligent comments that get ignored and buried, or even worse, modded down because their viewpoint is against the common belief of the people participating in the thread.

There are so many arguments that would not get improperly modded down if votes were public and subject to scrutiny. It only happens now because people know that they can anonymously get away with it.

> 2) All comment up/down votes should be publicly visible.

That would have a major effect on the dynamics of the site. It brings with it a metric buttload of baggage in terms of potential fuel for vendettas and bad feelings.

On the other hand it would be interesting to see the effect it had.But if you (pg) go this route, give it a full week and let people know beforehand; otherwise it's going to be more about 'OMG you changed the rules!' and less an investigation of the potential of different rulesets for provoking beneficial social dynamics.

Before the orange names, I refrained from commenting if I thought it was likely my comment would end up being downvoted to 0 points or less. Now, I'm likely to refrain from commenting if I think my comment won't get upmodded to 5 points or more (4 upvotes), because anything less would be net-negative on my average karma target of 3.5.

I see this as having a similar effect as initializing each post to -3 points (or maybe -2.5). I'm afraid this may lead to fewer genuinely thoughtful comments that might lack a populist appeal because the poster thought twice about posting at all.

Maybe we lose some awesome comments.

Maybe if people are thinking more about what they write, we might gain an awesome comment instead of a trivial one.

Maybe we might get far less comments, making it easier to notice awesome comments.

Maybe awesome people get more interested in a more interesting site and start making additional awesome comments.

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The orange name system fundamentally rewards quality over quantity. That is a step in the right direction for a system that has always been stupidly simple. Well, the commenting system was so simple that this change is quite large in the scheme of things.

Well, I don't actually care about orange names. I think the far more useful change recently introduced is the -8 karma limit, which will prevent lynch mob behaviour when someone makes a comment which a significant number of people disagree with strongly.

As for the orange name stuff, who cares. Karma is not an objective, it's a side-effect. If you do care about having an orange name, though, I agree that the algorithm is a bit dubious...

Some form of meta moderation would be a good fix for that, modding down when you disagree with someone is simply cheap. If you disagree then say so (and why!), don't mod down.

You can have your name in pink, purple or green for all I care it will not matter one little bit, the only thing that matters is what you have to say.

He's trying to avoid a redditer/digger reincarnation.

If a recent problem was, as I recall, downgrading of civil standards and generally, of intelligent discourse, I cannot see how downward karma capping can help. It will only encourage trolls and flamers.

I don't think trolls and flamers care about karma. As long as their individual posts get low enough to be out of sight, whether they're at -8 or -50 doesn't matter. Presumably users will still get banned for the same extent of trolling and flaming.

Karma might not be the objective, but since it determines the ordering of comments, it has a big effect on how the comments of a particular article come off. Even if nobody initially posts with an eye towards gaining karma, the most visible posts will be those with the highest karma, and they will shape the discussion.

That said, karma alone cannot preserve whatever culture and social norms exist here. I like the orange names because they highlight (for better or for worse) the people that shape the discussions the most. Since it seems to be generally agreed upon that the current discussions are good, it makes sense to point out those people that have the most influence. As a way to shape social norms, it seems pretty effective.

You know, I think the opposite: who cares about the score on one comment? But the orange name thing follows you around.

But there is way too much drama about this stuff now, so the thing to do is probably to let it go and see how it plays out over a few months.

I agree with the second statement. As a community we should wait a bit to see how it settles. If we don't like it in a week/month/quarter/trimester/whatever, it's just a revert back to the original state, right?

a status symbol now makes "good karma" more shiny. people will try to attain it. this makes sense, otherwise why would pg add this feature, if not to promote good commenting. the poster's point is that people are trying to attain shiny; will the culture actually become nicer and more thoughtful?

Hmm. If people take number 6 seriously enough we may be net ahead.

That's a fair point. It wouldn't be much of a hacker site if we didn't run the experiment just to see what happens.

Sadly, I'm betting on "no measurable change."

