Experiment: No Comment Scores
Over the years several people have suggested not displaying comment scores. I finally decided to try it. There are so many users now that voting is starting to have a bit of a mob feel to it. We'll see if this makes the site feel better.
Voting still has all the same effects (on karma, and on position on the page), so I encourage users to keep doing it. The only difference is that comment scores aren't displayed in threads.
326 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadA suggestion: Any chance the numbers could show later as the article gets older? I'd like to see how the votes resolved after some time. Or perhaps hide them only on front page articles?
heh! so did I . I actually asked a friend to look at it and tell me if he saw what I was seeing! (Long day, too much code, off to bed)
EDIT: I tried to vote up the comment above and got a "Can't make that vote" message. Then I tried to vote down a comment and got the same message. Bug?
EDIT2: Now I get a blank page on upvoting. I guess PG has a REPL open and is changing the site "live"
EDIT3: Blank page on voting (firefox/linux). This acts as a subtle disincentive to vote. "Oh I am going to see that blank page again and then need to click the browser back button. I'd rather continue reading(vs voting)". Is this by design? I hope not.
EDIT4: Fixed.
(I have also noticed that people don't stop upmodding even if the score is visible. I got 80 points yesterday on a one-line comment poking fun at Joel Spolsky. WTF?)
Just like when there is the delayed "reply" link that isn't showing, you can still reply to a comment by clicking the "link" link.
Edit: why is this being downmodded?
I didn't see the comment you mention, but that is exactly the sort of thing I meant about voting starting to have a mob feel.
Although I don't have any data, I think that if the same comment was posted today, it would end up with more points. If I see a comment with 80 upvotes, I usually let it stay there rather than bumping it to 81.
One other comment; I find it hard to navigate my "threads" page now. I used to focus on highly-voted comments to improve and reply to; now that I don't know what other people like, I have nothing to go on.
I guess spending less time on HN might not be a bad thing, however :)
Edit: one more thing. I still have a reflex-like urge to click the upvote button when the author name says "pg". With no number, it is even harder to suppress the urge.
So far I have managed, but I can't guarantee that I won't change my mind :)
Interesting to experiment.
PS: please don't ask me how to quantify such data :)
But, it will stop them from finding those highly rated comments hidden by a low rated parent comment.
Often when I notice a bump in my karma I look at my comment threads to see what was so popular.
BTW Cool experiment, think it might get rid of some of the group-think
EDIT: Fixed. Wow that was fast!
REPL ftw?
I feel kind of lost.
It can be when the site is new and only an overall smart population lives on it, but yc is (I guess) growing, and as it grows the quality of the voting (and therefore the score) decreases: insightful comments running against the general opinion get mercilessly downvoted, useless comments matching the general opinion rise.
That's one man's opinion. I read all the comments on every thread here, and find that not all the high-quality comments rise to the top. It's hit-and-miss. In a way that invalidates the theory of upvote-judging, no?
It's a shitty system that forces you to adapt to biases. Right now PG's experimenting with removing a bias and improving the system. You're arguing that it would be better if he left the system flawed.
It's true that PG is experimenting with the system, but it's a value judgment to say the old way is more flawed than the new way. In other words, your last two sentences beg the question.
Instead, let me just say that this common notion -- that because good content is the ultimate signal of quality, we should read all the content before making a choice -- is like saying that, because the way your spouse gets along with children is vitally important to your future happiness, you should try having a child with all the eligible spouses you can find before you choose one.
Since most people don't have infinite reading time, people use a heuristic to work out what's worth reading and what isn't, and upmods are a reasonable, if fallable, heuristic to use. I've just come back from an 8 hour shift at a warehouse, and I'm not going to bother reading all the comments - it's simply not going to happen. Sorry if that offends people, but I'm tired. I'm going to miss out on the the good comments because I don't have time to read all the comments.
Secondly, upmods smooth out discussion by preventing redundant comments and people repeating the same point ad nauseum. While this might be perceived as "groupthink", being able to separate a fringe viewpoint (even if they're not necessary wrong) from a popular view is an extremely useful heuristic, because the prevailing opinion is often (but not always) more likely to be a reasonable and reliable answer.
