
Experiment: No Comment Scores - pg
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.<p>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.
======
tc
Wow, this interferes with key elements of my system for voting/commenting on
HN. Here are some things that don't work now:

* 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.

~~~
pg
Voting patterns showed a lot of users voted to get a comment to what they felt
was an appropriate score: they wouldn't up- or downvote something unless they
felt its current score was too low or high respectively. But if comment scores
aren't displayed, you won't need to anymore.

~~~
tc
Hmmm... I always considered that a feature rather than a bug. Only voting when
the scores looked "wrong" was an optimization. How do I decide when to vote
now? I have a feeling I'm going to settle into a pattern of voting to reorder
comments and that I'm going to vote less overall.

~~~
nandemo
I also considered that a feature. I have 3 choices: -1, 0 and 1, and almost
always I choose 0.

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.

~~~
sev
I can see why the change is for the better: my vote (-1, 0, 1) should not be
skewed/altered based on past events (others voting). Also, an "appropriate"
total vote count is not something that an individual should be determining; it
should be a collective thought. The only thing an individual should decide on
is whether to award the comment a -1/0/1 purely based on the comment, nothing
more. This change removes everything else (or so we assume: but considering
the fact that the position on the page is still modified, it's not perfect,
but it's close enough in my book).

~~~
borism
"The only thing an individual should decide on is whether to award the comment
a -1/0/1 purely based on the comment, nothing more."

exactly

------
proee
One Idea I've had for fixing this problem is to weight the value of a click
based on position on the page. The further down on the page, the more weight
its gets. Therefore the most popular topic at the top only get marginally
incremented as people read it first and decide its worthy.

On the same note, if an article is _waaaay_ down at the bottom, and someone's
taken the time to read it and likes it, then it should get a good solid bump.
This will create a "bubble effect" and allow those treasures that are buried
deep down in the comment land, to rise to the top and even accelerate as more
users find out and rank them.

This essentially is a formula to equalize the comments and give them a fair
playing field as they battle for the top most position.

~~~
pg
That is a good idea. I will see if I can figure out an easy way to do that. It
may be enough just to make the time decay on comment scores faster.

~~~
pg
Update: I wrote a new function to rank comment threads, and it's being used
now. Seems promising.

~~~
christofd
Back a while ago I submitted an idea, that maybe there are herd (mob) effects
on comment threads happening.

This should do the trick (driving the long tail).

------
joshuaxls
Any chance we can see scores when we're looking at our own comments section?

Often when I notice a bump in my karma I look at my comment threads to see
what was so popular.

~~~
pg
Ok, now there should be scores next to your own comments. Better?

~~~
dcurtis
You know how sometimes online stores won't tell you the price of something
until you add it to your cart? Hacker News feels kind of like that now. Like
price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.

I feel kind of lost.

~~~
unalone
_Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and
quality._

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.

~~~
derefr
I'm the guy who said "Look at your comment score; looks like I'm right." The
details are off a bit, though; it was "judging by your comment score, the
parent speaks for the majority." I didn't participate in the discussion before
that, so "I'm right" would have been a nonsequitor.

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.

~~~
unalone
Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying!

------
kniwor
But now I cant quickly skim off information from a thread. There are 87
comments in this thread at this moment. I am not interested in reading 87
comments about this experiment. I am however very much interested in seeing
what the top few most insightful comments in this thread are. That feedback is
very important. Right now I am feeling blind as a bat...

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I feel your pain. I don't think I like the new system that much. At least so
far.

I'm used to scanning comments as a way to determine which articles to read.
Postings with a lot of comment action usually indicate something emotionally
appealing.

Once I go to the comments section, then I filter by score, only looking at
comments above a certain threshold (depending on how much time I have). I
usually try not to comment, unless some comment has been upvoted to a high
level and doesn't make sense to me.

Alas, there are a huge number of comments that I disagree with or fail to
understand, and only by knowing the score am I able to determine whether or
not my adding to the discussion will help the other readers.

That don't work no more. Now I'm just blindly poking around in the comments
section, not really feeling connected to the discussion at all...

~~~
mechanical_fish
This is precisely the problem. Without some idea of what earlier readers think
of the comments it is much harder to skim.

