I found the comment scores a good motivation for thinking about what I'm typing before hitting that 'add comment' button. Good imperative to participate instead of troll.
The author of a comment can tell if it's been upvoted - no one else. I really wouldn't like to see comment threads full of posts similar to yours; it lowers the signal:noise.
Obviously it would be terrible if everyone posted 'I agree' comments, that's the point. Numbers show the viewers sentiment towards a comment without clogging the thread.
It is self-evidently true that removing visible comment scores mostly removes methods for trivially measuring "viewer sentiment". It is the contention of those in support of non-visible comment scores that trivial measurement of viewer sentiment harms, rather than aids, discussion. You have made no argument against that point.
so why cant we start down voting with less karma, as opposed to now it being 500. so more people could counteract your issue. AND i think that if a comment has more upvotes, then they DID win the argument and that should be seen that they won.
Yes, logic wins arguments, but to continue with metaphors, I'm sure you have heard of the halting problem. Without upvotes, the thread will go on forever. Vote counts allows for closure. So threads are shorter and I'm happy to extract more information faster.
yeh, logic wins arguments. but people will upvote the comment that is most logical, which should also be the correct one. if a comment is illogical, then its also incorrect. so basically, the right and logical ones will get upvoted. whule the stupid, illogical, and wrong ones will get downvoted
Do not confuse highlight quality comments with displaying scores. And while numbers shouldn't be the ultimate arbitrator, knowing that 20 people found X's arguments to be better then Y's arguments lends some weight to someone's arguments. Having been on both sides of this, I feel it's fair. It's important to understand when your view runs contrary to the community wisdom of HN. It doesn't mean you have to give in, but it's still good to know where your ideas stand.
The only place I really miss having them is in older articles and on searchyc.com. I feel a much greater compulsion to engage each comment on its merit when voting and when reading, and I feel like reading HN has become more intellectually stimulating.
However, this is more of a problem when I'm trying to assess information in areas that I'm not already familiar with. If I'm searching for information on which DNS providers are best and I find an Ask HN from 4 months ago, I can no longer tell what the true community consensus on it is. I expect the current masking of comments will provide less biased voting, so I think displaying comment scores on stories that are more than two months old would eventually provide the best of both worlds.
I think if people in general see a comment that has been upvoted heavily they are less likely to contribute their opinion to it if they agree with it. I like not being able to see its weight as I feel like more readers will comment with their opinions rather than just upvote, which creates more discussion, etc (I have no numbers to back this up, just what I believe).
This is true for me--I have felt more encouraged to contribute to discussions now that the votes are hidden as opposed to before; As long as the higher voted comments bubble up to the top I don't see a reason to see the votes count with a comment.
That sound like it worsens the signal/noise ratio. If a comment is definitive (and ratified by up votes) then there would be fewer comments reiterating the point.
Are we going for more informative or more participatory?
Exactly. Don't show scores for active threads if you want, but please, after x days or so, let the numbers show so searchyc can cache it correctly and people who come back to old threads have a sense of direction from the discussion.
HN already has "modes" for comments. Comments that are two weeks old are in archive-mode: you can't reply to them. Displaying scores on such comments makes sense to me.
I'd prefer a system that reveals the score of comments you've already either replied to, or voted on. Gives you some kind of feedback on where the rest of the community's mind is with regard to that comment.
Without the comment scores we're confronted with a wall of text that is hard to filter. Should I have to read every single comment just to find the gems? Comments scores have their downsides but they make filtering out noise much easier.
Unfortunately I don't think everyone has time to judge each comment on its own merits -- there are simply too many comments -- so we need a little crowd-sourced ranking. It does lead to some group think at times but that's a (relatively) small price to pay.
Focus on "filtered" comments is a completely different discussion, and offering users an unnumbered slider to set personal threshold for where the grey vs black text divider falls on a percentile line between top and bottom scored remarks of the given thread, would accomplish 90% of what the TL;DR crowd want w/o all the problems of showing scores.
The most important aspect of the comment scores was that they let me know what the HN community thought of a particular point or argument. I'm capable of making up my own mind about any topic. I find it interesting and useful to see what other people think. As a geek I miss being able to see that "people agreed with this side of the argument at +20 as opposed to that side at +10".
If some people want to treat it as a "who can get more points" game, then so be it. I find that I can learn a lot from looking at which way public opinion is leaning.
|The most important aspect of the comment scores was that they let me know what the HN community thought of a particular point or argument. I'm capable of making up my own mind about any topic. I find it interesting and useful to see what other people think
That seems like cognitive dissonance to me and a rationalization. If you truly make up your own mind about something then why would you care so granularly about how much/little HN likes a comment. The ordering of the comments allows you to know where the comments all compare, so I don't see what you're really missing other than the exactness.
|I believe we are all here because we respect the opinions of the people here.
What does that even mean? That by not showing the comments we're somehow disrespecting those opinions?
|Sometimes the best reply is to a no-so-great parent comment.
And even then those replies are sorted again... what is your concern? Time? If you were saying hey, I only have so much time, I could maybe understand. But... I think it would be better for HN as a community to train people for more thought out discussions, fewer flame wars, and more of a focus on actually reading the comments and evaluating them based on their own content and not just on what others have said.