I have a feeling that most people actually practice these heuristics in real life too. Given finite reading time and the contents of all books in history, most people read books that others people have recommended or are popular.
My first comment was http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739112 Being my first intervention on HN, I thought I would be able to post anonymously so I included my name at the bottom of the post. The first reply (which, I admit is polite, well written and from a relatively famous person in this community, although not completely on-topic with respect to the article originally linked) got upvoted above ten. My comment, which revealed a lesser-know but true fact strongly related to the original article, with reference to an experiment that you can reproduce at home, was upvoted twice or something like that.
Fuck that. Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying and form your own opinions? That groupthink is just going to naturally turn out better than forcing every member to think about what they're reading?
For the longest time, HN has become more and more "accessible", at the cost of a lot of intellectual discussion. I've seen a lot of conversations where one side of the argument is downvoted to hell and it makes the other side look "correct". I just saw a thread two days ago where somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit. That's utter shit and it hurts Hacker News.
I'm fine with spending more time reading a thread if it means I'm legitimately thinking about what people are saying. This is a terrific improvement to the system, and it feels a hell of a lot less claustrophobic than it did when every single thing people said was being judged as if it were an objective statement capable of being "good" and "bad."
Hopefully this also stops people from downvoting statements based on disagreement. Feels less vindictive when you can't see what your vote's done.
That's assuming that the majority is right. If somebody gets voted down there is a pretty good chance that they were wrong, or even if they were right, they said in the wrong tone/manner.
I also see a curious downvoting pattern on those frequent incidents when somebody mass downvotes all my comments for some reason or other. I'll assume for argument that on average I make useful, relevant comments. When new comments that I make get downvoted, there's about a 50-50 chance that the next person to come along also downvotes the comment, even when it's a good one. They see the other person's downvote and it reenforces in their mind that there was a good reason the comment was being downvoted. The ones that get a reverse upvote, however, then soar upwards.
I had made one comment a few days ago that go downvoted such, then for a while hovered between -1 and -2, with very little differentiation. Then it hit 1 again, and within a few hours had hit up to something like 16. That's a pattern that I see a lot. People are less willing to upvote a comment that's grey than they are to upvote something solidly in the black. That's a flaw.
The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that". Also consider pg's comment recently about "bogus" research, and how so many people then jumped on him. Actually, someone got sued in the UK for calling research "bogus", instead of factually and objectively calling out the problem with it. It's also in the HN guidelines to use neutral and factual language without connotations.
By observing myself, I've noticed that my interpretation of a comment is affected by the upvotes/downvotes on it. It's not surprising, given the experimentally confirmed tendency to conform in humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3).
There's no such thing as a democratic theory of truth. The truth isn't something that can be voted on. Does God exist because more people believe in Him than believe in a secular universe?
The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that".
"Fuck that" obscures nothing. It's a concise way to say what I wanted to say. I could have said "I disagree", which takes twice as long to say and sounds garbled. I think there's a place for the word "fuck": It's for saying something very clearly and quickly when there's no need for delay. So, "Fuck that" doesn't have connotations. Not in the way that "That's shit" does, or even "Fuck you".
Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3).
I agree completely. As an aside, it's interesting right now watching my comments just in this thread. Once they hit 0 and turn grey, there's a lot of turbulence and they hover around there until they go black again, but the comments here that are in the black have quite high scores. That reinforces my belief that reading a grey comment biases you to think it's a bad comment. So in my mind, the threshold now where a single voter can grey a comment is too low. Setting it to -2 means there'd have to be a three-vote discrepancy between ups and downs, which I think sounds about right.
I disagree with that. Of course I could have said "Fuck that." However, just like you probably wouldn't want me just saying "Fuck that" in response to your viewpoint other people aren't going to appreciate a comment that says "Fuck that."
I will vote down any comment such as that, and I'm sure that many other members will as well.
I swear a lot, I grew up in a fairly rough area of a big town and it took me some self control to get rid of it.
It's not that I mind, it is that other people mind, and the use of it in 'polite discourse' is therefore discouraged, there are other ways to express exactly the same thing without chancing stepping on someones toes. In general, if every third comment on HN would contain swear words we'd have to start calling it 4chan, and I'm sure plenty of people - including me - would leave.