The top-level comments presumably rise and sink based roughly on their karma
(though the algorithm also seems to have other considerations, like momentum).
But what of the second-tier comments and below? Ripostes are often where the
action is.

I might find that I'm reduced to skimming for names that I recognize. That's
how the rest of the web works. The web in general has no karma system, so the
way to "upvote" something is to repeat it with your byline: You Twitter it or
reblog it (or retweet it, or re-reblog it) with a link and your signature,
implying a certain degree of implicit endorsement.

I expect that if this system holds we'll start seeing more "amen" comments. I
kind of _hope_ so, frankly: Now the only way I will spot an incredibly
insightful but short comment buried downthread is if I see a bunch of comments
from people I vaguely know saying "amen".

I'm not sure this trend will represent progress, however.

If we want to tinker, consider this: relative rankings on a page. Find a way
to distinguish the top-voted 20% of comments from the second quintile, and the
second quintile from everything else. (My instinct is not to bother
distinguishing things below the top 40%, and of course negative-karma comments
presumably are still doing their disappearing act, my favorite cute HN
feature.)

At the risk of repeating the legendary eye-searing Orange Name experiment...
we could turn the byline of comments in the top 20% a different color from the
second 20%, which in turn is a different color from everything else.

Red is probably the wrong color for any of this -- too loud. Think "green".
I'm thinking _shades_ of green: Comments in the first quintile have _very_
green bylines, comments in the second quintile have _slightly_ green bylines,
and all the other comments have their usual light grey bylines.

~~~
Perceval
I may be off base here, but perhaps HN isn't being designed to make skimming
easy. Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content, and then
voting on that content, is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding.

PG wrote an essay which discussed the 'fluff principle' at work in other
voting-based aggregator communities, in which the most superficially
sensational content usually rose to the top, beating out longer-form but more
intellectually substantial content:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

I think this move by PG is aimed at reducing the herd mentality of voting, and
reducing the ability of readers to engage in voting without having engaged the
content first.

However, I think your scheme of highlighting comments by quintile is probably
a good one. It gets us away from thinking about raw scores, but also serves to
reward and reinforce good commenting contributions/behavior by setting an
example for others to follow. In order to stave off the herd mentality of
'piling on' upvotes or downvotes, perhaps votes made subsequent to
highlighting (or greying out in the case of negative comments) should have
half the weight.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content... is probably
what the site is supposed to be avoiding._

If you think that the secret to encouraging _engagement_ is to flatten out the
structure of the information, and ask everyone to read everything in order to
discover the influential, popular, or insightful bits...

... you desperately need to read _The Paradox of Choice_ :

[http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-
Less/dp/006000...](http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-
Less/dp/0060005688)

There is nothing _engaging_ about thirty screenfuls of undifferentiated
choices. When presented with that, I'll just leave. If I wanted a firehose of
undifferentiated, recent, quality content, presented in a way which made it
very difficult to nucleate a conversation or form a community, I'd be using
Google Reader.

[EDIT: Incidentally, if not illustratively, I should point out that I haven't
actually read the entirety of _The Paradox of Choice_ myself. I listened to
the author lecture about it for an hour in a podcast, and I started to read
it, and I appreciated the concept, but I felt that the book kept repeating the
same point too many times and I had other uses for my time... ;]

------
njl
This change might improve voting, but it decreases the value of that voting.

I'll stipulate that the voting might be more "fair", if that is a goal. I'm
not sure it should be. It might make the "game" of getting high karma more
fair, but I'm not bothering with or bothered by that game anyway.

On the other hand, I can no longer use the results of this voting to help me
skim a conversation. I want to know what everyone else found most valuable,
without having to read through every comment on my own. I can't do that
anymore. This completely breaks how I use HN.

~~~
pg
Ok, comments over a threshold (currently 5) now have a red dot prepended to
them. Is that better?

~~~
huhtenberg
> _Is that better?_

No, it's about the same.

It's not a problem with hiding/showing scores/hints, it is a fundamental
problem with the voting model. As it stands, the process of voting is meant to
re-balance the discussion tree to make it more interesting to an _average_
reader.

IMO what makes more sense is to use votes to determine the preferences of an
_individual_ specific reader. If I keep voting up posts by a user X, then in
all likelihood I will be more interesting in X's posts in the future. The same
goes for downvotes. Additionally if X votes up Y's posts, then I may also be
interested in Y's posts as well.

Lastly, the up/down voting score for a specific post is going to be equivalent
to the score under existing model, and that can be used to sort posts for
anonymous or uninitiated users.

PS. This is not a trivial change and it is a lot of work. I realize that.

