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Ask HN: (discussions) should comments stand on their own?

1 points by pvdebbe ↗ HN
I rarely use the "newest comments" view (https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments) but now I clicked on it and saw a list of various comments without surrounding context. Yet, there are the buttons to vote on them.

That made me think, do people peruse that list and vote regularly solely on the comment's content without context? Suddenly some irrational voting patterns start to make sense, if there are people voting "blindly".

Should the view have vote buttons at all, make people to see some context before deciding on a downvote?

1 comment

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brudgers
I don't use it much either. When I have used it and voted, it is because the comment stands on its own as clearly good or clearly bad. In the case of bad, there can be comments that are bad in the large context of Hacker News and therefore the local context does not matter. Or to put it another way, local context is not an excuse for making comments that are objectively poor by HN norms.

I'd add that donwvotes are feedback on the quality of a comment. For a reasonable period of time, an author has the option of editing their comment to make their ideas clearer or to qualify their statements with additional facts, details, and rationales. In many cases, the author can delete their comment upon recognizing that it is not very good or not clearly within HN norms.

All that with the caveat that I think people do vote rationally most of the time and that differences in rational votes come down to differences of opinion not differences of cognitive function.