That says noting about your freedom to choose whatever words you want, but you have to be aware that you are changing the atmosphere in a non subtle way by your choice of language.
Don't just go along with the pack.
Don't you think that reaction is a little bit extreme? Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site.
Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site.
Really? When you're spending 30 days flying around on a plane and sleeping in airports, I'd imagine you're the one with more time to waste.
The top comments on HN are still the highest-voted ones. Read however many you want before the discussion tires you. Also, I can't think of many HN threads that ended up with more than 300 comments. 300 is at most an hour's reading; an hour isn't very long.
I pointed out an observation. Your response used the word fuck and then called me lazy, which is extremely rude. Would you have said that to my face? This isn't personal, dude. I just get the same feeling now when scanning comments that I get when I am looking at products on Amazon and can't see the price.
In person, I'd probably be doubly critical. Don't think of it as rude; I think criticizing what somebody's saying is a sign of respecting them. To quote a guy I'm in the middle of reading: "The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself."
If I were being rude, I'd ignore your comment and not call out what I thought was stupid/wrong about it. As it is, I'm debating what you said because I think there's a discussion to be had. For instance: Why would you feel the same reading comments as you would buying things? There's no harm to reading a few extra comments. You lose nothing but your time, which you're already spending on Hacker News.
I don't have time to read all the comments so I'll look at the greatest hits. You can find the conversation based on the kharma scores, both positive and negative. If someone says something -4, it might be worth reading because it got such a reaction out of people. But a bunch of 1s and 2s on an old thread are noise that aren't worth reading.
What, that I'm a student? Reading comments doesn't take that long. As I said above: Fifteen minutes at most? And that's if it's a seriously long thread. Most threads are five minutes' skimming at most.
If someone says something -4, it might be worth reading because it got such a reaction out of people. But a bunch of 1s and 2s on an old thread are noise that aren't worth reading.
Not necessarily. Perhaps somebody made a brilliant comment, but only after people were done reading. In any case, that hasn't changed now: Top-rated comments appear at the top of the thread, same as always. So if you want the most "valued" conversations, read at the top.
So if I pick a thread I read all of it, sometimes again at a later point in time (or via the 'threads' page).
This also frees me of any need to complain about offtopic stuff, as long as a few on-topic posts remain.
True, but often times the top comment will not be the highest rated, but the reply or subsequent replies below the comment will be rated higher than the orginal post, but the entire thread gets moved to the top because of that.
Now I have no way of knowing that.
[edit] I also have no way of knowing when the MAJORITY of readers are disagreeing with me.
Up votes/down votes has always been a way to express yourself without commenting. If it's not visible, it's not as expressive, nor is it as rewarding to the commentor or the voter. I officially dislike this.
Someone may not down vote my comment, which, say, has 7 points. But they may leave a reply that is argumentative to my comment. With this new system, I can only see that my comment has 7 points, but I can't see that the counter-point reply to it may have 34.
The fact that many people are agreeing with the counter-point to my comment is significant, as is my inability to see that.
Why would that matter ? The majority isn't always right.
HN is not a popularity contest, but when you look at the comments that way it certainly starts to look like it.
Let's see what I can say that many people will agree with so I can be voted up ?
As unalone already remarked, now you have to make up your own mind about what you are reading, which is a huge improvement over the groupthink mentality. It forces you to think for yourself before casting your vote, it takes care of the huge feedback loop that was in HN before this change.
Even now, there is still some of that left, after all the sort order still tells you what the majority voted for, but that's subtle enough that it probably won't matter too much, and the new sorting algorithm seems to do a very good job of bringing the good stuff to the top.
What the old system did was to provide a numeric indicator of other readers' emotive participation in the discussion. It wasn't a popularity contest (although it could be for some) and it wasn't an agree/disagree rank (although it could be for some)
These "bad" uses of the score caused the system to get out of whack as more and more people participated. The problem is, there are "good" uses of the score, which is to use it as a way to filter the site. After all, there are thousands of comments added per hour and it's crazy to think that I'm going to have time to read every single one. I need an indicator of those comments that seem to affect the most number of readers because that's where I want to add my limited amount of effort.