Somebody in the first thread mentioned that he suspected an influx of witty one-liners, since they're easy to read and quickly upvoted. I'm afraid that'll be the case: we'll see a decline in good posts in favor of easily digested posts.

I'm much more likely to read and upvote longer comments, especially when there's lots of comments in a thread, because my eye catches on them and I generally think that if someone wrote a long comment they must have put in some effort.

So if enough people are like me, it won't be the one-liners that benefit.

And maybe not net ahead, if people take #1, #4, and #8 seriously enough.

2, 3, 5 and 7 are all fairly minor, I think.

But 1 and 4 are all about popularity, and number 8 leads to shallow discussion. It seems wrong to me, to assume that anything valuable must be stated within the first two or three exchanges.

1- Checked 2- Checked 3- Checked 4- Checked 5- Done 6- Did you know Bill Gates is smelly and likes hamburgers 7. Checked 8. Checked

Bring forth the karma!

Something that would probably help is using javascript to track how many people have actually had your comment viewable in their browser. Then take the ratio of views to votes.

Eventually you might also find that you can determine the average # of views of your comment purely based on the location of it on the page, in which case the javascript tracking would no longer be necessary. Although it's also possible that the characteristics of comment viewing are too complex to be able to simplify it to that.

Also, maybe instead of a fixed score required to be orange, take a distribution of all users and only make the top X percent qualify.

My name isn't in orange, and yet I'm actually pretty happy with the quality of my comments when I look back through my threads page. I have a bunch of comments that I posted either to thank someone or to encourage someone or whatever, that clearly have no value to anyone else but the person I'm responding to. Certainly eliminating those would up my average comment score, and yet I'm not entirely convinced it would make the community a more pleasant place to spend time in.

At least #6 is true.

Unfortunately, #7 is also true. I've noticed too many comments downvoted where the sarcasm was just too heavy for people to pick up on, apparently. Maybe it's just my personality and background, but I think HN veers too much on the side of serious.

I enjoy reading interesting (#6), serious (#7), and succinct (#8) comments. Hopefully this new system will encourage such behavior.

I see this as evidence that no matter what change you make to a community website, some people are going to react against it.

I half expect to see a facebook group: "One Million Strong Against The New HN!"

In every case, the behavior that is encouraged is one that benefits the reader rather than the writer. I think this is a good thing.

1-3: Comments that few people ever read are inherently less valuable to the vitality of the site than comments that many people read.

4: If people are encouraged to pick their battles rather than voicing their opinion any time they have a comment box in front of them, so much the better. It means less time wasted with the same stale arguments, and perhaps fewer one-sided submissions.

I concede that this relies on the fragile notion that people will be willing to acknowledge (by voting) when a comment they disagree with has merit, but I suspect this would be easier if people had more experience with higher-quality disagreement--say a 4, 5, or 6 on pg's hierarchy.

5: If a submission and thread was worth commenting in at all, it is presumably interesting enough to deserve the up voting. Not a problem.

If people are discouraged from commenting on threads that they themselves do not find worth voting up, that's a good thing.

If a significant number of people start commenting on and voting up stories that they themselves don't find interesting--well, at that point I'd start fearing for the survival of the human race.

6-7: Well, duh.

8: See 1-3. Long 1-on-1 discussions can be valuable to the individuals involved, but they don't provide much benefit to the site as a whole.

Think about it this way: all you need to do to maintain a 3 point average is to write comments that at least two people find interesting. Just two people. All that the orange name signifies is that on average your comments are interesting to more than one other person on the site. I think that's worth rewarding.

1, 2, 3 and 8 are harmful to the community. There should be some sort of reward for deep conversations, commenting on unpopular stories (which would then promote them) and not simply replying to a highly rated comment so it will be "above the fold".

None of this is rocket science, so I don't fault tptaceck but I hope most of this advice is not taken (except for 6+7).

I always thought Digg needed a new category called "Stories that get no respect" which are picked by editors or highly rated members as quality stories and put on a special page to promote going deep on HN.

