Users I talked to seemed divided (at best) about the desirability of hiding comment scores, so I brought them back.
At least one good thing came of this experiment, though. There's now a new function for ranking comments, with a faster time decay. I should have done that before, but taking away points made the need for it more obvious.
Actually, I would like to have it set so that you can only see the scores until after you have up/down voted. You wouldn't be able to see the score until after you make a decision as to whether or not the post deserves points.
I was kind of enjoying it. Can we try for a week, maybe?
Also, the new comment ranking algorithm seems to demote highly ranked comments a bit fast. I can't click the comments link for an article and then read a few good comments immediately. I think there's more value in time tested, highly ranked comments than in new blind ones. Are you tweaking it at all?
Seconded. We had this for a day. Keep it up for a week or two, let people adjust. Kneejerk reaction is always against change, even when it's for the better. I remember hating the Reddit redesign for a good month before adjusting and deciding I really liked how it worked.
That's very true. I remember adding the possibility to 'enlarge' the video on ww.com simply by clicking a button and scaling the image, lots of flak from users for something they simply shouldn't click on if they don't want it.
Since then I've made a point of testing the waters with a small group of people, letting them get used to it for a bit, then if they decide it's good stuff open up the feature to the rest of the people. You'll still get flak but you'll feel more convinced that you're on the right track because a number of core people have already given it the green light.
Don't know about anyone else, but it was pretty refreshing for me. Being new to HN, I wasn't all that familiar with the UI, and not having scores made me focus on the comments a lot more. With the points being on the upper left corner, you can't read the comment without knowing how well it did so far with other people. It's a lot like movie reviews. It may be a good indicator, and often times they are right, but it still influences you to a degree.
the lack of comment scores is good for the kind of person who wants to read a lot of hacker news. for the person who wants to skim it and see a couple good points mentioned about each article it made it harder.
My initial reaction was negative, especially without the red dot, but it grew on me. I started paying more attention to the content of the comments rather than relying on point bias from the community. But it hasn't been enough time to really get used to it.
(The new ranking algorithm has been increasingly irritating though.)
Maybe we should wait 16 more days before we start listening to dcurtis.
Seriously though, I am confused why everyone calls the dot red... I felt pretty strongly that it is orange, but now that dcurtis backs it up... I don't know what to do.
I'd like to jump on with everyone else who has said "a day isn't long enough." In particular, a day over the weekend, where the site traffic is way down does not show any real significance as to how it will work out in the long run.
A few people have mentioned simply adding the feature as a greasemonkey script, but I would like to point out that the only way something like this works is if everyone does it, not just as an opt in. It may help that user a little bit, but it makes the problem worse over all.
From my brief experience with the hidden points it looks like it will cause massive karma inflation. I know it was mentioned that a lot of people set a certain value that they thought a post was worth, and voted to try and help it attain that point. It seems (looking at my karma gain over the weekend, compared to the week before) that far more people vote that way, than were voting with points hidden.
As far as point/no points, I vote to put it back. I know its rather anecdotal, but looking at my recent comments I can definitely see which ones were actually worth posting, and which were rather pointless, due to the points that I received for them. In the past, it was hit or miss. Generally, you can expect points for an early comment, no matter what it says, and the total incoming karma would be heavily related to the time of posting. With points hidden, that didn't happen.
Figure out what you want to attain, and give it a chance. One day isn't nearly enough.
[skolor]I know it was mentioned that a lot of people set a certain value that they thought a post was worth, and voted to try and help it attain that point.[/skolor]
Interesting! Would it perhaps be worthwhile testing a "score this post", or perhaps even "score this comment", on a fixed scale (say, -5 to 10 points)? Karma could still be calculated the old way, but a post/comment will now have two metrics associated with it, the (new) score and the (old) karma gain/loss?
In the first thread it was mentioned several times that people voted for posts to give them what they felt was a good score, not as a +1/-1/0, but to give them a specific score.
For example, I have a fairly reasonable idea of a 1 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848274), 5 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848482), and 10 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848201) point posts (note, these were just chosen fairly quickly off of the front page items, not trying to call anyone out for anything). Generally, I won't down vote people unless they are approaching the next group up when I don't think they deserve it, and will upvote if they are lower than I feel the post deserves. I know several other people mentioned feeling the same way, and it seems like there are far more people who felt that way and refrained from voting on most comments precisely because of that (at least if the jump in comment scores on my posts are indicative of the scoring in general).