As someone in this thread also pointed out, it also ends the perception that an argument can be won by popularity or upvotes-- I believe this has been especially beneficial at preventing/reducing typical fan-boy flaming. I think HN has already begun to benefit for the changes. Also, I would rather read fewer threads with better comments, than more threads with worse comments.
Note: Better subjectively being defined as more thought out, less antagonistic, more discussion based, more logic, and more citations/sources.
| What does that even mean? That by not showing the comments we're somehow disrespecting those opinions?
What I was trying to say is that I value the votes of the community. The culture at HN is that "+1" type comments are noise, but 73 upvotes gives me an indication that the comment resonates with this community (whose collective opinion means alot to me).
I disagree. It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit. Often times the highest voted comment seemed to be highest voted comment simply because it was the first comment and kept being upvoted for being upvoted by others.
Also, the ordering of the comments does the same thing as having the comment scores!
I do wish there was a way to still search for the highest rated comments on searchyc.com, but I still think it's a small sacrifice for an overall better community/environment. I have definitely seen less iOS/Android/Windows flaming, so I think the site is already benefitting from the changes.
It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit
I understand your argument. Just keep in mind that there are multiple ways that HN is useful. Some of us want to go deep into a topic, will read all the comments. And some of us are in a hurry and want to a quick feel and extract a summary.
In the first case (I call it "researcher mode"), not having votes is a good thing. But it prevents me from browsing in the second mode (the "quick update mode").
I wish you could set this in my preferences, but it wouldn't fulfill pg's original goal of staving the decline of HN (that I don't see - but that's another discussion).
I really miss comment points on book recommendations. I can't tell you how many books ive purchased over the years based on a highly rated HN comment.
I second what others have mentioned that it would be good to re-display comment scores on older posts. This way we could at least see the community consensus after some time has passed.
People can be wrong about things, and comment scores are useful information that helps us know if they are.
"that is not how mysql works" with 2 Points
And
"that is not how mysql works" with 102 points
Are not the same piece of info.
I don't see any benefit to hiding this from people. It also helps newbies understand the customs here (they can get feedback on other people's comments)
edit now that I'm not on my phone:
When you google things, you probably skip over results like daniweb, about.com, or expertsexchange.com, and hope for a stackexchange page.
The little URL at the bottom of the description tells you "hey, this is from $foo source" and you're a smart human being that can put this information to good use.
Of course, you could make a case that this is bad, because you should read each one of the results and judge it based on its merits. Maybe we should even strip all of the identifying information away from the page, and just let it stand on its own (this would be a neat experiment, actually [and that's the experiment that I think we're performing here]).
The point counts on the comments act just like the URL does on google results. It's not saying "this is definitely 100% accurate", but it is useful piece of information that we can put to good use. Depriving us of this information doesn't break the comments, but I have certainly found myself reading comments a bit less lately as a result of it (instead of actually reading comments, I'm usually just skimming them now). With comment scores, things seem to have a bit of order to them, without, it just feels like a lot of people shouting at one another.
(Maybe this was the point?)
Naturally, I'm never going to stop reading HN; it is by far my favorite website on the internet. Complaining about the lack of comment points here is like complaining that my favorite bar switched to a new, very slightly different glass. I can see the difference, but it's not really going to change my habits.
You can see how agreeable a comment is by how far up the page it is.
I think having the scores hidden is a good decision. It means that we concentrate on content rather than a 'karma game'.
""that is not how mysql works" with 2 Points And "that is not how mysql works" with 102 points Are not the same piece of info."
In my opinion, both of those comments are bad comments unless they further qualify the statement. I don't think karma should be used to infer whether a statement is correct.
Does not work that way if a reply has 100 upvotes, does it?
Also I love the discussion in this post since, when with Georgify (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2410195) I had tried first to seperate the upvotes with points of a comment, everyone (and yes a blanket term) had said it was a wrong thing to the extent that I had to make changes.
Of course it is not my site to make decisions for the users of the site, but still almost a dual reaction when the same decision was taken on HN by two different people in a very nearby time span, one being me (for Georgify) and the other being PG himself (for HN).
His opinion is that such a bad comment would never reach +100 upvotes since, the post being devoid of additional information, people like him might downvote if they saw the numbers getting "too high".
But a really good reply to the bad comment could get 100 upvotes yet be down, right? This is my interpretation of the rules here, not sure if they are correct.
Just expand the example: pretend it was "that is not the way mysql works blah blah explanation". I agree that I don't want to read this if it has 2 points but I do if it has 100.
Since we don't see points anymore, instead of upvotting you because I agree with you, I just have to add a comment saying "I agree". Is that what people want?
See kristofferR's comment above. He got downvoted for saying "I agree." This may have worked if implemented in the beginning of HN, but now the community has pretty strong norms against simple "I agree" or "I disagree" comments. Either eliminate voting completely or show the results, this in-between situation is foolish, bordering on stupid.
You need to reword this as a top level comment and repost. Some will say that having to make such a request is proof that scores need to come back, but I'm just concerned that everyone on the "pro" comment score side will never see it.
A better example would be choosing which newspapers to read based on your friend's recommendations, versus choosing by yourself. All articles from the same newspaper share a source and it already ensures some quality.
Wait, are you talking about articles on HN? Because only comments have their score hidden, you can still see how many points each article has.
My point was comparing newspapers brands/articles to HN comments, not articles, since you don't have much guidance anymore over what comments are worthwhile or not.
