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Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

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jcampbell1

> it was decidedly a positive change for the site.

Was it?

When things were transparent, there were no reason to upvote interesting trollish comments.

Now they get blindly up-voted for being interesting. For example, consider this article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7436401

About 5 facebook engineers are answering questions. They are of course buried by a meta discussion about whether facebook should use PHP at all.

Since the change, I have written a few 50+ karma comments, and all were trolls. The change makes me like my own comments less. Getting a "high score" just requires posting something popular and mildly offensive, where as before, people could weigh, "what conversation is most important".

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Agree. I'll add that the most frustrating thing to me is this: 3 comments in a row, are ranked as #1, #2, and #3. I end up reading crap, or not reading good things because that order tells me almost nothing. If I saw the scores, and they were 200, 5, 3, I could know to skip the bottom 2 if I wasn't very interested in the topic. If the scores were 200, 199, 198, I would be sure not to neglect reading #3.

Not seeing the scores also encourages hijacking visibility by replying to the top comment.

   #1 score 1000
      ->#2 score 5
   #3 score 800

We end up reading comment #2 before and often instead of #3.

Most really popular posts load 4-5 comments in reply to the actual post in the first page of comments. It's honestly ridiculous. I would really love to be able to collapse comment trees like on reddit, and even better if they aggressively collapsed by default based on their score.

Some simple comment auto-collapsing logic (like Reddit has, it's nothing magic) would actualy be "the simplest thing that could possibly work", a lot better and more straight-forward than adding yet another (third!) layer of voting to the comments.

Also I agree that hiding scores was not "decidedly a positive change", for the reason rando289 points out, among other things. It's just so useful information. Sure it changes the way people deal out votes, but in the end it's all about how the posts are sorted, not the individual points, and I doubt the sort-order will change much (and if it does, whether it'd be worse).

My most up-voted comment is this:

"2048 is HN's Flappy Bird"

Hardly enlightening or interesting.

Amount of upvotes for a given post are about a lot of other factors than just the quality of comment. Time of day is a major factor, for instance.

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