Isn't Slashdot's whole karma system designed specifically because us hackers find it irresistible to play games.

Spot On! Perhaps we should esteem those without Orange Names as (perhaps) frequent contributors to the more start-up/software related posts rather than the more generalised new items.

Meh. I think it's time to take an HN break for a few days until all the "Oh the humanity!" hand-wringing about the community bursting into flames has blown over.

is this the shortlist on how not to behave on HN ?

Well, are any of the individual activities by themselves bad things to do? Most of them don't actively detract from the discussion, they're just a bit selfish and egotistical in aggregate.

They make the 'score' the goal, whereas the goal is to have meaninful discussion about stuff interesting to hackers (unless I got that wrong).

It's an inherent risk in any situation where a number is brought in to play, there will be people that are going to focus on maximizing that number, not on the original goal the number was supposed to help achieve.

Orange names? I'm almost color blind and my LCD screen doesn't display the color in the right way, I never noticed the colors. :°(

Apparently they're a very, very recent addition. I of course can't speak for you, but you might be able to tell them apart because the orange ones are very dark. Compare a comment made by pg to most of the comments in this thread.

Opting out. I'd rather speak my mind then play games. You've suggested how to do both, but I can't help it if sometimes I want to reply to non-popular threads.

Some really great points. Couple very quick thoughts, and then ideas about your points. First, you only need to average 3.5 to be oranage if that's a concern, meaning posts around 2 or 3 don't set you back much, and just a few +10 or +20 comments here and there means you can comment totally freely and stay orange.

2. Don’t post on a front page post that already has more than a full page of text.... You’re just yelling into the void. --> I actually think this is GREAT. People won't post into an already largely full thread unless they have real insight that's bursting to get out, instead of rehashing some obvious observation.

3. When possible, reply to a highly rated comment that doesn’t already have replies. Particularly focus on getting your comment to appear "above the fold" when it is posted. This will ensure that your comment is read and enjoyed. --> If it gets abused for gamesmanship, that's ugly. However, an insightful follow-on or dissent from the top comment IS more read, and thus does create more value, and thus, more karma. But we should be vigilant as a community to these karma-jackers.

4. Don't post against the prevailing mood of a post. If the mood of that article is pro-libertarian, beware critiquing that philosophy! On the other hand, when the population is more balanced in that individual thread, feel free. In general someone who agrees is more likely to upvote than someone who disagrees, so you should get be ahead on balance. --> At first, this really upset me. I've seen a lot of warm'n'happy comments get upvoted more than an insightful point I made that I assume took heat from people with a different opinion based on the voting patterns around it. Then I realized - if you're on something controversial, it's got to either be balanced, or really good to get community respect. If people reflect for a minute before spouting talking points, that could be a good thing.

5. As soon as you make a comment, upvote the article and all of the parents to your comment. This will put your article closer to the public eye. If you want to truly join the dark side, vote down the other comments on the thread or other replies. I’ve never done this, but it’s an option. --> Yeah, could be a big problem - will be interesting to see how it plays out.

6. Say something interesting. Without this, you’ve got nothing! --> This is awesome.

7. If you’re trying to be funny or sarcastic, make it incredibly obvious. If it’s not incredibly obvious what you’re trying to say, don’t bother posting. --> I'm not everyone, but I HATE online sarcasm. It's cheap and easy to get that ANYWHERE. The internet is overflowing with sarcasm. I like that Hacker News is really an intelligent discussion place, and humor is used less frequently and more judiciously than elsewhere.

8. Don't get involved in a long discussion! This will only end with a bunch of 1 point posts that drag your average down. --> Finally, I just realized something. I try to check my comments later and see if anyone replied to me. I'm going to make more of an effort to upvote 1-karma posts that were late to the party if they offer even a bit of insight, as a way of saying thanks for keeping the discussion going.

Cheers Gavin!

orange name == massive design flaw

Gaming HN for an Orange Name - A Warning