

Hiding HN Karma - andrewcooke
http://www.acooke.org/cute/HidingHNKa0.html

======
BigZaphod
I have occasionally been bothered by the scores of my own comments and the
comments of others as they relate to mine. I would feel attacked or spited or
somehow otherwise wronged if I saw my own witty scribbling voted down while
someone else's similarly witty (and, might I add, less-awesome-because-I-
didn't-write-it) comment voted up or untainted by a down vote.

This bothered me and sometimes I'd get disappointed in the community's
apparent unwillingness to appreciate my obvious total superiority in all
matters of opinion. Sometimes I'd stop commenting for awhile - after all, they
don't deserve my great and valuable insights!

Eventually, probably in the shower, I began to realize that I was an idiot.
It's stupid to get bent out of shape when people don't agree with your every
word or understand your every joke. After reading over some of my lower rated
comments, it also became clear that most of the time they actually sucked. :)
I decided to make a conscious effort to watch myself for that kind of thinking
and to curb it before it dominated my mood the rest of the day. It has
influenced me deeply in ways that extend far beyond this site.

I'm now a chang(ed/ing) man. I'd be lying if the occasional down vote didn't
still irritate me now and then, but I've successfully trained myself to use
the comment scores as a reminder that we're not all the same and that it is a
valuable and important thing to internalize. I try to learn from it.

If you want to hide the scores - more power to you. It's no skin off my back
and it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the site in the least. You don't have to
feel guilty about doing it. I would just ask that you consider putting some
real time into trying to figure out why the scores bother you and decide, once
a reason is identified, if it's something worth changing your mind over or
not. Perhaps it isn't. No big deal. We all see the world slightly differently.

~~~
tokenadult
_I'd be lying if the occasional down vote didn't still irritate me now and
then, but I've successfully trained myself to use the comment scores as a
reminder that we're not all the same and that it is a valuable and important
thing to internalize. I try to learn from it._

Upvoted to show agreement with this idea that comment scores can teach each
commenter about how the commenter fits into a diverse community. Not
necessarily every true comment will be upvoted for helpfulness, and not
necessarily every funny comment will amuse other participants, but every
comment obtains a score, and the person posting comments can learn in the
aggregate from each and every score. Ups and downs come in life, and so
upvotes and downvotes are attached to comments. But every human being has
opportunity to learn every day.

~~~
chanux
I too had a time that I thought twice before commenting because of some down
modes that I honestly didn't understood. But with the time I realized that
it's my opinion that becomes a comment and what matters is whether I believe
in my opinion.

However karma controlled me from posting everything coming in to my mind (I
think it's a good thing to have a clean meaningful conversation). And the
occasional comments that express my sense of humor were affected so I hesitate
to share those.

Anyway HN is not what it used to be and there are many kinds of people here.
So obviously they think different and there's a great chance there can be many
people who disagree with you and actually go forward and downmod. But you
should post your comment if you think your opinion is still right, after you
think twice.

------
chaosmachine
PG actually hid comment karma for a while, but it was quickly restored. It's
just a very useful shortcut for scanning comment threads.

~~~
andrewcooke
aren't threads already sorted by karma (amongst other factors)?

but anyway, i'm not saying karma is not useful - this just makes the way i use
the site less frustrating for me. i threw it out there in case others felt the
same way, is all.

~~~
chaosmachine
The problem with that was threads with a 1 karma parent and a 100 karma reply
end up at the bottom. With karma displayed, it's easier to spot important
posts.

~~~
sidmitra
Maybe one can use colour based coding depending of the karma percentile?

So something at the top 10% percentile would have small green icon next to it.
The colour would be a gradient till it reaches the bottom 10%, where it would
show red.

This would make it even easier to scan, to look at top comments just search
for green..... just a thought.

~~~
chaosmachine
Actually, that was tried, too. There was an orange dot that showed up for
comments with over 15 karma.

------
eplanit
I've come to find the whole 'karma' thing the most absurd aspect of this site.
I give not a s#&t about my 'score' anymore. A high score can indicate someone
who actually submits useful entries....but just as often (or more) it's those
who are "running with the herd". The most agreeable amongst the clique. It's
group-think, largely.

Personally, carrying on a debate with people via keyboard is very slow and
tedious. Carrying on debates with anonymous folks along with the so-called
Karma system (I think it's more of an Applause Meter) tends to sway argument
based on popularity and acceptance. The 'karma' system generally leads to:
"Oh, you just insulted my iPad...minus 1 for you!", or "How dare you consider
JSON to be stupid...minus 1".

Toss the "points". Besides, what prize am I working towards?

I'll troll here for good articles, but I've lost any interest in being "part
of the community" (a.k.a. schoolyard).

~~~
shadowsun7
You forget that it's a really good filter for new users. Over time, as your
karma gets higher, I believe you'll think about it less - but for the new user
who's likely to be rude and probably doesn't yet _get_ the community, karma is
a rather useful tool.

I can attest to that - I'm a new poster; and I'm still getting the feel for
the community here. Karma helps bring me up to speed far quicker than other
existing forum systems.

~~~
eplanit
Yes, the tool of group-think. "Rude" comes to mean disagreeing too often.
Being critical is often deemed as "disagreeing". The same holds for "doesn't
yet 'get' the community". All these loaded terms: get, community.