I am not on a treasure hunt for good comments. I am not here to please PG or the other readers. Some might be but I am not. I am not jumping onboard to upvote things already upvoted -- the sad fact is that I can't read everything, so some things will have to have higher priority than others. If you take away the numeric system, I'll find some other way to filter -- perhaps by comment author or by scanning the front page for buzzwords that interest me.
I, the user, have a need to skim. Now the system can either easily provide that for me, or I'll probably go somewhere else. I don't mean that as a threat or anything -- I'm sure nobody gives a hoot where I read on the net or not -- but as an indication of the type of reaction the general public is going to have.
The sort order is what gives you exactly that, and that is still there, so the 'good' stuff is still at the top (and even better than before now with the improved sorting algorithm). It's just 'relative' now, instead of 'absolute'.
But right now I look at this thread and all I see is a bunch of jumbled-up comments. I don't know if the one at the top is worth-while for me to read or just matches some arcane criteria established by the programmer.
I'm forced to use "threads" to see where I've commented before and to use the new comments page to see where people are currently commenting. Any semblance of being able to apply my own sort criteria is gone.
And I think it gets to my ability to sort by my own criteria and the nested nature of the comments. Do I want to find highly-ranked comments under a lowly ranked parent? Sometimes those are the best ones.
I don't know. Let's see how it goes.
Yes it is.
"Who are you? Why does it seem like you're angry all the time?"
Which is an angry, personal remark.
The word "fuck", not directed at anyone, is not important. Personal attacks are.
If you don't like unalone's style, ignore him, don't psychologize him. Personally I appreciate the fact that he wrote substantive on-topic comments.
I think Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying and form your own opinions? is a rather personal remark. A psychologizing one at that. Pot, meet kettle.
"Are you saying that" is an opener that means, "How is it that you're viewing this, because I see it like this". I wasn't trying to be snide and put him down. I was letting him know that's how I was viewing the situation, and asking him his interpretation. It was also a teeny bit tongue-in-cheek, considering, again, he's currently spending a month of his life flying in planes.
More importantly, though, the discussion itself was about the poster's demeanor. In all other situations, downvoting isn't an accurate measure of sentiment toward the post, because voting mixes such things as agreement, clarity, obnoxiousness, and humor ratings, weighted differently for each person, into one opaque integer. However, in this case, when a person is voted down for [obnoxiously] arguing that they aren't obnoxious, and the parent is voted up for arguing that they are, in fact, obnoxious, the score really only has one meaning, in both cases: how much people dislike the poster. This is an exceptional situation; I never would have argued "by comment score" otherwise.
You mean in the same way a book's price is an indicator of its quality? ;)
The nice thing about comments is that they are short and quick to read. Unlike books or films there's no need for reviewers or critics to help you find the better ones. Just read and decide for yourself.
This is great. So now I can see which of my comments are getting voted up/down and so have feedback for my writing, but I have to vote other comments up or down based on content (and author sometimes I guess).
Oh i was just referring to the "vote pg up anyway" trend.
If the author is someone you know (and I've made many friends from YC) there is a minor incentive to upvote a comment even if it doesn't read well because you know the person and can guess at what he was trying to say. So instead of judge(content), the subroutine becomes judge(content, person). It sort of feels like "voice tone" is added to a comment if you know the person. The "tone" and (perceived) intent with which something is said makes a huge difference
This could lead to a known troll getting a downvote and a known "good guy" getting an upvote for the same comment.
And that is probably a good thing.
I hear there is this thing called a "dev server"...
I don't trust myself not to kill my app with a live REPL :)
I believe pg has in the past just used "this seems better/worse" as a metric, but it's hard to say how noticeable any change from this will be.
Perhaps my sense of dislocation will pass in a while.
I say bring back the ability to see one's own karma, perhaps with a preferences option to turn it off, regardless of what happens with the visibility of others' comment scores.
In fact, if anything about one's own karma would be hidden, I think the overall score would be a better choice to hide than the scores of (one's own) individual comments.