Thanks for the experiment anyway, it was interesting to see how it changed the interaction with HN, I found I felt 'blind' at the same time a vote felt like it counted more.
Are there any interesting statistics that came out of this experiment ?
Did the avg # of votes/comment or comments/post change much during the experiment? (Maybe it was too short to be useful to predict a long-term trend, but I'm still interested anyway.)
Not really. The point of the experiment was to increase the quality of the votes. It doesn't really help if the votes are only disabled by people who don't like to see it.
Sure. But whether my experience improves doesn't depend on what I set the setting too. Rather, it depends on the settings of other people. That's why a setting doesn't help.
I don't perceive the new ranking algorithm as 'faster time decay' — it seems like the opposite: newly made comments almost always appear at the very top of the thread, even with negative points.
It makes the site feel like digg! Previously stories and comments always had to be pulled up from the bottom. Now new shit is always plopped at the top of the pile, from whence it can roll down (time) or be pushed (moderation). Please explain your reasoning behind its implementation, as I don't see anything good in it.
It's not quite as bad since you've turned point-showing back on — At least now I won't accidentally downvote comments to zero that are at the top just for their recency.
Most votes are positive. That means that the longer a comment has been there, there more votes it can expect to have. Then by having more points and more visibility it has the potential to attract more points. Early comments have an advantage over later ones.
Somehow I feel more connected to the community here when I can see the scores. It's like the online forum equivalent of being able to read facial expressions.
IMO, the inability to read facial expressions etc. from mere text does a good deal of ground-leveling between the real-world socially adept and socially awkward, which is at least an interesting, if ambiguously desirable, feature of online interaction.
I don't want to feel connected to the community, I want to feel connected to the content.
I don't like scores. A high score means that a comment was posted early, that it was good or agreeable (which is not the same as being good), and that there was groupthink. A low score means the comment is new, or not useful, or not read.
Instead, scores should be there to tell us what to skip. A high score (0) would mean that I need to give the comment attention - whether it's new or a must-read is irrelevant. (This also means that we wouldn't need a score/time ordering system.) A low score (-30) would mean that the comment adds nothing new, or is otherwise less worth reading. Upvotes reserved for those who are seldom downvoted. Perhaps this is too hostile and negative, but then perhaps it's more honest, and better able to filter out those seeking points and those who cannot stomach criticism (which I've always found has helped me improve much more than praise has - and improving the quality of new-contributor comments is the only way we'll be able to grow).
I also think it's a loss that we can't remove names from comments (though leaving links to profiles). Removing them would emphasize that the score is about the comment, and not about the name.
I understand that developing a large user base is important, and that trying eccentric solutions might aggravate our core group into forever abandoning hn for more predictable and friendly sites... but I really do wish that pg would mess with the site more often and for longer periods of time, and not worry about the community's response. Our system is not so perfect that messing with it is guaranteed to reduce its effectiveness.
I also find them useful when I don't know a lot about the subject. When a comment is rated higher it gives me confidence that the person is talking sense / is correct, which makes it worth remembering.
The ultimate user experience is the one that gives a user what they want. If that is stuff ranked in a different way than someone else then by giving them that they'll feel more at home.
I think that sort of thing (extreme customizability) is analogous to what drove the PC revolution, power to the user.
The web is an exercise in bringing back the centralization of data and code, no need to also centralize the kinds of user experiences.
I think in a lot of cases there is a lot of value. You make an interesting analogy to the PC revolution, but Apple is now making huge sums of money by limiting user customizability and essentially telling people what they want.
If you take extreme customizability to it's logical end then everybody just ends up writing their own web-app front ends on top of public apis. I don't know that that's better. There are certain best practices that probably should be enforced. I guess you might argue that a sensible default would satisfy that need, while allowing for deviations for those who care.
The last thing I'll say then is that perhaps a community wants to enforce (or at least encourage) some cultural features. If people can customize out certain cultural features then you lose that ability. For instance, maybe HN wants itself to be a place where comments are ranked in a certain way so that new comments aren't completely buried and everybody is at least forced to scan over them. If you can customize that out, it possibly hurts the culture.
This is kind of rambly and the thread is already old but it could be a very interesting discussion. feel free to contact me directly (gmail: andrewmbenton).
I'm not sure if I like the points showing or not. In theory, I don't like them. It seems like a cheap sort of game you get sucked with comments and scores and how you feel about how many points some comment got.
