
Ask PG: Is there any chance of getting points displayed again - deutronium
I'm just wondering if theres any plan to bring back the points being displayed for comments.<p>As I find it rather disorientating not having them,  as it makes it more difficult to know which comments to read.<p>We could always have a CSS style to hide them for people who don't want them.  
Also I believe sites like Reddit 'fuzz' their points displayed to help prevent gaming the system.
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pg
I'm not inclined to. Hiding points seems to decrease the intensity and perhaps
also the number of fights, as I'd hoped.

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feral
Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the
points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments.

Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair
enough.

So, is there any way of getting back the utility, without increasing the
fights?

Maybe show points, but with a time lag? Show points, but just in bins (maybe
logarithmicly binned?) You trust users above a certain karma threshold with
downvote, because they've learned the ropes; maybe display points to these
users? People that get in fights, and hence are downvoted, won't see points?

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JangoSteve
Here are two of the polls created by pg:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039> 186 days ago

    
    
      prefer points: 2355
      prefer no-points: 1763
    

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605> 141 days ago

    
    
      prefer points: 2717
      prefer no-points: 1703
    

So, 57.2% and 61.5%, respectively, were in favor of bringing points back.

EDIT: _succinctness and formatting_

EDIT 2: Not sure why this is being downvoted, I simply found and linked to the
polls mentioned above, because I couldn't remember the exact outcomes.

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tung
Beware of selection bias. I saw these submissions when they were posted, but
voted in neither, because I didn't mind the status quo of no points, and I'm
wary of meta-discussion. If I had felt differently, I'd definitely have voted.

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SeoxyS
I'd be more interested in something that'd prevent this situation from
happening:

    
    
        smartest comment
        --smart reply
        ----more discussion
        ----more discussion
        ------correction on more discussion
        --smart-ish reply
        ----more discussion
        ----more discussion
        ----more discussion
        ------not-so-smart reply
        ----uninteresting reply
        ----downvoted comment
        ------comment on why parent was a bad comment
        ------another comment that's essentially the same thing
        ----a bunch more downvoted comments
        2nd smartest comment
        [etc.]
    
    

Basically, the 2nd best top-level comment is buried below the entire
discussion for the best comment, even if much of that discussion has been
voted average or negatively.

A possible solution could be to collapse all the replies except for the few
quality ones and show a [more] link, much like reddit.

EDIT: This very comment exemplifies my point perfectly.

~~~
larrik
I actually considered posting this idea just now too, but since you did, I
don't have to.

A javascript +/- button to collapse and expand threads would be perfect. The
indentation is just too subtle, and it's too hard to follow the thread in
bigger discussions (which are often the good ones worth following).

Somewhat unrelatedly, I would think that comments should get extra points if
they spawn a lot of discussion. I mean, that's what the points are for, right?
This would credit the original user's karma for fulfilling the goal of the
site, but more importantly, it will bump up the entire discussion higher on
the page to better reflect it's value. (Though I don't know the algorithm that
orders comments, so that part may already happen)

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davidu
This is off-topic, but since PG reads this thread:

Please add back the "by " in front of each comment. It was useful because if I
wanted to see all comments by PG on a page, I could Ctrl-F and just look for
"by pg" but now I can't -- if I just search for "pg" I get people talking
about you, rather than only comments by you.

A very small UI tweak probably to remove clutter, but it served a purpose,
albeit a very small one. :-)

-David

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igorgue
pg(space) works most of the time, since there're not many words that ends on
"pg" and not a lot of users I suppose.

EDIT: Well.. unless it's an "Ask PG" :-)

~~~
timothya
His point is that he wants to find which posts are by PG, not other posts
talking about PG. "PG<space>" would not improve the search results.

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rkudeshi
A tangential question for PG: whatever happened to perhaps showing logarithmic
point values?

If I remember correctly, you were seriously considering this.

