Ask PG: How has voting habit/volume changed since being hidden?

My personal totally unscientific observation is that I seem to upvote less often. On the other hand, I seem to be getting slightly more upvotes than before the change.

There was a similar thread couple(?) days back, PG replied. Search.

I personally do not like the fact that the voting process is being hidden. I hope PG will take it away soon. These are my reasons:

1. From my experience, I stopped voting because I am not being educated on the fact that we need to vote (well I can't see the rating, so why vote). I have a feeling that other users act similar. Please confirm.

2. The voting process shows the values of HN. Comments that are ok in techcrunch would be downvoted here within a second. And I feel that voting system needs to be open to educate new hackers & founders about what's acceptable and what's not. I know there are rules but we learn by practice.

3. When voting process is open, good comments get even more votes, and irrelevant or bad comments get even more downvoted. I personally don't want to read irrelevant posts. I have limited time but now I feel like going through comments that really don't have enough information.

PG, I hope you take my personal opinion into consideration. Thanks

I can't explain why but it's pushed me away from commenting.

One idea I really liked from the previous discussion on this was to hide the Names of all comments for a few hours.

This way comments really can be voted on their merits rather than the fan club of the commenter.

This is an interesting question. Thanks for the link here to a recent comment by pg on how karma scores are looking on various individual comments.

In sizing up what this means, let's all review together the stated reason for the experiment, expressed in a thread-opening post by pg titled "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

How do the highest-voted comments visible in the bestcomments list

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

look to all of you recently? Are there fewer mean comments than before? Are there fewer dumb comments than before? Are the comments that are "massively upvoted" since the experiment began mostly comments that are reasonably kind and well-informed, helpful comments on the whole? In most of the treads you visit, do helpful, thoughtful comments seem to rise to a position of prominence, while mean or dumb comments gray out?

A link and comment in the thread referred to by the edit on this submission largely sums up the back-and-forth about visible comment scores as a signal on comments in active threads:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465357

>> Please bring back the comment scores. It helps a lot in parsing the comments and assigning a proportional weight to each when reading them.

> I had to think about this a bit, and I disagree so far. I'm finding that I'm not pre-judging comments as much. It's nice to be able to read someone's comment without knowing first that 70 or 80 or 3 other people thought it was worthwhile.

My impression too is that even with comment scores not visible, it is still convenient to browse threads to find thoughtful, informative comments, but now there is less anchoring bias

http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm

of most votes on a comment converging to one score level that shows up early in a thread's development, and more engagement by readers of HN in actively reading comments and upvoting (or downvoting) based on each comment's characteristics in light of the context of the thread.

But the main criterion of the experiment is to "stave off decline of HN," and that is what will decide if the experiment was successful. For that every reader can help by actively upvoting informative, helpful comments, and also by downvoting comments that are either mean or dumb--and especially comments that are both. As I recall, the experiment has also involved some changes in the effects of flagging, so flagging inappropriate comments is also helpful.

  but now there is less anchoring bias

  How do I know what's important without vote counts?

For me the amount of votes did matter - it gave you a quick idea as to where some of the most important comments were within the thread. Also HN seems to having far lesser activity - this someone with actual data might want to check and get back

My personal observation has been that, while blind-folding might have been good for curation of the comments, by avoiding the bandwagon effect, but it has serious ill-effects on the readability, especially for the new subject matter for the reader.

In the past, there were 2 signals of the comment-quality in the thread.

1. Vote count.

2. Positioning in the thread.

Now, that Vote count is not visible, There is only one signal left.

1. Positioning in the thread.

It makes it very difficult to segregate good comments from the bad ones, and decide which comments add to the topic, and hence worth reading/discussing, especially on a large thread, on a new subject matter, reader does not understand very-well.

Few suggestions to improve the comment readability of the thread.

1. Would it make sense to hide the comment count of a thread till a particular threshold (say votes < 7, comment time < 10 mins), or of the entire thread comments (thread time < 30 mins, number of comments < 30) and the likes, and make them visible to add to the readability/visibility of the thread?

