I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

Having the information normalized as you suggest would be great. Breaking it up into a ~5 point scale (especially if it took advantage of visual cues) would save some mental effort. Perhaps relative font sizes?

Removing the obvious noise comments like "+1", "lol", bad jokes etc. how are you defining signal and noise?

This is my entire point: I don't care about the points when I know about the topic, it's when I'm not qualified to decide what is signal and noise that they are valuable.

I can't agree that the signal noise ratio has gone up since the system changed, though this is a subjective, unmeasurable point.

It may improve the "level of discussion" in some abstract way, but it certainly does make it less useful for individual readers.

It was common, before, for me to jump into the comments of a dicussion, check out the few highest rated ones, and then read the article with that information in mind, coming back to read other comments after that. With nothing to differentiate upvoted comments (unless they happen to be at the same thread level in the same thread), there's no way for me to do that, now. I don't view this as a good thing.

If points aren't being shown, why have them in the first place? What's the point?

Points should reflect the quality of the comment. If it's not being used for that, it's worthless to have.

Showing them days later, after the discussion is finished, is also fairly worthless.

I'd much rather have some indicator of quality posts. We already have an indicator for poorer quality posts. Their is value in knowing what your peers think.

I disagree with you. The signal/noise ratio has gone down considerably. What I'm noticing now is that people are writing longer comments, but the comments have considerably less substance.

People can't stand out based on upvotes (actual community approval) so they're trying to stand out based on post-length.

At a very basic glance it appears that what you're saying is true, but I've found the opposite.

> In terms of learning new things, the vote count helps tremendously! You can tell that a security-related suggestion earning 50 up votes is sound (of course considering context), technology-wise.

No, absolutely not! You can only tell that other non-experts agree in some path-dependent fashion.

I'll occasionally see highly-upvoted nonsense in an area that I'm expert in. This is very bad.

This is some kind of cognitive bias.

EDIT> I should clarify that it's entirely possible for experts to disagree. So this isn't the you disagree with me so you dumb argument.

There should be an option to abstain from voting as well, for those that don't know if it's a valid comment or not.

I agree so much I'm commenting.

Perlmonks.org does this. They only show you vote counts for nodes you've voted on. It always seemed effective to me -- I'd vote on comments I thought were good, and after I voted I'd see what their vote scores were.

That defeats the entire point of having people vote who know what they're talking about.

I watch my karma on reddit and HN very closely. It is very rare that I get reflexively downvoted as a result of initial voting, and when it does happen, I mention it and clarify my post and almost always see it even back out.

How does that option help the main poster? Forcing him to vote on comments (even as abstention) is just meaningless mechanism that gets in the way.

This makes me sad. I always thought that part of being a good user on HN was submitting feedback via comments and voting. To imagine that there are users out there who don't consider this a community, and want only to leech off the useful information contributed by others, is saddening.

Would this even be a problem for most scenarios? I don't think most users have (or would want to spend) the time to look at two browsers for every set of comments I want to view and/or vote on.

Seeing vote counts could also be a karma linked feature, I suppose. That makes it enough work to the point where it's probably not worth it to game the system.

Agreed (if you don't like short comments like mine, bring back the vote count and I'll happily upvote the parent)

Agreed (if you don't like short comments like mine, bring back the vote count and I'll happily upvote the parent)

All systems can be hacked and tweaked, you should never write off a system just because its possible to work around it. It's a trade off, and you have to weigh it all up.

The problem is groupthink. Even HN is not immune.

Not true, otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion - the OP is saying that it's a necessary filter.

Indeed, we should all wander through the net with no inkling of others opinions in order to mitigate some dubious risk. Enlightened people read every article, decide for themselves and then sit silently.

It has far less value than you might think. When this community was 100% startuppers, that worked better, but now there are so many people who don't have first hand experience that are willing to upvote anything that sounds correct that it's lost a lot of its value. It's now a dangerous positive feedback loop.

High vote counts tend to be very convincing to all but the most discriminating people, it's not the mark of a fool to believe what everyone is telling them is correct, just a sign of inexperience with that topic.

