

Experiment HN: Remove Numbered Listing - kyro

I tend to not give much attention to the news items that are towards the bottom of the front/news pages, more so to the ones on the 'next' pages, and I think part of that might be due to the number rankings next to them. My mind attaches some sort of numbered value, which could color the way I view the submission quality-wise. I'd imagine others might be doing the same. Might be interesting to see if there's more user engagement with submissions if those numbers are completely removed.
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pg
I think I tried this when I was writing it, and without numbers the page seems
too unstructured. You need something, and bullets don't do it.

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gbookman
You could do an iTunes-esque stripe pattern, alternating between white and
some other contrasting color.

This site does something similar: <http://slickdeals.net/>

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mrfish
Oh god. Please don't use zebra stripes. That's even harder to read.

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pg
IIRC Reddit had those originally, and I learned from their example it was a
bad idea.

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scott_s
I didn't consciously notice that items have numbers next to them until a few
days ago. The numbers communicate the same thing as the relative position. So
I doubt it makes a difference for me.

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chaosprophet
I thought it would be pretty interesting to view the listings without
numerical rankings, so I whipped up a script which removed the rankings.

As of now, I haven't really noticed much impact on the way I use HN, but maybe
it's going to take more time. I think it would make a more positive impact if
the points score was removed for the titles.

The greasemonkey script is at: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/60421>

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petercooper
I don't notice the numbers anymore - they're just bullets to me. But even when
I deliberately look, I don't apply any importance to them. It feels kinda
random to me - I've seen stories with < 10 points beating not-particularly-old
stories with > 100 points. I know there's a formula but since I don't know
what it is.. it's random to me :-)

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makecheck
I use the numbers mostly when browsing pages (with "More"), since there is no
other indication of what page you're on.

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mbrubeck
As I write this, #30 on the front page is yesterday's #1. Just remember that
from time to time and you might not give the numbers so much significance.

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mattj
How about just randomizing the order on the front page? That's a more standard
approach to testing something like this...

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HeyLaughingBoy
How about just leaving it alone? I like the numbers.