On the other hand, something felt off without them. Maybe just habit.
pg - please revert to the no-karma-mode. I thought this helped in bringing down the mass voted comments.
for example (bad examples- all i could search, but you 'meet' a lot of opinions of the one liner kind which in the recent times have got decent karma):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847571
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=842627 (i can't speak fo if fact vs otherwise in this particular post, but sometimes a 'slightly' upvoted comment from a regular gets pushed up and it rides the karma wave)
For those who didn't like - I suggest keep the new version for few days - they will love it. thx.
It did get me to change my behavior from voting to get a comment to the right score to voting +1, 0, -1 solely on the basis of the comment. If this is the intended behavior, maybe you should put it in the guidelines.
It would be interesting to see the impact of the UI and scoring changes on stats like average # of threads read per session, likelihood of users commenting, stay time on a comment thread, etc.
I am not sure if the point system changes my behavior or writing style. It definitely impacts my reading style. Let me think of a good experiment to verify.
you can make it fancy like toggling instead of hiding, or showing only points or authors, but it's sufficient for me (actually i use auto-hide-trigger-with-no-button which is simpler)
We should use an orange dot, the opacity of which goes up based on the score, with alt text. This isn't a console. It was refreshing to be able to check scores with hardly a glance, even at the cost of seeing exactly how well it scored.
ahh. I've been publicly flogged. I'm going to put on my dunce cap now and sit in the corner.
At any rate, why allow a comment to get negative points pg? Just delete the comment or let it sit at 1. It definitely feels a little vindictive and childish in here at times.
EDIT: For context - My original comment was at the coveted dead last -1 position but has since been up'd. Thanks ;)
I still say we do away with negative numbers. If someone is flaming another or using excessive language, let the mods do their job and delete the comment.
65 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadAt least one good thing came of this experiment, though. There's now a new function for ranking comments, with a faster time decay. I should have done that before, but taking away points made the need for it more obvious.
Has anyone suggested having it work like the down-arrow, where you can't see scores until you're above a threshold?
But I also disagree with downvoting for disagreeing, so I modded you up.
Also, the new comment ranking algorithm seems to demote highly ranked comments a bit fast. I can't click the comments link for an article and then read a few good comments immediately. I think there's more value in time tested, highly ranked comments than in new blind ones. Are you tweaking it at all?
That's very true. I remember adding the possibility to 'enlarge' the video on ww.com simply by clicking a button and scaling the image, lots of flak from users for something they simply shouldn't click on if they don't want it.
Since then I've made a point of testing the waters with a small group of people, letting them get used to it for a bit, then if they decide it's good stuff open up the feature to the rest of the people. You'll still get flak but you'll feel more convinced that you're on the right track because a number of core people have already given it the green light.
Seriously, I don't mind either way but I think with this sort of thing it's best to let it bed in for a week.
(The new ranking algorithm has been increasingly irritating though.)
Seriously though, I am confused why everyone calls the dot red... I felt pretty strongly that it is orange, but now that dcurtis backs it up... I don't know what to do.
A few people have mentioned simply adding the feature as a greasemonkey script, but I would like to point out that the only way something like this works is if everyone does it, not just as an opt in. It may help that user a little bit, but it makes the problem worse over all.
From my brief experience with the hidden points it looks like it will cause massive karma inflation. I know it was mentioned that a lot of people set a certain value that they thought a post was worth, and voted to try and help it attain that point. It seems (looking at my karma gain over the weekend, compared to the week before) that far more people vote that way, than were voting with points hidden.
As far as point/no points, I vote to put it back. I know its rather anecdotal, but looking at my recent comments I can definitely see which ones were actually worth posting, and which were rather pointless, due to the points that I received for them. In the past, it was hit or miss. Generally, you can expect points for an early comment, no matter what it says, and the total incoming karma would be heavily related to the time of posting. With points hidden, that didn't happen.
Figure out what you want to attain, and give it a chance. One day isn't nearly enough.
Interesting! Would it perhaps be worthwhile testing a "score this post", or perhaps even "score this comment", on a fixed scale (say, -5 to 10 points)? Karma could still be calculated the old way, but a post/comment will now have two metrics associated with it, the (new) score and the (old) karma gain/loss?
For example, I have a fairly reasonable idea of a 1 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848274), 5 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848482), and 10 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848201) point posts (note, these were just chosen fairly quickly off of the front page items, not trying to call anyone out for anything). Generally, I won't down vote people unless they are approaching the next group up when I don't think they deserve it, and will upvote if they are lower than I feel the post deserves. I know several other people mentioned feeling the same way, and it seems like there are far more people who felt that way and refrained from voting on most comments precisely because of that (at least if the jump in comment scores on my posts are indicative of the scoring in general).