> Learn to survey, skim, and dive in. All your endeavors will be the better for it.
Then why sort comments at all? just order them in date order (or the reverse) and be done with it. Let the reader decide what is useful and what isn't.
Seems like having comments sorted in an implicit order of 'goodness' (even if there is no score) would handicap people in the development of their ability to 'survey, skim and dive in'.
To your point about not beings soiled by unpopular views, the truth is that unpopular views already have that font color applied to them which goes a lot further in making sure I don't ready it (with my eyes I often have to copy paste it to a text editor before I can read it comfortably). I would much prefer all comments be the same font color and being able to see the score so I can make my own decision as to whether to read it or not.
I don't think karma should be used to infer whether a statement is correct.
Completely agree. In my limited tenure here at HN, I've learned that karma scores have never been about being correct, factually or otherwise. Rather, they should be given to comments that help increase and move the discussion around the given topic even if that commenters opinion or assumption on something isn't factually accurate.
I'd be curious to see how this approach compares to the opposite, which strikes me as being more effective at reducing karma gaming. I.e., your own karma is invisible but you can see everyone else's.
You can see how agreeable a comment is by how far up the page it is.
Except if it's nested.
Sometimes the most useful comments are replies to less-interesting top-level comments. In this case the lower-scored item is positioned higher up the page than the higher-scored item.
Start with the assumption all comments are wrong; after all there's no absolute truth. The scores are a measure of popularity, which is often right and sometimes wrong. Plus everyone is entitled to an opinion. I don't think scores help anything, it's a measure of someones self-righteousness that i 'd rather not have. It's enough that unpopular opinions float to the bottom, where they belong.
If anything i'd suggest that comment scores should also have minimal impact in karma, except for questions, where an answer is a valuable contribution. Otherwise, everyone's entitled to an opinion.
Starting with an assumption that all comments are wrong is a prudent approach, which also considerably lowers the utility of HN for certain types of usage.
I read HN primarily for the informative comments, not the opinion pieces. A high comment score on an informative comment that contains a factual statement is a relatively good way how to easily tell that the information has been validated by the community and is likely to be correct.
>> It's enough that unpopular opinions float to the bottom, where they belong.
Unpopular opinions are exactly what make the conversation interesting. While not every unpopular opinion is necessarily valid, it's fair to say that on many occasions the "unpopular" viewpoint is both valid, and often correct.
But regardless of the correctness of the opinion, it is the unpopular viewpoint which makes us stop, think about, and then articulate our own viewpoint.
Now wouldn't it be ironical if this very comment is deemed unpopular?
Unpopular opinions more often than not are valid and uncomfortable truths, so they're likely to attract trolls and personal attacks. It's best to keep them down there, for those who are interested enough to browse all the threads.
But two comments with equal points given at different times on the same thread are likely not equally informative; the newer one had fewer impressions but receiving the same points has a higher points to views ratio. Part of the problem with points is that people try to use them like you are -- to gauge agreement for correctness, or who 'won' a discussion or whatever -- but points are a really crappy indicator of that. Points should be normed by impressions, and then smoothed (or given credibility intervals or something).
> Points should be normed by impressions, and then smoothed (or given credibility intervals or something).
I agree that this might work better for determining correctness of informative comments than just plain point scores, however point scores work better than nothing at all.
>> Points should be normed by impressions, and then smoothed (or given credibility intervals or something).
While technically you're right, that seems like taking a really simple idea and making it really complicated.
Comment scores act as a "trend" of what people are thinking - it's not like a football game where the highest score wins. If I see a discussion it's useful to see
a) how many people care enough to bother to vote either way and b) what sort of proportions are involved.
I think most people here can accept that not every comment in a thread gets the same number of eyeballs, and therefore the "scores" are not necessarily directly comparable.
The problem is that scores aren't like trends; they're like integrating a 'popularity' measure over time. As a consequence, you get a strong bias towards the stuff with the most points being comments from near the beginning of the discussion, not what's most correct or interesting or insightful.
Since I can't see your score, and you can't see mine, I honestly have no idea at this point whether more people agree with you than with me. Or indeed if no-one cares at all.
When this thread is referenced to a week from now there is no way to see what sort of agreement occurred with either one of us. There are a bunch of "for" comments, and a bunch of "against" comments, but ultimately no resolution (that either of us can see.) So a plethora of "me too" postings occur to fill the void.
Of course the agreement in, and of itself, means nothing - as noted elsewhere popularity does not equal correctness, however it's a data point which exists, and in some cases is useful.
> Since I can't see your score, and you can't see mine, I honestly have no idea at this point whether more people agree with you than with me... When this thread is referenced to a week from now there is no way to see what sort of agreement occurred with either one of us.
It's almost as though the future reader would need to form an opinion... for themselves.
The readers here tend toward the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, and of course the presence of scores doesn't preclude future readings in depth. We all understand that scores are blunt indicators, but why not have access to that information? Knowing how the community "graded" a particular comment is an interesting piece of meta-information, even if you believe the cognitive anchoring effect diminishes its value as an indicator of the relative quality of the comment. But given the quality of the audience, high scores are likely to be positively correlated with quality comments, don't you think?
> high scores are likely to be positively correlated with quality comments, don't you think?
"likely ... positive", granted, but strong correlation, no.
