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Comment by pbrown | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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