~~~
shimon
Reinforcing the average makes good sense if your goal is to keep the community
aligned, rather than simply please the widest array of readers.

------
sdp
PG: Will you be applying some metric to determine if this improves site feel?
If so, what metric?

~~~
edd
I think the two obvious metrics are volume of comment votes and average
comment score. I don't know which way you would want those two to go though.

~~~
philh
If the standard deviation in comment scores decreases, that indicates more
people are voting in disagreement with the majority, which is probably the
intended purpose.

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.

------
wglb
But don't votes also give feedback to the commentor? I have used this to learn
what works within this community and what doesn't. Now, I only know by
approximation to my total karma, or if i am bad, that I turn gray.

~~~
wglb
Just as an example, my karma just jumped a bunch of points. Was it because of
the above post, or was it due to europe waking up to some posts made a few
hours ago?

Perhaps my sense of dislocation will pass in a while.

~~~
apotheon
I feel similarly, actually. It's okay if others' scores don't show up for me,
but I don't think scores will serve as effective (dis)incentives for behavior
if they're too abstracted from the immediate cause, as is the case with having
to try to guess which of my last thirty comments resulted in the upticks in my
overall karma score. In fact, if anything, I think linking it to overall karma
score may tend to _increase_ obsession with karma, because now I have to watch
my overall karma like a hawk and spend time thinking about the likely source
of change to determine whether I've stepped on my dick somewhere.

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.

------
gcheong
I didn't realize how much I was affected by the comment ratings until they
went away. Commencing cognitive restructuring.

~~~
plinkplonk
"Commencing cognitive restructuring."

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!

------
jrockway
I can still see the score on the "edit" page, which means I can still edit my
post to whine about being downmodded. Since nobody knows the degree that I am
being downmodded to (or corrected to), people might upvote more than they
should.

(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?

~~~
pg
Fixed.

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.

~~~
jrockway
It was this one: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840748>

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 :)

~~~
netsp
I was thinking something similar when I saw this change. I know I am affected
by by the comments score when I vote, but I think it's more of a moderating
effect. I might vote down a smart ass one line remark if it has lots of
points, or vote up something that is so-so if it's been voted down.

Interesting to experiment.

------
j_baker
I notice that nobody here is playing devil's advocate, so allow me. What was
wrong with the site beforehand? Sure the comments have a mob feel to them
sometimes, but that's just something a social _anything_ app has to deal with.

Over all, I like the comments on HN much more than say reddit or digg by far.
Plus, I've never seen a community that responds so well to criticism as this
one does.

~~~
billswift
Overall I agree with you, but I think this will be an interesting experiment,
I want to see what happens.

~~~
j_baker
As do I. Like I said, I was playing devil's advocate. :-)

------
lionhearted
In long threads I skim based on scores. I try to give low comments at the
bottom a quick read to vote on them, but one thing I definitely look for are
long threads like this:

+5 -3 +4 -2 +4 0

That means someone is being generally rude or uninsightful, but the replies
are good, so I'll just read the replies. If there's a long thread of a bunch
of 1's, then two people are talking at each other both uninsightfully. If both
people are voted up a bit, that means it's a good discussion and the whole
thing is worth reading.

I'll give this a good trying out before forming an opinion either way, but the
loss of skim-by-score ability is slowing me down just a touch right now. It'll
be interesting to see how this turns out.

------
johnnybgoode
I'm seeing dots for some comments instead of the score. It looks like gray
dots for comments with a high score and red dots for comments with a very high
score. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the change to some extent?

Edit: Sorry, it looks like this was explained after I had loaded this page.
Still, this seems like a partial reversal. Also, this story is at #16 on the
front page and really should be at #1 considering the magnitude of the change.

Oh and just one more question: I'm seeing this comment at the top of the page.
Is that just how it looks for me, or is it that way for everyone because of
the new ranking algorithm?