Keep in mind the change was an experiment to mitigate effects of HN growth and the corresponding trend towards average of audience. The "tend" you mention had been unquestionably moving back to the middle.
That said, I don't have a problem with points switching on after the comments page goes to archive mode. I can ignore them then, while those who want to see them then can neither vote based on bias nor vote to correct perceived bias.
Discussion and reading should be thoughtful instead based on clicks
One's own comments can be self-appraised by seeing one's own score in real time, influencing one's own future thoughtfulness.
There are strong opinions and good arguments on both sides. Perhaps we should leave scores hidden, but provide a user preference to turn them on -- after reaching a certain karma level. If one argues that the rapid growth of the site has led to an exaggerated score influence, maybe a "norming" period makes sense. Downvoting privileges have to be "earned," so why not score visibility?
>"When this thread is referenced to a week from now there is no way to see what sort of agreement occurred with either one of us."
That just means that people will have to read the comments and decide for themselves based on the merits of the comments.
One might argue that that is better than deciding based on points because some people interpret points as assent to the beliefs expressed in the comment while others interpret points as a indicating the technical quality of the comment, e.g relevant supporting rationales and examples assembled logically.
But it's not necessarily about judging a comment for an upvote/downvote.
The number can be used to gauge whether you should stop and read something carefully. Maybe an expert comes along and makes an extremely informative comment and maybe I just scan it. Seeing a bunch of upvotes indicates that I should probably slow down and try to learn something from it.
Or maybe a well-reasoned debate has a large voting discrepancy. I value the collective judgement of the HN community and this information helps me learn from the arguments.
The value of this exceeds the more fair voting that we might have now.
>"The value of this exceeds the more fair voting that we might have now."
In your argument, you are using yourself as the measure of value, rather than using the community, i.e. saving you as an individual time by helping you ignore the less popular side of an argument doesn't demonstrably improve the quality of comments of the community in general (or even your comments in particular - though it may help you choose which side to comment on in order to maximize the upvotes your comments receive).
In the case where a "well-reasoned" debate has a large discrepancy then using points as a measure of value indicates an interpretation of votes as agreement with ideas rather than an objective indication of a comment's quality.
>> That just means that people will have to read the comments and decide for themselves based on the merits of the comments.
You imply that the sole benefit of the score would be to allow me to form my own opinion. Whereas I hypothosize that I already know my own opinion - the score allows me to measure the opinion of others. Those who have no opinion of their own are easily swayed, with or without a score, however for those with an opinion of their own, it is useful to know the relative popularity of that opinion.
More data is almost always better - especially for those who respect the value, and limitations, of raw data.
>"I hypothosize that I already know my own opinion"
I think part of the reason for hiding the points is to affect the process of forming opinions and better facilitate changing opinions already formed - I doubt that the use of scores to confirm one's own opinions is seen as beneficial to the community. For people who believe that scores should reflect the quality of a comment rather than the popularity of the sentiment it expresses your argument tends to support the hiding of scores.
Why aren't they the same piece of info? Scores just reflect popularity, not expert analysis. I find scoring systems like at reddit or slashdot just promote, usually wrong, group think (ZOMG OBAMA IS A COMMIE KENYAN!!) or whatever group values the majority accepts (GAYS SHOULDNT GET MARRIED!!).
There's a lot of faith in the wisdom of crowds with these systems and that's not a faith I find particularly convincing. The lowest common denominator shouldn't be encouraged. These systems are good for getting rid of trolls and other cruft, but not magical quality or truth machines.
Surely that's no different to what we have now: the most "popular" comments / submissions are, with the application of some secret sauce, the most visible and promoted to the top of the thread. The fact that we can't see the underlying numbers makes no difference.
I don't think you've been a member of the community long enough, then. On YC, I certainly find a correlation between the points for a certain comment and the thoughtfulness put into that comment. This isn't true on other systems (reddit, etc) where clever noise is preferred to depth, but I generally find the most helpful comments getting voted up here.
I agree. I've almost forgotten how disappointed I am that sites like HN, Reddit, and so forth don't use my up votes as signals for a collaborative filter and suggest which comments and stories I might find interesting. (And by "interesting," I mean interesting, not something I agree with, a distinction too many people on HN don't seem to understand.)
That's a great idea. I could see a simple implementation that'll could work out. If I like comment 4954 and you like comment 4954 and later I like comment 5004 then it should recommend it to you.
I agree. I actually often find myself only reading the top one or two comments on a thread now, whereas before I would scan down the list of comments for high point values. This is especially true of replies-in-replies, where the sort order is less indicative of agreement/value.
I miss the community-provided context of comment points.
All comment scores do is reveal the inner workings of the site. HN already has an algorithm to turn vote count and time since posting into relevance, that's how we order posts now. Perhaps that could be a bit more fine grained, so that you can know more easily to skip barely upvoted leaf nodes, but all seeing the vote score does is let you replace that algorithm with your own internal one.
You are absolutely right though about source links on Google. They give us context for Google's ordering. While Google has done the work to return the best ordering of results possible, which might be the best results in the average case (though maybe not) site have earned a personal reputation for us. Personally, I know that I don't want to check the expertsexchange.com sites, so I skip over them.