I read that slightly differently. I read that as meaning there is a greater disparity between the high voted comments and the low comments.

I don't see it addressing the quantity of highly voted comments vs quantity of lower voted comments.

Good point though. It does definitely question my assertion that the herd mentality has negatively affected the value of upvotes. But I don't believe it disproves it.

My observation on my own comments has been that most of them level out at a lower number, say 2-4 when they might have hit 8-10 eariler.

But there are some outliers that are getting voted much higher than they honestly deserve. I'm talking 50-70 range for something that would have been 8-10 before.

I think people might be seeing comments that contribute to the conversation in some useful way and are now upvoting them when they would have let them cap out at a medium score, if they could see the score.

They have no way to know the comment is already considerably over-upvoted.

I mean, thanks for the karma and all, but I don't know that it's really helping.

I think there is a problem with the “upvote doesn’t imply agreement” dictum. It doesn’t make all that much sense to me, at least not in all situations.

I can imagine an eloquent, well written movie review with which I don’t agree but which I think is so well written that it should be read by more people. That’s taste and you should certainly not downvote taste, but most discussions on HN are not about taste but rather about questions with right and wrong answers.

When I’m disagreeing with someone about those I must be thinking that what the person writes is based on wrong facts or is illogical. Should users be encouraged to upvote eloquent and well written comments even if they think those comments are spreading false information and are illogical? (Whether or not such comments should be downvoted is a different question. I tend not to.)

It’s never quite that clear cut in the real world. You might feel that the facts are wrong or that some illogical argument is hiding somewhere in the comment but you might not be sure about it. Upvoting may be the right thing to do, then – the comment can be seen by a wider audience and it can come under more scrutiny. The comment and its analysis can help all parties to get closer to the truth.

There is no doubt to me that there are situations in which upvoting despite disagreement can be a good idea. I also think that upvoting because of agreement and not upvoting because of disagreement can be a good idea.

On a certain level, agreement and “making your point in a good way” are one and the same. No matter how eloquent, how can a comment with factual errors that undermine its central thesis ever be an example of “making your point in a good way”?

ugh has a very good definition of what a high vote count means: the comment is a must read. It doesn't mean everyone agrees, but it's a key point in the overall discussion.

You took away such an important buoy for us to navigate HN!

Whereas before this would have gotten downvoted, but there is now no meaningful way to communicate your agreement than to leave a comment.

Most upvotes are going to be based on agreement, its simply psychological. We're more likely to even consider upvoting something if we agree with it. Downvotes on the other hand, have a detrimental effect such that we can stop to think if this actually deserves a downvote after we get the impulse. So even though ideally upvotes should be about adding to discussion, it's just not going to play out that way.

This has been suggested before, but perhaps the ability to vote separately on "good/bad contribution" and "agree/disagree" would be a good thing. If nothing else, it might give the "agree/disagree" folks a way to express their views without affecting the sorting (which should be by "good/bad contribution", I hope most would agree).

While the two variables may be orthogonal for an individual, in aggregate they tend to be the same thing.

To illustrate starting with the most stark case- try to imagine a comment that 0% of HN readers agree with but that 100% feel is a valuable contribution. I can't, and the reason I can't is because usually when I encounter the "valuable but disagree" situation individually, it's actually me thinking "some % of other HN readers may share this misconception, therefore it makes more sense to respond than to downvote." or "I disagree with this, but I know most HN readers won't." Or, rarely, "I disagree vehemently, and feel obligated to make that disagreement known because the 5% of readers who actually agree really need to know why it's [dangerous/silly/misguided...]"

If the poster is the only one in HN-space that agrees, no matter how "thoughtful" (i.e., verbose, in that case; possibly like the comment I'm writing now) it is, it's not important. The fact that some percentage of readers agree* or may agree is what gives it importance. In aggregate I'd suggest that the number and ratio of upvotes to downvotes would match the importance as defined by the community.

In this context I'm using the word "agree" in a sense a little broader than usual. Instead of "I take that position to be my own"- an upvote is broadened to "I can see myself taking that position as my own after further reading/thought/experiment," and finally even "This line of thinking is attractive to the kind of people I like to have in this community."