Do you really care so much? Anyway, If I were pg I would play around actually: half users see votes, the other half orange dot or whatever. I bet the numerical scores create a sheep effect and people who see high numbers are more likely to rate comments up.
Now you don't really know if people like your work or not, so why bother contributing?
(I know why: "because someone is wrong on the Internet!" But it is nice to get some karma too, :)
Indeed. Interesting how fast the brain adapts. I just caught myself looking at the total score and trying to predict which comment is getting upvoted (since I see the total increasing). And I don't even care about comment score!
* If a comment is sitting at 1 or 0, I'll try to avoid downvoting it unless I really think the comment subtracts value from the site.
* If a child is attracting more votes than the parent, and I think this is because the child commenter didn't comprehend what the parent was saying, I vote to level out the comments.
* If I see a comment sitting in negative territory that I feel should only be a 0 or 1 because it wasn't that bad, I'll upvote it even if I otherwise wouldn't have.
* If a thread is already dominated by a couple of high-scoring comments, relative to its age, I'm less likely to post a new top level comment. My feeling is that if a good comment just sits at the bottom because it arrived slightly too late, I've only added noise to the thread. The lack of visible points makes it much harder to gauge how a new comment will 'compete' on the thread.
* If the scores indicate that something is being widely misunderstood, I might comment where I otherwise would not have to try to restore sanity.
Of course, if this change were to stick, it would alter the character of the site, and we would all develop new voting and commenting systems. I can already tell that this change magnifies my tendency to vote with an eye toward reordering comments rather than voting on each comment in relative isolation.
I do think that people make too much of karma and comments scores. But I don't understand why pg thinks this particular aspect is an improvement.
exactly
After all, the biggest function by far of the votes is to influence the sort order, so the good stuff gets read by the people that skim. A vote is like a little bit of editorial power, you get to have a say in what goes 'above the fold'.
I don't want to be the asshat to drop a comment below 1, just because there's a better comment that's currently below it (but probably with more karma). At least from my usage, you'll see a net gain in karma inflation.
I can see ways hidden scores may work for or against extreme totals. On the one hand, without the satisfaction of seeing a vote take immediate effect, overall voting may go down. But on the other, without the indication that a comment is already 'far enough' in a desired direction, charged comments may rack up unprecedented positive or negative values. I hope you can share info about which effect predominates.
I will miss the chance to quickly 'rescue' slightly-downvoted comments I don't particularly like or agree with, but feel have been unfairly squelched into nether-ratings by hair-trigger down-voters.
My prediction: comment voting will drop precipitously.
Then there's just a list of comments and one can vote them up or down on the content of the comment. Ok I did say it was weird.
EDIT: Some great counterpoints below. I agree with them. This is a bad idea.
cperciva said "Knowing who wrote a comment often provides very useful context"
You are both completely right. My suggestion doesn't make sense.
It was just a "spur of the moment" suggestion to provoke thought (de Bono's PO mental operator). I dind't think it through at all.
For instance, the ggp is a security professional. I give more credence to his opinions than others.
On the other hand, when somebody who is deeply respected (be it pg, or any prolific high-karma commenter) posts on something where they have no particular expertise the comment shouldn't get special consideration due to the author.
I can't think of a way to reconcile these, and there's enough people who post here that are actual authorities in relevant areas that I wouldn't want to give up the first. Being able to know that, say, a comment about security was written by tptacek matters more to me than "oh look, pg made a two-word post that got 9001 points".
Whoa! Nice :-). Any concrete examples?
Good idea.
The problem with that is that anonymity leads to trolling.
Also, credibility matters. Some people are known for their expertise in certain areas, like Matt Maroon and poker.
We are having the same problem on how to show it correctly on GraffitiGeo. We ended up using "by ivinkirigin, points: 10", which in my opinion is still not perfect.
Any idea on this?
If the numbers are changing you get accustomed to it quickly.
By the way, my original comment has an absurdly high karma count. I think that is a direct result of hiding the count.
I don't believe I've seen a site where any user can give more than one vote, so I don't think this is misleading. But I've not thought about it before, and I do like "by ivinkirigin, points: 10" better.
Kudos on putting so much thought into your UI. Definitely bodes well for GraffitiGeo.