I think that what HN would benefit greatly from is a more codified personal reputation system. Right now, the only way we have that is by learning to recognize the names of HN posters which, for me, has only happened with a precious few of the most prolific and respected. If HN would only give me some indication that I had up (or down) voted this commenter n number of times in the past, that would be far more useful than displaying the current vote count. It would allow me to discover whose voices I like, and who I might ignore.
I recognize that not having this is part of the design of HN. Instead we are encouraged to consider every comment fresh, without any context. It's a meritocracy of comments. I don't have much answer to that, other than to say that I would really like to see people be able to earn a good reputation. It would make the community feel a bit smaller and closer.
I'd venture in the opposite direction as an experiment. Make all posts temporarily anonymous until the thread is closed or less popular. Allow the discussion to exist ONLY according to the merits of the content. Then maybe after a thread is closed or enough time has passed, show the usernames and maybe the points as well.
I really like the lack of comment scores. Things are still sorted, so the cream floats to the top, and it made me realize I felt group-impulses based on the score.
Now, there is little to no incentive to one-up someone, and I don't consider people refuted based on their score, but rather based on what I think of their comment. That last part has nurtured my curiosity, I find myself exploring thoughts I didn't on the 'old' HN
This is my dilemma, and based on pg's recent poll may be part of why that vote was split. Basically, I feel that I'm interacting more intelligently but receiving less value from the conversation.
I feeling that I am contributing differently, assessing comments more on merit and adding my own thoughts less. I'm certainly voting on comments less (both up and down).
But I find I lack context in many of those discussions - when there are two different views on technical matters, I can't tell the difference in the group's opinion (especially if one is a reply to the other, so not comparable by which is 'higher' in the tree). Group think is bad, by blhack's mysql example is positive group interaction.
I also notice a similar lack of feedback on what is and isn't acceptable by the group. If a snide one-liner sits at the same level as a well-reasoned response, there's nothing to tell us all that one has 15pts in support and one has 1pt (an extreme example - other, more subtle ones, are now only noticeable if someone is greyed out for a negative score). There's no opportunity for us to learn from other's experience.
Comment scores are currently visible for the author. That's what I mean by not learning from other's examples:
Let's say you say "mysql won't help with foo" and get no upvotes. Ten minutes later, in the same thread, someone says the same thing but adds a link and get 20 upvotes.
You can't tell that their behaviour - adding the link - was valuable to the group. They're above you, which could be a time thing only, so you learn nothing from their actions.
And next time, you make the same reply. If you could see their votes, you would learn from that (for most HN instances of "you").
A more likely case is a person who posts "mysql won't help you with foo" with no link and for no upvotes and "this is the ninja lisp trick" with a link and notices that they get far more upvoates for it.
But the most likely case is a person who notices that the first person to refer to Balmer as "monkey boy" in a hit thread gets massive upvotes.
When you get to a certain level of Karma, you will have the ability to vote down comments (but not articles). The figure changes - I think the level is currently 500 (it was less when I rose through the system, but there were fewer members so fewer votes to go around back then).
I believe that I can make a fair determination of the quality of a comment without the need for scores. heck, I do that every day in my job. I think scores incentivize the wrong behavior.
In fact, I think the general quality of comments has improved since the comment score mechanism has been removed.
Of course, that's the wonderful aspect of comments - we are all free to disagree.
Sorting works well enough for me too. I would even add a bit (10% or so) of randomness to the sorting, to give the less popular comments a bit of time in the spotlight.
Seeing comment scores helps me to quickly scan comments to find the ones of most interest. It's not about "who's right" or "who's wrong" --- but what comments are more insightful and interesting. This is what the community of HN provides in voting people's comments up and down. This concept is missing now.
All in all, not showing comment points is a step backwards in helping people get the most out of the site in the most efficient way possible.
Definitely agree on that as well - it's a pros and cons argument. Frankly I miss the scoring for the reason you mention, but I think this method promotes merit. Of course, now we are all subjected to whatever secret algorithm pushes comments to the top of the page, but I'll naively trust that it's doing its job properly ;-)
The only issue I see with not being able to see the scores of comments is that joke or off-the-cuff comments are probably getting a lot more points.
If there was a comment that made me laugh (while sticking to the point) I will be more likely to upvote it, but if it already had 10+ upvotes a laugh on my part probably didn't justify another upvote.
Cant we have a "showcommentscores" option for displaying comment scores? Personally, I really (really) miss seeing comment scores, but its apparent that there are a lot of people who like HN the other way.
No, because the point of not displaying comment scores is to invite different commenting behaviour from us. If we make it an option, then we don't get the different behaviour from the whole userbase.
The problem is that part of what we like about not displaying the comment scores is the effect it has on other people's behavior. Letting others opt in to seeing the scores would defeat a large part of the purpose.
I don't usually want to post, "me too" posts but...
I really miss the comment scores.
Sometimes I am not totally familiar with whatever the original post is talking about, often the top rated couple of comments give me some good insight or jumping off points to look into it further.
I respect the HN community and have learned a lot here. I generally trust their judgement and I have found if a comment is rated highly, it most likely adds a lot of value to the discussion.
Sometimes I disagree with the highest rated comment(s). I then see my opinion is in a minority and maybe I re-examine it or stand firm and make a comment to the contrary.
I have been quite surprised at how my enthusiasm for contributing to Hacker News has diminished at the removal of comment scores. Not necessarily a bad thing for anyone.
My initial reaction was also "just bring em back".