Personally, I like it better without the points now. But I do still wish there
was an indicator of high-quality comments (I think you said you were
considering an orange dot?).

~~~
z0r
HN works fine for me without visible points (I think I might prefer it as
well), but some simple way to see which posts have received an order of
magnitude of upvotes more than other posts might preserve the good taste of
the current design and satisfy the curiosity of those users who want that kind
of feedback. Would be interested in PG's answer as well

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gkoberger
There's a huge difference between an opinion held by one person and one held
by 100 people.

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alextingle
All it's done is freeze the status quo. Nobody votes any more, so those users
who had lots of points at the cut off get to exercise their extra powers, and
the rest of us just have learn to be good little serfs. I for one have come
here less because the voting has become so pointless.

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Homunculiheaded
I realized the current system works pretty damn well when I thought "I wish
these were points were visible!" upon seeing a heavily up-voted comment of
mine. I quickly realized that this is a really bad concern to have when
commenting. There is such a fine but significant difference between getting
feedback that let's you know people like what you say, and publicly displaying
it. The former is the natural desire to be right/smart/insightful, the latter
is actually the desire to _appear_ right/smart/insightful to others.

I think we've all seen this pattern of fame at any scale: Smart but unnoticed
person finally gets attention for their work, people notice this and the
person appears smart and worth listening to, after time the person's focus
shifts from the smart work they did to work maintaining the reputation of
being smart.

I think it's great to get some form of acknowledgment that your ideas are
generating positive feedback, this encourage thoughtful comments and provides
a real reward to those primitive parts of our brain that want to be the big
monkey. But any further and the big monkey starts to be the one doing the
talking.

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huhtenberg
It'd be useful to have 1 point comments marked somehow.

I suspect I am not the only one who uses downvoting as a way to sink unwanted
comments down the thread, but since newer comments are given a position boost,
it is not always clear if a comment floats near the top because it is popular
or because it is new. It'd be nice to tell these cases apart (as a short-term
fix).

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baddox
I don't think I've voted for a parent level comment since the point were
hidden, with the possible exception of downvoting a few trolls. Not having
points displayed probably does help prevent fighting and pandering, but it
also makes the ordering of comments instinctively feel arbitrary. It's quite
possible that the pros outweigh the cons.

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rsbrown
"I find it rather disorientating not having them, as it makes it more
difficult to know which comments to read."

This is a telling admission, in my opinion.

I love the newer, non-points display. Skim through the comments and read the
ones that seem most interesting to you. Otherwise, the discussions quickly
degrade into thoughtless popularity contests.

~~~
huhtenberg
If only user IDs were obfuscated too... it is really annoying to see e-v-e-r-y
s-i-n-g-l-e c-o-m-m-e-n-t of few high-karma users constantly upvoted to the
top of every thread. The very same popularity contests, just a different
angle.

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powertower
I've noticed that since points have become private, people have become more
likely to contribute their up/downvotes...

A comment that used to get 10 points, now gets 15-20.

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satori99
Perhaps allowing points to be visible after a fews days would be a suitable
compromise?

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mgkimsal
I'll ask again (as I've done in past point discussions):

Why not have these be visible by the people who want them, and invisible to
people who don't want them? Perhaps "off by default" but something that can be
enabled in registered accounts.

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pbhjpbhj
> _something that can be enabled in registered accounts_ //

Even 'registered accounts with high karma'. /selfish

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iskander
Unrelated, but I'm not sure where I should submit bug reports:

I just tried to submit a story for the first time in a while (weeks? months?)
and got the error "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."

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jvanderwal
Maybe have points become visible _after_ you upvote a comment? That way
there's no influence on which comments to upvote, but you get some validation.

~~~
jquery
I think this would add a lot of noise to upvotes. Imagine an HN script that
auto-upvoted all the posts just to show the points.

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phzbOx
Anyway, points on comments doesn't say if a comment is good or bad; it says if
people agree or not with it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It used to. I don't think that is true any more. People used to vote towards
what they felt was a value rating for a comment (how much it added to the
thread). Now I feel votes are simply opinion based though there's not a lot of
data to go on.

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wololo
when it comes to unhelpful comments being (sometimes) voted to the top, why is
hacker news "one user, one vote"? why not weight the votes? eg. why not weight
users by running pagerank over the vote graph?

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CamperBob
I'd hate to see a Reddit-esque "fuzz" algorithm used here. IMO, the various
hacks applied by Reddit do nothing but confuse people (who then waste
bandwidth complaining about being "downvoted") and deny useful feedback to
commenters who actually care about their scores.

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JonnieCache
HN already has this kind of thing, but it doesn't affect the scores in any
way, just the ordering, and it's global, ie. it doesn't depend on your session
like reddit's apparently does.

On reddit they say its an antispam measure, whereas here its a key part of the
ranking algorithm.

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jedberg
> On reddit they say its an antispam measure, whereas here its a key part of
> the ranking algorithm.

Those two things are one in the same.

~~~
JonnieCache
_> Those two things are one in the same._

Fair point.

