HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why does HN show the score of posts?

7 points by wunderlust ↗ HN
I've noticed that when I look at a post I'm occasionally more inclined to upvote when the score of the post is high (or perhaps higher than when I last visited HN).

This is a disposition of my own, of course, but now I wonder why the score is there at all. Or at least why it's shown on the main page.

Is it possible other readers also have this disposition to upvote a post that is trending or has a (relatively) high score?

What would happen if the score wasn't shown at all?

(I should probably note that I don't have down-vote privileges, but I'm not sure what factor that has in this context.)

3 comments

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brudgers
Probably worth noting that Stories cannot be downvoted, only flagged. It used to be the case that scores were shown for all comments and that this was removed as an experiment to see how it affected behavior. The results were deemed positive, the experiment became permanent, and comment scores (except for the user's own comments) are no longer displayed. That's a round about explanation of why I think story scores are shown because they do not appear to cause a problem from the standpoint of HN's maintainers.

To me, there's nothing wrong with voting for a high ranked story (or not voting for it). That's what the arrow is for.

tabeth
It would be nice if you could just disable it completely. At the very least I wish a class was used that way it could be removed and all notions of score could be erased.