With reflection, I think a good idea might be to show the score after you vote.
This way you get the feeling of making some difference i.e. immediate feedback, but also the knowledge that your vote wasn't subconsciously affected by a visible score beforehand.
The main downside of this would be people voting out of curiosity to see what a comments current score is. Perhaps displaying the score of a comment once it reaches a certain age (maybe three or four days old) would mitigate against this.
Why? If you feel positively or negatively towards a comment, then vote thusly. Abstaining to reveal the score is far too easily gamed with a secondary account.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadThe opposite is true for others, I'm sure.
EDIT: this -> parent comment
However, this is more of a problem when I'm trying to assess information in areas that I'm not already familiar with. If I'm searching for information on which DNS providers are best and I find an Ask HN from 4 months ago, I can no longer tell what the true community consensus on it is. I expect the current masking of comments will provide less biased voting, so I think displaying comment scores on stories that are more than two months old would eventually provide the best of both worlds.
Comment scores in the midst of an active discussion narrow thinking. Comment scores on historical artifacts are useful for research.
Are we going for more informative or more participatory?
Unfortunately I don't think everyone has time to judge each comment on its own merits -- there are simply too many comments -- so we need a little crowd-sourced ranking. It does lead to some group think at times but that's a (relatively) small price to pay.
Skimming is a valuable skill, becoming even more important as the world generates information ever faster.
I'd prefer to focus on attention on filtered comments rather than waste time skimming hundreds of comments.
If some people want to treat it as a "who can get more points" game, then so be it. I find that I can learn a lot from looking at which way public opinion is leaning.
That seems like cognitive dissonance to me and a rationalization. If you truly make up your own mind about something then why would you care so granularly about how much/little HN likes a comment. The ordering of the comments allows you to know where the comments all compare, so I don't see what you're really missing other than the exactness.
Also, comments sort within threads. Sometimes the best reply is to a no-so-great parent comment.
What does that even mean? That by not showing the comments we're somehow disrespecting those opinions?
|Sometimes the best reply is to a no-so-great parent comment.
And even then those replies are sorted again... what is your concern? Time? If you were saying hey, I only have so much time, I could maybe understand. But... I think it would be better for HN as a community to train people for more thought out discussions, fewer flame wars, and more of a focus on actually reading the comments and evaluating them based on their own content and not just on what others have said.
As someone in this thread also pointed out, it also ends the perception that an argument can be won by popularity or upvotes-- I believe this has been especially beneficial at preventing/reducing typical fan-boy flaming. I think HN has already begun to benefit for the changes. Also, I would rather read fewer threads with better comments, than more threads with worse comments.
Note: Better subjectively being defined as more thought out, less antagonistic, more discussion based, more logic, and more citations/sources.
What I was trying to say is that I value the votes of the community. The culture at HN is that "+1" type comments are noise, but 73 upvotes gives me an indication that the comment resonates with this community (whose collective opinion means alot to me).
Also, the ordering of the comments does the same thing as having the comment scores!
I do wish there was a way to still search for the highest rated comments on searchyc.com, but I still think it's a small sacrifice for an overall better community/environment. I have definitely seen less iOS/Android/Windows flaming, so I think the site is already benefitting from the changes.
I understand your argument. Just keep in mind that there are multiple ways that HN is useful. Some of us want to go deep into a topic, will read all the comments. And some of us are in a hurry and want to a quick feel and extract a summary.
In the first case (I call it "researcher mode"), not having votes is a good thing. But it prevents me from browsing in the second mode (the "quick update mode").
I wish you could set this in my preferences, but it wouldn't fulfill pg's original goal of staving the decline of HN (that I don't see - but that's another discussion).
I second what others have mentioned that it would be good to re-display comment scores on older posts. This way we could at least see the community consensus after some time has passed.
"that is not how mysql works" with 2 Points And "that is not how mysql works" with 102 points Are not the same piece of info.
I don't see any benefit to hiding this from people. It also helps newbies understand the customs here (they can get feedback on other people's comments)
edit now that I'm not on my phone:
When you google things, you probably skip over results like daniweb, about.com, or expertsexchange.com, and hope for a stackexchange page.
The little URL at the bottom of the description tells you "hey, this is from $foo source" and you're a smart human being that can put this information to good use.
Of course, you could make a case that this is bad, because you should read each one of the results and judge it based on its merits. Maybe we should even strip all of the identifying information away from the page, and just let it stand on its own (this would be a neat experiment, actually [and that's the experiment that I think we're performing here]).
The point counts on the comments act just like the URL does on google results. It's not saying "this is definitely 100% accurate", but it is useful piece of information that we can put to good use. Depriving us of this information doesn't break the comments, but I have certainly found myself reading comments a bit less lately as a result of it (instead of actually reading comments, I'm usually just skimming them now). With comment scores, things seem to have a bit of order to them, without, it just feels like a lot of people shouting at one another.
(Maybe this was the point?)
Naturally, I'm never going to stop reading HN; it is by far my favorite website on the internet. Complaining about the lack of comment points here is like complaining that my favorite bar switched to a new, very slightly different glass. I can see the difference, but it's not really going to change my habits.
I think having the scores hidden is a good decision. It means that we concentrate on content rather than a 'karma game'.
""that is not how mysql works" with 2 Points And "that is not how mysql works" with 102 points Are not the same piece of info."
