Ask HN: Orange dot?
What is this little orange dot I keep seeing around the comments?
Is it related to the now-missing comment ratings?
Is it related to the now-missing comment ratings?
I've been experimenting with various ways of indicating high scoring comments.
At the moment I use an orange dot after the time.
At one point I tried giving all comments initial dots, and turned them red when
the comment had a high score.Anyways, have definitely noticed a distinct difference in how I read thread. Instead of skimming scores, I now skim text.
1. You used to pay more attention to scores than to text? (i.e., "I used to skim the score to see if I wanted to read the comment, but now I skim the text.")
2. You used to pay more attention to text than you do now? (i.e., "I used to skim scores, then read text more carefully, but now I just skim text and move on.")
3. Something else entirely?
If the idea is to not show the the information the scores represent, then don't show it, even abstracted as little dots. If we do want the information, just show the scores.
Today was the best day on HN in recent memory, and by a large margin. I've followed almost all the links on the front, and the signal-to-noise ratio in the comments seems to have increased by a full order of magnitude.
Please return the old behavior of displaying comment scores. I suffered an extra hour's loss of productivity today.
(This is awesome, please don't go back to regular comment scores.)
I also found a thread which seemed to have devolved into the trading of personal insults without getting greyed out. I didn't like that.
I'd suggest using something closer to #ff9955
Other than that, I really like it.
By the way, suppressing these metrics is pointless. We are intelligent people who notice the difference between two comments with very similar upvotes and one that far outpaces the other and find these proportions to be of interest. The new portrayal of comment rankings keeps interesting information from users and will end up stunting the community's progress. If you're just trying to ward off users, maybe remove the nav and make the site even slower.
There are far more interesting ways to differentiate. I'd like to see this site be as light and fast as possible (would appeal to our hacker ethic) and allow users to customize the hell out of it given knowledge of Arc or similar (good chance to promote your language as well).
Yes, concerning the site speed I definitely upvote the idea of making the server faster. Maybe they really removed the comment scores to save bandwidth. ;)
And of course these dots will help you locate higher rated comments that get pushed to the bottom (perhaps because they replied to a low rated comment).
Maybe making the default text color slightly more grayish and the "a bit better than orange dot" have #000 text, and for the exceptionally upvoted posts also make the "pg 26 minutes ago | link | parent | flag" header bold.
These things aren't perfect measures, but I find them useful.
By reading every post you'll certainly find the "diamond in the rough", posts that don't get the recognition they deserve. But you'll also have to trudge through loads of posts of little merit. Given that there is an infinite amount of information on the internet, those 2 minutes can probably be better spent on wikipedia or reading the top post in a different HN thread.
Additionally: HN isn't just about opinion, it is also for a large part about fact. And insightful facts almost always rise to the top. On the bottom of threads you often find things that are wrong or subtly wrong.
Judging by the numbers may very well be the most efficient and reliable way to get to insightful content.
BillSwift your comment has all of the sniping dogma that you attribute to Herd Followers.
Have you tried to think of a more generous reason that people might look at the scores? perhaps people (like me) do a first pass to understand the herd reaction, and then do a second pass to delve into the specifics.
Simply saying score readers are herd following cretins is insulting and wrong.
The one thing in this experiment that might (I intuit) help discourage groupthink related behaviors is hiding one's own score from oneself, because people will then be less emboldened when they're being idiots just for expressing popular opinions. Unfortunately, this will also (I intuit) discourage people when they're being smart from as readily taking another look at whether what they've said is idiotic when others recognize the idiocy.
This strikes me as something of a parallel to when people sometimes claim that programming languages should be made "safer" at the expense of power provided for the programmer, and does not seem like a good direction to take the site.
Comment scores make group beliefs far more obvious. Common knowledge of group beliefs is a necessary condition for groupthink.
>The one thing in this experiment that might (I intuit) help discourage groupthink related behaviors is hiding one's own score from oneself, because people will then be less emboldened when they're being idiots just for expressing popular opinions.
The thing we need to be afraid of is public praise or shame for writing a well-received or poorly-received comment.
>Unfortunately, this will also (I intuit) discourage people when they're being smart from as readily taking another look at whether what they've said is idiotic when others recognize the idiocy.
I disagree. When people are called out publicly for unpopular beliefs, they tend to commit to them even stronger.
Consider the following two stories. In Story A, Joe is downmodded on a comment with no replies and his low score is public knowledge. Joe becomes unhappy and stubborn. In Story B, Joe is downmodded on a comment with no replies and his low score is private knowledge. Joe wonders what might have caused so many to individually downmod his comment. He replies to his comment and says "Just curious, I noticed that a lot of people seem to be downmodding my comment. Is there some sort of flaw in my argument that I'm not seeing?"
True -- but obviousness is not a prerequisite of common knowledge in a knowledge-oriented community like this. Maybe if it was Digg the scores themselves would be a lot more necessary for groupthink.
> The thing we need to be afraid of is public praise or shame for writing a well-received or poorly-received comment.
I think you're underestimating the power of a pat on the back.
> I disagree. When people are called out publicly for unpopular beliefs, they tend to commit to them even stronger.
See above, re: "being smart". Were you not reading what I said?
That "being smart" sentence was pretty convoluted, so I chose to interpret it as something I disagreed with just to be safe. :-)
Still it is very important to realize that it's better to improve the quality of your work and work 6/8 hours a day and find the time to relax and enjoy the life. To work very well and focused for 6 hours a day without interruptions I think can be considered to work hard as much as working 12 hours a day with a lot of breaks, environmental noise, and so on.
Usually I work from home, but I have a company with five people working together with me, and from time to time I go to work on the office in order to organize the work, solve the hardest tech problems, and so forth. When I'm at the office I'm a lot less focused because I receive many questions, I can't just have my usual working patterns, and my productivity is something like 20% compared to my working at home productivity.