Another edit: From PG's explanation, I thought the gray dots were all turned
red, but I still see gray dots for some comments (including one with a
negative score).

~~~
NathanKP
Where was it explained? I'm still searching.....

~~~
NathanKP
Got it...

Thanks. The comments here are getting to be so much that they are hard to
follow. ;)

------
ivankirigin
I think you can remove the word "by"

~~~
siong1987
"10 points by ivankirigin" is actually quite misleading. It looks like
"ivankirign" gave the comment 10 points.

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?

~~~
LeChuck
Why not just "ivinkirigin, 10 points" or something. I think it's fairly
obvious that the first word is a username.

------
thorax
Interesting experiment. I thought I was going crazy all of a sudden.

A 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?

~~~
plinkplonk
"I thought I was going crazy all of a sudden."

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.

~~~
chaosprophet
On a related note, I noticed that I'm just being shown a blank page after
voting, rather than redirecting to the original discussion.

------
pg
I'm now experimenting with changing the function used to rank comments. I'm
hopeful this will both help users find the good comments on a thread, and
solve the problem of good but late comments getting stuck at the bottom of the
page.

~~~
blasdel
The ranking changes you just made completely eliminated whatever mental model
of thread dynamics I had left. It's not clear that you understand the degree
to which you're playing with fire here.

A 'good but late' comment won't be seen by anyone anyway, due to your front
page ranking algorithm that prevents even the most active threads from
spending long enough on the front pages.

~~~
tel
I think HN has always been an experiment. Playing with fire sounds almost like
a compliment then.

------
alexgartrell
One PLUS of karma scores next to comments is that I know when to stop reading
:)

If my personal interest + the comment score < arbitrary threshold, i quit

~~~
j_baker
You know, if there's one thing programmers should appreciate, it's making it
easy to see which information you _don't_ want to read.

~~~
tumult
A simple number next to a post doesn't necessarily tell you much about whether
or not you want to read it.

~~~
kingnothing
Sure it does. This is a community of individuals who share common interests.
If the community values a particular comment, there's a high probability that
I'm going to find value in it as well because of those shared interests.

~~~
tumult
You don't have to be part of the community to sign up for an account and start
voting stuff up.

~~~
kingnothing
I think you're implicitly part of the community once you sign up.

------
carbocation
If you had a Likert-type scale, this wouldn't be a problem. I would rate a
post 7/10 regardless of what everyone else had rated it. But we just have ups
and downs. I think we've all established a sense of what the "right" score is
for a given comment. For example, a thoughtful, on-topic post probably has no
upper limit for how many points it deserves, while a funny but off-topic post
won't get an upvote if it's already got enough points.

Won't this lead us towards a bimodal distribution? Without the crucial
knowledge of where the comment's score is, the votes will tend towards
extremes: we can't collectively decide when the target comment is near the
range that we find appropriate.

------
mynameishere
The bandwagon effect (which is just ridiculous on reddit) occurs because top-
rated comments stay at the top. Typical reddit comment at the top of a thread:

    
    
      reddit_user 622 points
     
      Glenn Beck is a wanker!  He sniffs arses!
    

Everyone agrees with this, needless to say, but they only upmod it because
it's at the top of the pile. Otherwise, it's a worthless comment. I find the
lack of mod points distracting to an unexpected degree. Bad quantification is
better than no quantification...

~~~
billswift
That depends on how you define "bad quantification".

Bad as inaccurate quantification is worse than none.

Bad as rough, but roughly accurate is better than none.

------
plinkplonk
Weird suggestion: now hide the contributor too, avoiding the "vote pg up
anyway"category of upvotes.

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
Knowing who wrote a comment often provides very useful context (especially
when there is back-and-forth discussion going on).

~~~
plinkplonk
pvg said -> "It would be a little difficult to have an exchange with someone
if you can't tell who is who."

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.

~~~
Prolitheus
You could give everyone a unique identifier per thread.

~~~
Radix
That would only solve one of the problems. Some of the users here are skilled
enough that the average user doesn't know enough to keep up a disagreement.
It's easier if the user names stay.

For instance, the ggp is a security professional. I give more credence to his
opinions than others.

