

Ask PG: Can we bring back the upvote/downvote numbering on certain posts? - tstegart

It defeats the purpose of crowdsourcing when the numbers are hidden. I understand why its done on posts about politics or posts about argumentative topics. But sometimes people ask genuinely complex questions and the always-awesome HN crowd weighs in with great answers based on their experience. However, we can't see which answer has the most backers, or which answer most people consider right. It defeats the purpose of the wisdom of the crowd when the wisdom of the crowd is hidden. 
Can you enable an option to allow a submitter in the "Ask HN" section to activate comment upvote/downvote counters?
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davidmurphy
I really miss the numbering, I've got to say. It makes it significantly harder
to skim through the comments section, and it frankly has made Hacker News less
enjoyable and useful for me as a reader.

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beagle3
To counter, it has made HN more enjoyable for me. I perceive significantly
less karma-whoring and ego games now that it is gone.

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chc
You can't see the numbers, but it's not really accurate to say "You can't see
which answer has the most backers." The comments are still ordered by
popularity. In general, the ones near the top have more backers and the ones
near the bottom have fewer.

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tstegart
In general yes, but that doesn't tell you if comment number 2 is way ahead of
comment number 3, or if they both suck compared to comment number 1. And see
my comment below about replies. How are those ranked?

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beagle3
I cannot speak for pg, but I would guess that he is targeting the site at
people who can make up their own mind given the arguments, with the voting
system used to let the good stuff float up and lesser stuff sink.

Why do you care so much about the scores, either within the same post or
related to other posts?

You are aware, I hope, that without the vote timeline, what you are asking for
is completely meaningless -- replies posted when something is on the front
page get significantly more votes/replies than those posted after the thing
has dropped to the 2nd page, regardless of merit.

For the score to be meaningful as a number, scores have to be normalized with
respect to no. of page views, time since post, and a lot of other things.

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tstegart
I care because I want to know the right answer. Sometimes people post
questions seeking the wisdom of the crowd, and its impossible to tell which
comment gets the highest vote. Which negates the reason for asking the crowd
in the first place.

Its kind of like asking your friends if you should buy A or B. If all of them
say A, you get a good handle on the reasons to buy A.

This sort of question works fine if commenters just say A or B in the first
comments. But what if someone replies to that and says "What about C, that's
an even better alternative." And then everyone agrees C is better. But the
current system doesn't allow us to see that accurately, so I'm asking if it
can be turned on for people wanting to ask questions that way.

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beagle3
> its impossible to tell which comment gets the highest vote. Which negates
> the reason for asking the crowd in the first place.

Wait a couple of days after the last comment you are interested in was posted;
the time decay among different replies will be approximately equal, and the
one on top is the highest, but

> I care because I want to know the right answer.

> Its kind of like asking your friends if you should buy A or B. If all of
> them say A, you get a good handle on the reasons to buy A.

The reasons are in the text, not in the vote, and you have to read them in
order to appreciate if this is relevant to you or not. No way around it.

> This sort of question works fine if commenters just say A or B in the first
> comments. But what if someone replies to that and says "What about C, that's
> an even better alternative." And then everyone agrees C is better. But the
> current system doesn't allow us to see that accurately, so I'm asking if it
> can be turned on for people wanting to ask questions that way.

Come on.... What if that "what about C reply" was posted 5 days later, when no
one who posted A or B was still looking? does the fact that it didn't get much
upvotes make it any less valid?

Also, time of day matters -- at different times of the day, the answer
statistics are dominated by people in Asia/Australia, people in Europe, and
people in the US, etc, and they might have wildly different circumstances. You
have to wait a couple of days for the dust to settle and everyone to chime in.

I'm sorry to say that, but your post have convinced me even more that pg did
the right thing: There is much, much less information in those numbers than
you ascribe. Even the rank is super biased. If you base your view of "what's
right" on the number of votes (or even on their rank) rather than the actual
content, perhaps HN is not the right place for you.

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tstegart
I think you're discounting the value of people's opinions too much. Basing a
decision on what the denizens of Hacker news think is the best answer is a
perfectly acceptable method of moving forward. Whole businesses and methods
are based on this sort of wisdom (Crowdsourcing answers, the Facebook "Like"
button, re-tweets on Twitter). Choosing the most popular answer might have
it's drawbacks, but sometimes its the right answer. You have a point in that
time of day and all the other factors you listed might skew the results, but
it might not skew them in a way that bothers me. If something is the best
answer, I'm sure people in Asia or Europe or America can pick it out. They
might have wildly different answers, _or_ they could also be exactly the same.
I get the impression you think just because people "liked" one answer the best
isn't a technical enough reason to go with that answer, and in fact you think
the decision should be based on something more substantial. I disagree that
this always needs to happen.

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bdfh42
The answers near the top of the page got the most up-votes. The ones at the
bottom got fewer votes or have a negative score.

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tstegart
And the replies to the answers? For example, if a reply gets the most votes.
How do I know when that happens?

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beagle3
The reply will be listed first among all those replying to the same parent.
There's also a time-decay factor that comes in -- in essence, when ordering,
the votes on a newer post are worth more (and as time goes by, all votes
equalize in value)

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tstegart
Right, but the relationship between replies is not known. Is reply number 1
far ahead of reply number 2? Or are they close. Plus, what about replies with
different parents. How do you tell which reply has more votes?

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finnw
Maybe that kind of complex question would be better suited to StackExchange
instead of HN?

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iopuy
Comments are scored by length initially. This is short, hence it will be at
the bottom.