Are there any interesting statistics that came out of this experiment ?
EDIT: Maybe there could be a toggle in the profile settings for those that prefer the reading style of the '5 plus red dot'?
It makes the site feel like digg! Previously stories and comments always had to be pulled up from the bottom. Now new shit is always plopped at the top of the pile, from whence it can roll down (time) or be pushed (moderation). Please explain your reasoning behind its implementation, as I don't see anything good in it.
It's not quite as bad since you've turned point-showing back on — At least now I won't accidentally downvote comments to zero that are at the top just for their recency.
I don't understand why you assume new = shit.
I don't like scores. A high score means that a comment was posted early, that it was good or agreeable (which is not the same as being good), and that there was groupthink. A low score means the comment is new, or not useful, or not read.
Instead, scores should be there to tell us what to skip. A high score (0) would mean that I need to give the comment attention - whether it's new or a must-read is irrelevant. (This also means that we wouldn't need a score/time ordering system.) A low score (-30) would mean that the comment adds nothing new, or is otherwise less worth reading. Upvotes reserved for those who are seldom downvoted. Perhaps this is too hostile and negative, but then perhaps it's more honest, and better able to filter out those seeking points and those who cannot stomach criticism (which I've always found has helped me improve much more than praise has - and improving the quality of new-contributor comments is the only way we'll be able to grow).
I also think it's a loss that we can't remove names from comments (though leaving links to profiles). Removing them would emphasize that the score is about the comment, and not about the name.
I understand that developing a large user base is important, and that trying eccentric solutions might aggravate our core group into forever abandoning hn for more predictable and friendly sites... but I really do wish that pg would mess with the site more often and for longer periods of time, and not worry about the community's response. Our system is not so perfect that messing with it is guaranteed to reduce its effectiveness.
The ultimate user experience is the one that gives a user what they want. If that is stuff ranked in a different way than someone else then by giving them that they'll feel more at home.
I think that sort of thing (extreme customizability) is analogous to what drove the PC revolution, power to the user.
The web is an exercise in bringing back the centralization of data and code, no need to also centralize the kinds of user experiences.
If you take extreme customizability to it's logical end then everybody just ends up writing their own web-app front ends on top of public apis. I don't know that that's better. There are certain best practices that probably should be enforced. I guess you might argue that a sensible default would satisfy that need, while allowing for deviations for those who care.
The last thing I'll say then is that perhaps a community wants to enforce (or at least encourage) some cultural features. If people can customize out certain cultural features then you lose that ability. For instance, maybe HN wants itself to be a place where comments are ranked in a certain way so that new comments aren't completely buried and everybody is at least forced to scan over them. If you can customize that out, it possibly hurts the culture.
This is kind of rambly and the thread is already old but it could be a very interesting discussion. feel free to contact me directly (gmail: andrewmbenton).
On the other hand, something felt off without them. Maybe just habit.
for example (bad examples- all i could search, but you 'meet' a lot of opinions of the one liner kind which in the recent times have got decent karma): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847571
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847008
and at a odd time like this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=842627 (i can't speak fo if fact vs otherwise in this particular post, but sometimes a 'slightly' upvoted comment from a regular gets pushed up and it rides the karma wave)
For those who didn't like - I suggest keep the new version for few days - they will love it. thx.
Solution 1: Remove scores on comments.
Solution 2, 3, 4, n: ?
Also an orange dot for comments with more than +2 vote difference from the previous comment, might be useful.
//begin include('~/jquery/jquery.js'); b=new Button('hide comment heads', function() { $('.comhead').hide(); }); insert(after('add comment button'), b)); //end
click the new button injected to hide comments. can be automatically triggered whenever ff opens http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=*
you can make it fancy like toggling instead of hiding, or showing only points or authors, but it's sufficient for me (actually i use auto-hide-trigger-with-no-button which is simpler)
I know I prefer to process information looking at a grid instead of a single column.. but maybe that's just me =)
At any rate, why allow a comment to get negative points pg? Just delete the comment or let it sit at 1. It definitely feels a little vindictive and childish in here at times.
EDIT: For context - My original comment was at the coveted dead last -1 position but has since been up'd. Thanks ;) I still say we do away with negative numbers. If someone is flaming another or using excessive language, let the mods do their job and delete the comment.