~~~
Prolitheus
It was only intended to solve one of the problems, as the other 'problem' is
exactly what removing the names would seek to address: a person's
authority/history influencing the weight of their comments within a thread.
It'd really benefit people who've earned a negative following, but I don't see
such a mob mentality on here as opposed to certain aggregators in which biases
become apparent in just a few threads.

~~~
camccann
Yes, but sometimes a person's authority is _actually relevant_. Consider this
short exchange from the other day:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841887>

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".

------
tyn
This new system saves me a lot of time by making HN less attractive.

~~~
pg
That could be good, if it did it by removing bad attractions.

Some controversial threads with large numbers of votes were starting to feel
like fights that attracted a crowd of onlookers. Those are very engaging,
certainly, but it's probably better for both fighters and onlookers to have
less of them.

~~~
blasdel
The solution to that is to make the vote scores logarithmic.

Removing information helps nobody.

------
pvg
It'd be interesting to see the results of the experiment - level of voting
before and after, volatility of the voting before and after, rate of change of
comment ordering, before and after. Are you planning on releasing some sort of
aggregate data or publishing some sort of analysis?

------
ryanwaggoner
Does anyone else find their eyes constantly scanning to try and find the score
for each comment? I wonder if this means that I rely too heavily on the
comment score? It's amazing how such a subtle change can reveal something more
profound.

------
adrianwaj
I'd try out rounded percentage scores.

Out of the total comment Karma alloted to all comments for an item, what
proportion of this amount is contained within each comment?

The issue here is that upon voting, you couldn't change all displayed comment
percentages at once, it'd have to change on page reload.

Also, it could be a rounded 1-10 scale.

\-- edit: would be good to reveal any comment score upon voting: gives an
incentive to vote and remain critical. It's also like a marker as to what
comments interest you for future recall -- that's something new.

~~~
adrianwaj
also - to make the score pertinent:

\- either cap underlying comment scores at 50 points

OR

\- instead of giving a percentage score for a comment's proportion of total
comment points, rank comments in terms of lowest positive score to highest
positive score: then give each comment a score between 1-10 by segmenting the
long tail into 10 even parts. (the initial ranking may not even need to be
used)

having no visible scores seems surreal.

------
evgen
This will definitely be interesting. While I think not having comment scores
will have a somewhat limiting effect on groupthink voting, it will also
probably have a counter-effect on pithy/silly one-liner comments by preventing
people from noticing that no matter how humorous or witty the comment might
have been it has already gathered as many votes as it deserves. The great
karnak predicts a lot more early comments at the first level of two of comment
threads being short witticisms that attempts to predict the herd and thereby
gather a lot of early upvotes.

------
rend
How about having the scores show up after a week (or X amount of time).
Practically nobody votes on week-old posts, but I often use -- for example --
searchyc.com's average points per post to get a feel for a user's
contributions.

That would balance the elimination of mob voting with being able to ascertain
(historical) credibility.

------
jamesbritt
Interesting. I still see some comments a light gray.

Also, like some others , I like know if something I've posted was particularly
liked (or not).

And I've been skimming pages looking for the high-karma comments to try to dig
out what are likely to be the most worthwhile comments. I suppose there's some
feedback effect in place there, as popular comments simply get more attention
(and so likely garner more up-votes votes), but there's pragmatic value in
having a metric to selectively peruse a post with so much to read. (And, no,
ZapRead isn't the answer :) )

------
sgk284
I love this idea, but it should really be initially implemented as a kind of
A/B test.

Simply choose half of the UIDs at random and always show them the comment
score, and don't show it to the other half. Track which comments are upvoted
most when their score is visible versus when not (there are many other metrics
to use as well). It should be pretty easy to determine how much groupthink
plays into voting.

I suspect that most people only read (and therefore only vote on) already
popular comments, so I suspect groupthink is fairly high here.

~~~
mechanical_fish
On the one hand, I completely agree with the scientific merit of your
suggestion.

On the other hand, showing different HNs to different people doesn't exactly
strike me as community-building behavior. I think it would make the site feel
even more like Temple Grandin's barnyard, with us in the role of the cows.
Will my species behave better if we design the floor like _this_? Will _that_
tweak to the algorithm prevent us from starting fights among ourselves? Oh,
no, a gathering of more than twelve people -- we'd better build a robot to
break those up.

------
adamhowell
I think only showing votes for comments and links once you've voted would be a
better solution. It's what I'm trying with a side-project of mine.