It's a great place to find references to good articles. I find participating
in discussions, over time, a huge time drain and stress producer. It's
anonymous debate with the masses (smart as many of them are), with an applause
meter running the whole time.

~~~
Semiapies
Or where rude just means "rude".

Certainly, various geek social dysfunctions tend to get a free pass (empty
snark, ridiculously aggressive tone, ignoring most of what someone's said to
knee-jerk on minutia, etc.), but you'll get that in any geek crowd. HN does
tend to react properly to other forms of rudeness.

I like votes as a clue to the reactions of the people reading threads, myself.
I don't always agree with or approve of the reactions (this place is not
exactly great when gender issues come up), but that's just dealing with
people.

Mind, sometimes it just _isn't_ worth dealing with people - there's nothing
wrong with skipping the chatter if it's not useful to you.

(Personally, _my_ main gripe is that people tend to vastly prefer a short,
pithy remark over a clearly-written and more nuanced bit of, say, anything
more than this comment's length. To see an offhand remark I spent a second
typing get double the votes of something I've more seriously considered irks a
bit.)

~~~
eplanit
I love it! I just got downvoted (implying I have "bad karma") because I
_thanked_ a poster for an entry I found helpful. I guess I was being "rude" by
thanking him.

"Mind, sometimes it just isn't worth dealing with people". Agreed!

Again, a good place for articles, but I'll avoid the schoolyard from here on
out. Enjoy your "community".

I know. Here it comes: 3-2-1.....down-voting ensues.

------
jrockway
I like HN karma. Back when HN was new and there weren't many people around, it
was a good incentive to stick around and contribute. Now that "leaders" is
gone (although only hidden), I'm not sure there is that much incentive to
contribute. The community is still small enough, however, that it's easy
enough to identify the regulars, so maybe karma is not that important.

If there was one thing I would change, it would be how karma is doled out for
submissions. It seems unfair that if someone submits my blog that I don't get
any points for the post. But since I am usually first to submit my own stuff,
I guess I don't really care :)

------
jmillikin
Along the same lines, I realized that sometimes I was giving undue weight to
comments depending on the author. This was also solved with Greasemonkey -- if
anybody's interested, the script is at <
<http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/67722> >.

~~~
andrewcooke
interesting idea. on the implementation: you might be interested in looking at
the source for my code. i use a library called jquery and it allows for most
things to be doing in "one line".

on the flip side there's a lot of boilerplate and it may make things run
slower (i have no comparison - this is the first time i've written one of
these).

~~~
jmillikin
I prefer to avoid jQuery for Greasemonkey, because the per-page performance
hit of inserting it into the DOM / waiting to load from Google / running
through various abstraction layers is IMO not worth reducing a 20-line script
to 10 lines.

~~~
andrewcooke
ok, thanks - i was curious about that (i suspect there must be some caching,
that ameliorates the cost of loading if you use a site regularly, but i have
no idea about the rest).

------
tokenadult
What do you think of this proposal by pg

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589>

from not quite three months ago?

~~~
andrewcooke
personally, i like the idea - it removes some of the semantic ambiguity about
what voting means. something similar has helped on metafilter, for example
(which already has less emphasis on votes).

------
petercooper
Note that you can do this stuff in Safari too using Greasekit:
<http://8-p.info/greasekit/>

------
Roridge
Why do you find it "frustrating"?

~~~
andrewcooke
well, you can check my recent comments, but one way of looking at is that it's
a "judgement" that doesn't fit with my own idea of what is good and bad. this
is a simple way to avoid having to consciously reconcile the difference.

~~~
Roridge
So you are frustrated because you feel it gets misused. Or that you don't
enjoy having your opinions rated?

(I'm not trying to be factious, I'm genuinely interested)

I saw one of the things you listed in previous comments is you don't get up
voted when you get closest to the correct answer. Is it that important?

~~~
andrewcooke
i think i explained it elsewhere as feeling like a judgement that's not
consistent with my own standards. so both of the examples you give (misuse and
rating) are part of that. it's a little like having a label stamped everywhere
saying "good" and "bad" that you constantly have to ignore, because it's not
_your_ set of values.

obviously the same kind of thing happens in real life, but there conversation
is much more fluid, so these signs are transient and negotiable. also, there's
not a finite number of rooms in which you can chat to other people - it's
easier to adapt the context.

someone else has said how they managed to get over this in the shower. good
for them. i got over it by writing a greasemonkey script. generally i find
writing a script to be easier than changing my (largely subconscious)
cognitive processes, but ymmv.

~~~
Roridge
I am intrigued that it means so much to people that their opinions are
accepted by everyone. Perhaps I don't understand completely, but when you
wrote that you "got over it" that surprised me as I couldn't imagine there
really is anything to get over.

I appreciate your reply though, I am always interested to understand peoples
frustrations with such things. Whether it is with my own applications or other
peoples.

~~~
andrewcooke
i am not saying that i want to be accepted by everyone. i am saying that i
don't want to be constantly _reminded_ that i am not. in a "real life" social
context such signs are transitory and adaptable. here, they were not. now they
are.

