
Never mind - dongslol
Please delete this
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burkaman
This is a really weird way to look at conversations. Clearly your comment was
useful, because you said what a lot of people were thinking, and prompted a
very helpful explanation from a subject matter expert. Had you stayed silent,
rayiner might not have felt any need to comment, and everyone would have been
worse off.

Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the
smartest or most correct.

~~~
throwanem
Exactly. Moreover, comment scores do not capture information about truth
values, and displaying them would seem only to encourage people to confuse
them with something which does. It doesn't _matter_ whether 'rayiner's comment
has a higher score than that which prompted him to write it - what matters is
that both the erroneous interpretation and its correction by a domain expert
are there, publicly visible, for anyone to read and evaluate.

If anything, I'd argue that it's almost more worth going the other way, and
hiding scores on one's own comments as well. I don't really know what purpose
they serve.

~~~
jrs235
>I'd argue that it's almost more worth going the other way, and hiding scores
on one's own comments as well. I don't really know what purpose they serve.

I've never thought of that idea. I think I like it!?

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dilap
Sites like HN have made me realize it's actually more or less impossible to
tell if a given argument is well-founded unless you have first-hand experience
in the domain. Most people don't have experience in most topics, so upvotes
were quite susceptible to "reasonable seeming" yet incorrect arguments.

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jrs235
HN is not meant to be a karma competition. The cream will float to the top.

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dasil003
Inevitably comment votes are going to reflect common thought patterns
including misconceptions. Even though this is susceptible to groupthink and
gaming, HN has pretty strong antibodies in that area, so I think it's less of
a problem than the timing issue.

In short, the worst bias in HN comment scores are that early comments get
exponentially more votes than late comments. It would be nice if later posts
could get a boost to their upvotes to incentivize late contributions, and help
better ones float to the top even after the conversation has died down a bit.

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aaronchall
I'll be honest, I'd like this - it would tell me (us) when others make better
comments and help me (us) to improve my (our) own commenting.

It would also give readers an idea of how popular the ideas in the comments
are - and perhaps, if we could show total up versus total down, whether the
comments got a lot or a little attention.

This could be a privilege for those with high karma levels, similar to the
downvote.