~~~
chaosmachine
I was going to suggest the same thing. Most polls do not show you the results
before you vote, this could work the same way.

------
araneae
I actually expect that posts may become more extremely negative than they used
to. At some point, you become sorry for a person with a highly negative
comment; or at least I do. Sometimes I upvote comments that are negative
because I think that the downvotes are unreasonable. Now there's no way for
others to provide a check on the immoral downvoting behavior of others.

~~~
camccann
It seems that negative-scored comments still start to gray out, so you'll be
able to upvote something you think has been unjustly penalized.

What you won't be able to do is aim things toward a desired positive score,
such as downvoting a one-liner joke with 100+ points that you wouldn't
downvote if it were at 20 points or less.

~~~
unalone
It'll be curious to see, then, if those one-liners get even _more_ massively
upvoted, or if the reaction towards them becomes something negative.

~~~
camccann
My guess would be: More groupthink, less bandwagon.

That is, comments that (intentionally or not) pander to the audience will get
more upvotes, but good comments that happen to get several early upvotes won't
get the same pile-on effect. That's just a WAG, though.

~~~
unalone
One thing I _do_ notice: I'm already much less frustrated at comments I'm
reading here. If somebody says something I disagree with, I can't see if half
the site has voted them up, to me it's just a typical comment that I can
either ignore or respond to.

Similarly, now dcurtis and I are arguing upthread, and I'm not anxiously
wondering if he's been voted up more than me. We're just in a normal argument
where neither of us will be proved by the community to be "more" right than
the other. That's good.

------
akamaka
Interesting idea, but now old threads like this, where people voted by modding
up, don't make sense:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527681>

------
kingnothing
How about putting comment scores back in for people who have been here for at
least X days / weeks / months or who have a comment score total greater than
Y? I've been here since the beginning and value having the ability to pay more
attention to higher rated comments when I'm skimming discussions.

------
stuntgoat
If you gave me the option to switch karma on/off for submissions and comments,
I would likely leave both off.

Leaving karma off somehow gives me confidence to contribute more.

Another idea is to remove the (time 'ago). Good comments are timeless :) and
old comments seem like nobody is watching anymore, so the dialog seems over.

Thank you Paul

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I don't need karma either, but the time of submission is important to know
whether the poster is likely to read a reply.

------
huhtenberg
Why not hide the usernames as well then and let the comments be judged purely
based on their content ?

~~~
johns
I bet that would lead a lot of people to start using signatures. No thanks.

~~~
unalone
Perhaps we could assign IDs to posters? The first commenter in a thread is A,
the second commenter is B, so that each new thread gives users a new identity.

The problem with that is that anonymity leads to trolling.

~~~
huhtenberg
Troll posts _will_ be modded down and deleted. That's not really a problem.

------
shaunxcode
Will comments still change tone til they fade to nothing as they are down
voted?

------
jacquesm
I see a lot of comments here that basically say the same thing: "don't change
anything, I was used to the old situation, now I'm lost".

Give it a couple of days worth of trying before casting your 'vote' on the
changes, it's a pretty disruptive change because it breaks the routine, but I
really think this sort of experimenting is what will bring out the best in HN,
if hackers are starting to be conservatives then we really are in trouble.

Give it the benefit of the doubt and an honest chance.

------
blogimus
About a year ago, I mentioned the problem of "bandwagon upvoting"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217822>

So I'm really glad to see this and hopeful it works out. I think hiding the
votes is better than a hard upper vote limit, as it is more organic. I'm
really curious to know after the experiment how this affects the voting
behavior (more votes, less votes, more for lead, less, etc)

------
yason
This is good -- I really want to read threads without scores. If the
experiment ends at some point, I would like to see it as an option checkbox.

I often read comments with highest scores first while often there are good
comments forgotten and sandwiched between a few übercomments. Or the
übercomment is so conclusive that there's nowhere to take the discussion to.
Hiding scores allows me to approach the discussion more objectively.

------
fjabre
Actually everyone should just try it out for a little while instead of
instantly judging the change.

I agree with PG, HN started to have mob feel in the comments section.

------
plinkplonk
Interestingly enough, comments voted below zero still show up as gray. Helps
to decide whether to upvote an "unjustly downvoted" comment.

------
paraschopra
Ah, I love change! Though a smart hacker can make a model that takes into time
and position of a comment to predict the comment score?

------
hxa7241
As far as comment-scores are used to filter one's reading, there is an
inherent contradiction in the system:

* the reader wants some filtering, so they can just read the good stuff

* the filtering is done by the readers, which requires they read more than just the good stuff

So the filtering can never be extremely effective, i.e. showing everyone only
the good stuff, because then the filtering would not get done at all. I
suppose it is a weakness in all public-contribution-based systems.

The work has to be done by someone. Perhaps there are other, better ways of
allocating that work. A first thought: lower scored items appear
stochastically -- lower score, less frequent random appearance. That might
help by making it seem like there is less 'work' to do . . .

It seems the whole subject would warrant a fair amount of pondering and
experiment (although it looks basically economic) . . .

------
Pistos2
(Really sorry if this is already discussed, but I don't have time to read 300+
comments in depth)

How about allowing users to set two thresholds for themselves: (1) show only
comments above X; (2) begin greying out below Y

What precisely X and Y are or could be I'll leave to the experts.

But this would let everyone decide their own absolute or relative threshold of
comments they want to see. Those of you with plenty of time to spend on HN can
have fairly low X and Y, whereas those of us that only want to spend a little
time on HN each day can have just the popular presented to us. Voluntary herd
membership (or rejection), if you will.

Variant along the same lines: An absolute number account setting indicating "I
want to see only the N highest-scoring comments/parents".