In my opinion, both of those comments are bad comments unless they further qualify the statement. I don't think karma should be used to infer whether a statement is correct.
Also I love the discussion in this post since, when with Georgify (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2410195) I had tried first to seperate the upvotes with points of a comment, everyone (and yes a blanket term) had said it was a wrong thing to the extent that I had to make changes.
Of course it is not my site to make decisions for the users of the site, but still almost a dual reaction when the same decision was taken on HN by two different people in a very nearby time span, one being me (for Georgify) and the other being PG himself (for HN).
I wonder how these people ever managed to make it through a newspaper without scores telling them which articles are worth it.
Learn to survey, skim, and dive in. All your endeavors will be the better for it.
PS. Your method (don't read if don't like score) also ensures you won't be soiled by accidentally reading an unpopular but truthful point of view.
You make an excellent point, applicable here: newspaper brand = web brand.
Articles not flagged [dead] on news.ycombinator.com already ensure some quality, and both similarly share a "front page".
My point was comparing newspapers brands/articles to HN comments, not articles, since you don't have much guidance anymore over what comments are worthwhile or not.
Then why sort comments at all? just order them in date order (or the reverse) and be done with it. Let the reader decide what is useful and what isn't.
Seems like having comments sorted in an implicit order of 'goodness' (even if there is no score) would handicap people in the development of their ability to 'survey, skim and dive in'.
This comment is near the top of the page. Does that make it agreeable?
Completely agree. In my limited tenure here at HN, I've learned that karma scores have never been about being correct, factually or otherwise. Rather, they should be given to comments that help increase and move the discussion around the given topic even if that commenters opinion or assumption on something isn't factually accurate.
Except if it's nested.
Sometimes the most useful comments are replies to less-interesting top-level comments. In this case the lower-scored item is positioned higher up the page than the higher-scored item.
If anything i'd suggest that comment scores should also have minimal impact in karma, except for questions, where an answer is a valuable contribution. Otherwise, everyone's entitled to an opinion.
I read HN primarily for the informative comments, not the opinion pieces. A high comment score on an informative comment that contains a factual statement is a relatively good way how to easily tell that the information has been validated by the community and is likely to be correct.
Unpopular opinions are exactly what make the conversation interesting. While not every unpopular opinion is necessarily valid, it's fair to say that on many occasions the "unpopular" viewpoint is both valid, and often correct.
But regardless of the correctness of the opinion, it is the unpopular viewpoint which makes us stop, think about, and then articulate our own viewpoint.
Now wouldn't it be ironical if this very comment is deemed unpopular?
I agree that this might work better for determining correctness of informative comments than just plain point scores, however point scores work better than nothing at all.
While technically you're right, that seems like taking a really simple idea and making it really complicated.
Comment scores act as a "trend" of what people are thinking - it's not like a football game where the highest score wins. If I see a discussion it's useful to see a) how many people care enough to bother to vote either way and b) what sort of proportions are involved.
I think most people here can accept that not every comment in a thread gets the same number of eyeballs, and therefore the "scores" are not necessarily directly comparable.
The problem is that scores aren't like trends; they're like integrating a 'popularity' measure over time. As a consequence, you get a strong bias towards the stuff with the most points being comments from near the beginning of the discussion, not what's most correct or interesting or insightful.
When this thread is referenced to a week from now there is no way to see what sort of agreement occurred with either one of us. There are a bunch of "for" comments, and a bunch of "against" comments, but ultimately no resolution (that either of us can see.) So a plethora of "me too" postings occur to fill the void.
Of course the agreement in, and of itself, means nothing - as noted elsewhere popularity does not equal correctness, however it's a data point which exists, and in some cases is useful.
It's almost as though the future reader would need to form an opinion... for themselves.
Edit: of course, this argument would be satisfied by no more than making comment scores visible on discussions older than n days.
"likely ... positive", granted, but strong correlation, no.
Keep in mind the change was an experiment to mitigate effects of HN growth and the corresponding trend towards average of audience. The "tend" you mention had been unquestionably moving back to the middle.
That said, I don't have a problem with points switching on after the comments page goes to archive mode. I can ignore them then, while those who want to see them then can neither vote based on bias nor vote to correct perceived bias.
Discussion and reading should be thoughtful instead based on clicks
One's own comments can be self-appraised by seeing one's own score in real time, influencing one's own future thoughtfulness.
That just means that people will have to read the comments and decide for themselves based on the merits of the comments.
One might argue that that is better than deciding based on points because some people interpret points as assent to the beliefs expressed in the comment while others interpret points as a indicating the technical quality of the comment, e.g relevant supporting rationales and examples assembled logically.
The number can be used to gauge whether you should stop and read something carefully. Maybe an expert comes along and makes an extremely informative comment and maybe I just scan it. Seeing a bunch of upvotes indicates that I should probably slow down and try to learn something from it.
Or maybe a well-reasoned debate has a large voting discrepancy. I value the collective judgement of the HN community and this information helps me learn from the arguments.
The value of this exceeds the more fair voting that we might have now.
In your argument, you are using yourself as the measure of value, rather than using the community, i.e. saving you as an individual time by helping you ignore the less popular side of an argument doesn't demonstrably improve the quality of comments of the community in general (or even your comments in particular - though it may help you choose which side to comment on in order to maximize the upvotes your comments receive).