Where things get muddy is when we take that even further and say to ourselves "Some percentage of people will take that position even though I will not. Therefore it is 'important' and I will upvote it." Kudos to the altruism and social empathy, but imagine if 100% of HN readers thought this way. A position that is shared by only 5% of the community would have the same number of votes as a position shared by 90% of the community, even pithy one liners and mean-spirited ad-homimems. In a more likely equilibrium, a percentage of people will do an "importance" upvote for an item separate from their agreement with a probability roughly equal to the number of people who actually agree with the comment (So, there's a 1 in 100 chance that I'll give an "importance" upvote on an item that roughly 1 in 100 people would agree with). That would keep the proportions more or less sane and only result in general karma inflation.

Whew, hopefully showed my point- aggregate agreement _is_ relative importance- even if the individuals agreeing and upvoting are not the same people. I could go on with a parallel line of thought for disagreement, although with slightly different results (it's probably a lot less likely that one thinks "While agree with this, it's not important." or "I agree with this and it is important, but x number of people probably don't agree with it so I'd better give it a downvote to be fair...") In fact maybe, the difference between the two sides is key to the bigger questions of site quality degradation.

So, to the bigger question: possible reasons for degradation that I've thought about and seen discussed so far-

* People trying to decouple agreement from importance and therefore end up trying to channel the thoughts of others, leading to inflation and biases in all sorts of weird ways due to a social instinct that is, by itself, very positive and healthy.

* The blind leading the blind (avalanching) that pg is experimenting with solutions to now.

* Scariest of all because the fixes are more difficult: The community, in aggregate, is not as valuable/smart/insightful as it was. This compounds the problem with the first point- What happens when some percentage of people (say, greater than 10%) genuinely find "You're a dirtbag" insightful? It trumps the other two points even if they're perfectly solved. What happens when 80% of readers thoughtfully proving comments turns into 30% of readers, with the other 70% just there to "learn" and follow the lead of the 30%?

The last point is the mo...

Then you go back and read the source so you can try to run through the calculation backwards in your head to estimate, relative to the surrounding comments' timestamps, what the score might be based on its position?

Do you also apply this logic to books in a library?

How do you choose which ones to read? Do you read all of them?

I think if you don't have time to read all of the books and judge them on their merits, then you shouldn't be participating in an activity like reading books.

That's the easiest and most effective solution, I think. But we could also do with an optional visual cue, since a lot of people want it.

Regarding your second bullet - do you have an alter ego to test anti-HN sentiments as well? Not really in good taste, I know, but it would be interesting as a social experiment.

I notice that a lot of posters prefix their comments with a "damn-the-downvotes" remark, which shows that a lot of disussion is skewed toward karma-preservation. Both up and downvoting are fraught and maybe you really need both or neither one.

You still have that rough idea of social proof in the comment ordering. Of course there's the occasional very recent comment sprinkled in, but I think the error this introduces isn't worse that popular, but slight wrong comments upvoted with herd-thinking.

I like it this way even for discovering new things, especially since the lack of comment points prevent my brain from going into autopilot mode. Trying to grasp new ideas without a concerning mind just doesn't cut it for me ...

To my understanding, it is generally accepted that the primary purpose of karma points on HN is to encourage good discussions. One of the most common reasons I've seen proposed by people who want to bring back visible scores for comments is "it'll make threads easier for me to skim". Another common reason I've seen is "how can I know what I should think without visible karma points?" I feel that it is worth bearing in mind that neither of those reasons is "bringing back visible comment scores will improve the quality of discussion." I also feel that (with the exception of borderline-trollish comments like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495648 and "Bring back visible scores because I'm angry today!" threads) that discussion quality has improved since comment scores where made invisible, though obviously that position is up for debate. But, if we accept that the primary purpose of karma points is to encourage good discussion (and making, e.g. skimming comment threads easier is at best a secondary purpose), and (for the sake of argument) we accept that making comment scores invisible has improved discussion quality, then it is clear that the correct decision is to keep comment scores invisible, imho.