~~~
qu1j0t3
I'm sure HN is not too proud to steal one of /.'s features. :)

------
chaosprophet
And here I was, thinking firefox was screwing up the JS. I guess this should
improve the quality of discussions a lot, since a lot of people tend to just
skim the few comments at the top. Not displaying the comment scores _might_
make them read more.

~~~
yters
I don't think this'll stop people from just skimming the top.

But, it will stop them from finding those highly rated comments hidden by a
low rated parent comment.

~~~
chaosprophet
Which brings us to an interesting point: Shouldn't comment threads be sorted
by the total votes for all comments in that thread???

~~~
NathanKP
That might make sense but it could still mean that a long, pointless, off-
topic discussion would rise to the top, above other shorter, succinct comments
that might end up buried at the bottom.

~~~
chaosprophet
I believe the shorter on-topic comment would be voted up more than the off-
topic thread (unless ofcourse, the off-topic thread involves a sparky issue
like Micheal Arrington).

------
deutronium
I kind of miss the lack of comment scores. I do think they allow me to be more
selective about the comments I read, based on the wisdom of crowds.

Is there any chance we could have two style sheets, one in which they are
hidden and the other where they are visible?

------
soundsop
If this improves the site, should it be applied to submission scores too?
Showing submission scores can create the same sort of mob mentality in voting.
The only potential downside that I see is people voting less often.

------
timwiseman
I anticipate that one effect of this will be that there will be more threads
simply saying "I agree" or "Good comment" since this will no longer be so
visibly reflected by the voting.

~~~
unalone
I think that those threads will be downvoted same as always, and when they
grey out it'll give other users the impression that those comments are less
interesting/worthwhile than other comments.

And, to rant a teeny bit, _that's what downvoting is used for_. You don't
downvote people that disagree with you or that say something you don't like.
Downvoting is for _removing comments that aren't relevant to the discussion_.
That's why they go grey. When I saw your comment, you'd been downvoted and
greyed out, and you made a comment with a relevant or interesting point. You
should not have been downvoted.

------
mbrubeck
It looks like pg is still in the middle of changing things. A moment ago I
could see other people's comments' scores in the replies on my "threads" page;
now I can't.

~~~
jrockway
I have noticed things changing around too.

I hear there is this thing called a "dev server"...

~~~
pg
I usually do development on my local machine, but for small things like this I
use the server's repl.

~~~
jrockway
Nice. I wondered why things were changing quickly but there were never any
page load errors.