In the case where a "well-reasoned" debate has a large discrepancy then using points as a measure of value indicates an interpretation of votes as agreement with ideas rather than an objective indication of a comment's quality.
You imply that the sole benefit of the score would be to allow me to form my own opinion. Whereas I hypothosize that I already know my own opinion - the score allows me to measure the opinion of others. Those who have no opinion of their own are easily swayed, with or without a score, however for those with an opinion of their own, it is useful to know the relative popularity of that opinion.
More data is almost always better - especially for those who respect the value, and limitations, of raw data.
I think part of the reason for hiding the points is to affect the process of forming opinions and better facilitate changing opinions already formed - I doubt that the use of scores to confirm one's own opinions is seen as beneficial to the community. For people who believe that scores should reflect the quality of a comment rather than the popularity of the sentiment it expresses your argument tends to support the hiding of scores.
There's a lot of faith in the wisdom of crowds with these systems and that's not a faith I find particularly convincing. The lowest common denominator shouldn't be encouraged. These systems are good for getting rid of trolls and other cruft, but not magical quality or truth machines.
I miss the community-provided context of comment points.
You are absolutely right though about source links on Google. They give us context for Google's ordering. While Google has done the work to return the best ordering of results possible, which might be the best results in the average case (though maybe not) site have earned a personal reputation for us. Personally, I know that I don't want to check the expertsexchange.com sites, so I skip over them.
I think that what HN would benefit greatly from is a more codified personal reputation system. Right now, the only way we have that is by learning to recognize the names of HN posters which, for me, has only happened with a precious few of the most prolific and respected. If HN would only give me some indication that I had up (or down) voted this commenter n number of times in the past, that would be far more useful than displaying the current vote count. It would allow me to discover whose voices I like, and who I might ignore.
I recognize that not having this is part of the design of HN. Instead we are encouraged to consider every comment fresh, without any context. It's a meritocracy of comments. I don't have much answer to that, other than to say that I would really like to see people be able to earn a good reputation. It would make the community feel a bit smaller and closer.
My gut is telling me that traffic is likely to be lower. Reality might be different of course.
My comment here explaining it has made me comment less has 40 points. I think a lot of people agree.
So the system could lead to more posts by undesirables (me) and fewer posts by those with more knowledge (you).
Now, there is little to no incentive to one-up someone, and I don't consider people refuted based on their score, but rather based on what I think of their comment. That last part has nurtured my curiosity, I find myself exploring thoughts I didn't on the 'old' HN
Yes, at times I'm curious what a comment's score is, but that's my lizard brain talking.
I feeling that I am contributing differently, assessing comments more on merit and adding my own thoughts less. I'm certainly voting on comments less (both up and down).
But I find I lack context in many of those discussions - when there are two different views on technical matters, I can't tell the difference in the group's opinion (especially if one is a reply to the other, so not comparable by which is 'higher' in the tree). Group think is bad, by blhack's mysql example is positive group interaction.
I also notice a similar lack of feedback on what is and isn't acceptable by the group. If a snide one-liner sits at the same level as a well-reasoned response, there's nothing to tell us all that one has 15pts in support and one has 1pt (an extreme example - other, more subtle ones, are now only noticeable if someone is greyed out for a negative score). There's no opportunity for us to learn from other's experience.
All in all, I want them back.
Let's say you say "mysql won't help with foo" and get no upvotes. Ten minutes later, in the same thread, someone says the same thing but adds a link and get 20 upvotes.
You can't tell that their behaviour - adding the link - was valuable to the group. They're above you, which could be a time thing only, so you learn nothing from their actions.
And next time, you make the same reply. If you could see their votes, you would learn from that (for most HN instances of "you").
A more likely case is a person who posts "mysql won't help you with foo" with no link and for no upvotes and "this is the ninja lisp trick" with a link and notices that they get far more upvoates for it.
But the most likely case is a person who notices that the first person to refer to Balmer as "monkey boy" in a hit thread gets massive upvotes.
In fact, I think the general quality of comments has improved since the comment score mechanism has been removed.
Of course, that's the wonderful aspect of comments - we are all free to disagree.
All in all, not showing comment points is a step backwards in helping people get the most out of the site in the most efficient way possible.
If there was a comment that made me laugh (while sticking to the point) I will be more likely to upvote it, but if it already had 10+ upvotes a laugh on my part probably didn't justify another upvote.
That, I believe is more correct. I miss the scores, personally, and found them rather useful.
I really miss the comment scores.
Sometimes I am not totally familiar with whatever the original post is talking about, often the top rated couple of comments give me some good insight or jumping off points to look into it further.
I respect the HN community and have learned a lot here. I generally trust their judgement and I have found if a comment is rated highly, it most likely adds a lot of value to the discussion.
Sometimes I disagree with the highest rated comment(s). I then see my opinion is in a minority and maybe I re-examine it or stand firm and make a comment to the contrary.
With reflection, I think a good idea might be to show the score after you vote.
This way you get the feeling of making some difference i.e. immediate feedback, but also the knowledge that your vote wasn't subconsciously affected by a visible score beforehand.
The main downside of this would be people voting out of curiosity to see what a comments current score is. Perhaps displaying the score of a comment once it reaches a certain age (maybe three or four days old) would mitigate against this.
If voting reveals the score, then there would need to be a new way to abstain and reveal the score.