

Ask HN: What if usernames were only visible after you have voted on a comment? - nextstep

Recently, it feels like HN discussions are dominated by a minority of commenters.  I am worried that comment threads are less valuable when they are dominated by a few voices.  People begin to up/down vote comments based on who's saying them, and not on the merits of the ideas being presented.<p>What if our usernames were obscured, at least until our votes have been cast?
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brudgers
Who posted is often relevant to judging the response, e.g. PG in an "Ask PG"
thread, grellas on a question of legal organization etc.

It's not that I don't sympathize with the sentiment behind the suggestion. I
just don't think that increased anonymity would be an improvement to HN.

Everyone has an opinion, but everyone's opinions aren't equally grounded in
knowledge and experience.

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chc
That would be very annoying. Whether comment threads are valuable or not has
less to do with the diversity of the commenters than the quality. A hundred
random responses are far less valuable than two well-informed and well-written
responses.

I would stop reading HN if we could no longer see who said what — as it is, a
lot of my reading is through HackerFollow. I get more out of the site that
way. To be blunt, some commenters _are_ better than others.

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fabricode
What would be annoying? The comments with the highest votes would still be at
the top. He/she said nothing about randomizing the comments. The only effect
of the idea would be to eliminate "celebrity" votes.

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chc
Who cares if the comments with the highest votes are at the top? That's just
as true of /r/lolcats. I care about how much trouble it is to find _good
content_.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Given a practical and insightful
essay on the day-to-day running of a business and a picture of a cat in a
funny pose, most people will vote for the cat _every time_. Making it harder
to find good comments will only exacerbate this, because it's easy for the
cat-lovers to find silly pictures, so to speak, while carefully reading every
comment on every post for insight takes more time than most people have to
spend on an Internet forum.

In fact, I'll go further, although tentatively: I think authorship is
_probably_ a stronger predictor of comment quality than votes are. For
example, blind contrarianism will almost always take the top spot in a thread
— at least for a while — and even mildly criticizing Apple on a thread where
lots of Apple fans happen to be will get you several downvotes. There are so
many factors besides quality and authorship that affect voting — the mere
popularity of a comment's sentiment is often enough to trump everything else.

(EDIT: Thanks, anonymous downvoter, for making my point for me!)

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lsiebert
I can see how that can be an issue. For me, and this may not be true for
everyone else, I would rather who is posting not dramatically influence how
many votes they get, because I want the comments with the most votes to be the
most informative and valuable.

I don't agree that this is a good solution, because who is posting can be
important to context.

Plus I think good comments tend to head to the top, and may create
conversations... that's why you can reply to comments directly.

Basically you should:

Don't be afraid to make comments.

Vote for comments you think are good.

Explain when and why you like a comment to encourage others to vote for it.

I think you might have a more productive post if you submitted the issue,
instead of floated a particular solution.