I don't trust myself not to kill my app with a live REPL :)

~~~
wglb
I do it in a live production environment and it can often give you a nice
adrenaline flush. I do occasionally fat-finger things, so I try to avoid it.

------
petercooper
If I try and vote on a comment now, the ersatz AJAX trick no longer works. I'm
actually taken to /vote?for=12345 etc.. so I get a blank page every time I
vote. Bug?

------
buugs
I think this is very nice because karma isn't really worth anything and
comments that are popular still get to be seen without the mob mentality to
vote them up

~~~
jrockway
I think karma was an incentive for people to contribute comments. You might
not be getting sex or money, but you are getting that feeling of creating
something other people like.

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, :)

------
roder
I love it. Keeps comment voting honest it seems.

------
xenophanes
I like the hidden comment scores. You can still see negative comments at a
glance, and the comments are still ordered by the scores so you can read the
high score comments first since they are on top.

If they are turned back on, I'd suggest making it an _option_ , and possibly
hidden by default.

------
lhorie
I'd be interested in seeing this happening for posts in addition to comments,
so that there's more of an incentive to vote based on one's own opinion of the
post than to fall for "scorebait" and voting on the heat of the moment because
it seems everyone else is doing the same

------
jurjenh
Just as an alternative idea - why not colour the score to the background
colour - that way it is effectively invisible, yet can still be seen by
highlighting the heading.

Although that being said, I tend to gloss over the scores anyway for the most
part...

------
justlearning
This is going to work wonders. imho, it will atleast 'confuse' people who
upvote friends without reading the context, specially for all the 'voters' who
upvote 'i love/hate my country' kind of comments.

This feature will be interesting.

------
quellhorst
I like this already. How long will you let the test run?

------
noodle
i have to admit that i would equally like to see this happen for content
submissions.

------
yason
Has this been reverted? I can see the comment scores again.

------
pegobry
Great idea.

(This one is going to go down, but that's all I have to say.)

------
chrischen
Ahhh.. And I thought my browser was acting up again.

------
allenbrunson
this is weird and surprising to me, but it's causing me to look at news.yc in
a refreshing new way. so i guess that has to be a good thing.

------
DanielBMarkham
Odd sort of "improvement"

Hacker News -- now with less information?

I would imagine that the more readers become engaged with the site the more
information about the site they would want to consume, no?

~~~
pg
What matters is the quality of the information, not the amount. One of my
goals has always been to decrease the amount of stupid information flowing
through the system. That's why there are no downvotes on submissions: my
observations of Reddit suggested that downvotes were more often reflexive than
upvotes.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I'm with you on your motives, and it'll be interesting to see how the site
reacts.

It just clashes with the idea that sites should be very simple to use, but
engaging in detail over time -- that as users spend more time on a site they
become interested in more details, whatever those details are. I think you see
this in the number of HN mining apps posted. People who are engaged want more
stuff from what they're engaged in.

I'm definitely not for information for information's sake, just find your
tweaking counter-intuitive. Seems like shooting all of the animals to prevent
them from escaping the barn.

I look forward to somebody telling us how the experiment went.

------
moscoso
Please, don't think HN is big enough to justify this change (I wish I could
downvote you! :).

------
adrianwaj
How about an API?

------
pizza
It's a really good idea, but it kinda feels awkward.

~~~
jqueryin
I see nothing awkward about it. It just makes you upvote and reply to the most
thought provoking and insightful posts rather than the ones with the highest
counts.

------
adrianwaj
turn off voting at 50 points.

------
conoryoung
Interesting psychological side effect I just noticed: I wasn't previously
aware of my tendency to scan a long thread for comments that stand out because
of their high comment scores but I just did it when I opened this thread and
felt like I didn't have my usual bearings. In one sense it levels the playing
field. In another sense, though, it removes some key information that helps us
to prioritize where we direct our attention.

------
c00p3r
This decision is very good for improving quality of content of comments.

Maybe it is good idea to display author's karma instead.

People love to see magic numbers. =)

------
CamperBob
And they said K5 was dead...

------
test12
WTF ?? <script>alert(/XSS/)</script>

------
proee
The Hacker News community should decide if this featured is enabled (maybe a
poll post).

Having you just take this away on a whim because you felt it "might" be better
is pretty poor taste in my opinion.

It all most feels like papa Apple just rejected an iPhone app because they
didn't like the "feel" of it.

Please bring back the comment scores ASAP. I can't envision myself staying
round here without them ;-)

At a minimum, give me the option to turn it on for my own viewing pleasure.