2. Would it help if the up-votes are capped?

Since scores have been hidden, voting on a comment feels less like a contribution and more like talking to myself. I vote less. It seems like one dimension of the community -- an admittedly imprecise form of collective intelligence -- is missing. It's certainly not a dealbreaker, but the comment threads feel ever so slightly "flatter".

I'd be interested in seeing how we'd react with a logarithmic voting system.

Base 10 for example: the most-significant digit would be visible and the rest be zero's: '5' -> '5', '42' -> '40', '256' -> '200'.

That way, you could still see the impact of a comment while hiding the voting trends and other numeric details that keep you from unbiased (err, less biased) voting.

My given comment score average has plummetted yet bizarrely my actual average comment score is higher than the average before the alteration (due to one or two over-regarded comments).

In being a participant in many of these online communities, these kind of things sometimes seem like a losing battle to me. There will always be a slice of the population that will try to game the 'karma' system on sites like HN. Slashdot went thru this years ago. Kuro5hin went thru it. Digg. Reddit.... All sorts of solutions are proposed, like hiding a user's 'karma' rating, having the user population meta moderate ratings on comments...

I do find it interesting that the comment score has been hidden. That's kind of novel, and it might be the kind of solution needed in this case.

Having done some redesigns of HN to see my own reaction towards the concealment of scores and other elements I have to come out in full support of concealing comment scores. After playing with a layout that concealed the scores for comments and stories I'm also a big fan of ditching score display for stories.

My experience was what I think common sense dictates. Since I couldn't see a score I couldn't let that color my opinion of a given comment and had to read it. This point alone has significantly increased my engagement in the threads I care to read and made me more carefully consider the top level comments on a story. Since pg turned off comment scores I've wondered if the primary reason people have reacted negatively is due to losing a positive status indicator. This is to say the score might have nothing to do with one's own engagement with HN, but with one's concern for other user's perception of their comments.

One other change I experimented with was moving the score of stories and comments to the far right top of the story/comment so that it wasn't the first thing in my line of sight. This helped with my bias as well.

At the end of the day this all anecdotal, and your mileage may vary.

...notices that they have been hidden...

It's harder to figure out what's worth reading.

Unfortunately the changes have broken one of my most used Android apps -- HNDroid. I hope either the changes here revert, or the app developer updates it, cuz I miss it! :(

To me, the site has gotten a lot less informative and interesting since the votes have been hidden. The voting numbers really help me understand what people are thinking: how strong the consensus is, how much support there is for dissenting opinions. Without that data, at least for me the value of the discussion here is significantly reduced.

I'm not sure I care about comment scores, but I am concerned by how much other people seem to. Relying on scores to choose which comments to read is like getting all your news from the most watched cable news channel. I might prefer that the comments be sorted chronologically.

Just to toss out an idea that addresses some of the complaints I've seen: you could always reveal the total score after votes are placed (and you could replace the score with a question mark until then, clicking on which would indicate "I don't want to vote" and would reveal the score). If hiding names is under consideration, you can solve the thread confusion problem by replacing names by letters in a consistent way. Again, real names could be revealed by clicking, removing the ability to vote. The main problems I see in this are when revisiting threads later (now you cant vote on new comments) and the possibly dominant strategy of beginning every post with an allusion to "my bingo card software".

As someone who's been here from a while but not from the beginning, I find myself relying more on name recognition. For example, on this thread I saw tokenadult's, grandalf's, praptak's and criticsquid's comments first because I had a recognition of quality based on their history of commenting.

I have a few ideas, but first I will say that I like the hidden karma. 1) Show karma after a vote. I feel this would assuage the claims that voting has no meaning or impact. 2) Order threads by replies/length. Not foolproof, but in many instances longer comments and threads are more meaningful and relevant. 3) Karma visible when not logged in, hidden when logged in.

Again, just ideas, I'm sure they can be improved or refuted (and I'd much enjoy the discussion). If you feel a comment is inaccurate or misleading, reply to it and explain. The reply will tell more than a number will.

PG might consider doing something similar to what I am doing on Hubski (http://hubski.com). -Scores have ranged values, only the user sees their absolute score.

Maybe I can give something in return for the great source code. :) Thanks PG.

I would be really interested to know if anyone is looking at the comment posting velocity of users before the change and after.

I have a suggestion: make it an option and give users the choice to view vote counts.