
I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count - wdewind
I know 1500 people have said this before, but today I guess I'm the one who hit the boiling point.<p>The value of HN, from the perspective of simply learning, has been destroyed for me since upvotes were hidden.<p>When I first started reading HN I learned a TON very quickly and everyday about completely new stuff, and was able to do so because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes.  Yes, the upvote system wasn't perfect, but it's a piece of information I can take with a grain of salt.  Especially as an engineer who knows little about business, it was extremely helpful to get a community perspective on the startup stuff.<p>Now, unless I know a lot about the subject (in which case I get limited value from the community), this is just a forum with no easy way for readers to differentiate the noise except for: a) the location on the page, which is useless when comparing a parent to a child reply, and b) the overall confidence and aggressiveness of the poster, which is the exact thing we are trying to avoid judging legitimacy on.<p>I feel like I just come back here everyday because of inertia and habit.  That wont last much longer because I don't feel like I learn anything here: it's just watching people argue now.<p>I expect massive downvoting but hopefully I'm not the only one...
======
mmaunder
You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction. The problem with
vote counts is that two downvotes can start a cascade of reflex downvotes. Or
at best, it won't get upvoted. When vote counts where active, this effect
caused many instances where an excellent comment was found greyed out at the
bottom of the page until a few smart HN folks with high karma voted it back
up.

~~~
lukifer
Idea: a [view count] link. Once clicked, votes are ignored for that comment.
You can vote, or get the social proof, but not both.

~~~
mmaunder
That's quite brilliant. How about up, down and abstain buttons and if you
click any you get to see the vote count and you're done voting. It will
encourage voting, remove the social proof influence and give the option to
abstain.

~~~
vacri
How does that option help the main poster? Forcing him to vote on comments
(even as abstention) is just meaningless mechanism that gets in the way.

------
AgentConundrum
I've noticed the same thing. I'll see a debate which is basically a thread of
two people replying to each other with no other contributors. In this
circumstance, it's impossible to distinguish between a situation where one
person gets 10 upvotes and holds a well-agreed opinion and the other person
gets 1 or 2 upvotes and is arguing his opinion just well enough to avoid being
downvoted.

I understand that we're supposed to form our own opinions as to who we agree
with, but sometimes its just not reasonable to take the time to do enough
research. Sometimes, you want to learn from someone that actually knows what
they're talking about.

Without some sort of vote indicator, it's hard to tell who has the most
accurate opinion, except often in subjects like law, security, and seo where
there are known experts that often chime in (e.g. grellas, tptacek, patio11).

I'd suggest that a form of "fuzzy vote counts" be implemented. Something to
indicate either a relative score ("this comment is substantially higher voted
than its parent") or just an approximate value ("unvoted", "few votes", "many
votes") without a specific score.

~~~
neild
_Without some sort of vote indicator, it's hard to tell who has the most
accurate opinion, except often in subjects like law, security, and seo where
there are known experts that often chime in (e.g. grellas, tptacek, patio11)._

You assume that votes are a good indicator of who holds the most accurate
opinion. My experience says that they are merely an indicator of who holds the
most _popular_ opinion, or who argues their point in the most convincing
fashion. The latter is a particularly insidious case, since accurate
information does not always go hand in hand with good debating skills.

~~~
ghshephard
I would agree with you. Most topics don't even really have a clear measurement
of objective accuracy. And, even when they do, it's rare that votes reflect
expert's analysis of accuracy. Rather, votes on HN typically reflect one of
the following:

O How well known is the individual - I'm even guilty of mindlessly clicking on
a grellas comment when it has to do with Law, Security with tptacek, or
patio11 on all sorts of things (Japan, Startups, SEO).

O How popular is their opinion - once again, I sometimes do this myself - when
I want an endorphine rush, or my day is slow, I'll go create a comment that I
know adheres to HN Philiosophy, just to enjoy racking up 40 or 50 points.
Juvenile, I know, but it _feels_ good.

O How effective are they presenting - this is a bit of a mixed bag, and I'm
happy to see that frequently very well argued positions are downvoted into
oblivion because they are nonsense. :-)

But, with that said - the first approach actually isn't too bad -
grellas/tptacek/patio11 actually _are_ worth reading, and their opinions
really do count for more than a random individual - so maybe the "this
personis well known and has a good track record" vote does have merit.

~~~
zwieback
Regarding your second bullet - do you have an alter ego to test anti-HN
sentiments as well? Not really in good taste, I know, but it would be
interesting as a social experiment.

I notice that a lot of posters prefix their comments with a "damn-the-
downvotes" remark, which shows that a lot of disussion is skewed toward karma-
preservation. Both up and downvoting are fraught and maybe you really need
both or neither one.

------
moxiemk1
I feel the opposite - I'm learning more, because if I'm spending the time to
read something, I have to think critically about it and do research sometimes
in order to have a good interpretation. It takes more time, but it's real
learning, instead of echo-chamber reading.

~~~
mike_h
It's like it's gone from a cherry-picking exercise to an actual reading
exercise. It requires more of a commitment, and it seems to keep the dialog on
a more contemplative level.

We're all speaking about "seems" and "feels" here, so it's coming down to
impressions (not to mention taste differences), but some ideas for measuring
the effect:

\- change in the "story point count"-to-"comment count" ratio

\- change in average current (and future?) karma of the people who do comment

\- change in average comment length

None of these is an objective measure of quality, but they do indicate
"change" which might help Paul or whoever make a decision about whether that
change was desirable.

------
masterzora
I know I'm not really supposed to have an opinion on these things, being a
recently-created account and all, but I must respectfully disagree. If you
really want to learn, using upvotes as proxy for correctness is a suboptimal
way to do so, especially regarding topics without any clear cut answers. Being
new to this site, I've actually spent roughly equal amounts of time with and
without vote counts an I've noticed a pretty big difference in my own habits.
In particular, rather than acting like HN is an omniscient font of knowledge,
I treat it much more like wikipedia: a springboard for further exploration of
topics.

------
mixmax
I absolutely agree - and since it's impossible to know whether a top comment
in a thread is there because it was just posted or because it has a lot of
upvotes the sorting of the comments doesn't really give me any information.
This begs the question: _If I can't see the votes and have no easy way of
knowing which comments are highly rated why have a voting system at all?_ What
is the purpose if not to serve as a guideline for the users?

------
jimrandomh
I don't use upvotes to decide what I agree with, I use them to decide what to
read in the first place. Hiding the votes means I can no longer skim through a
thread to pick out the comments that are gems; I'd have to read all the bad
comments too. And this means that reading comments here is no longer worth my
time, so I don't do it. This is definitely not the desired effect.

~~~
dmpatierno
This is exactly how I feel. It's no longer an efficient use of my time.

------
spencerfry
I completely agree. I don't have time to read every comment. I miss being able
to skim to crowd-sourced, high up-voted comments.

~~~
huhtenberg
These high up-voted comments are still exactly where they were before - at the
top of the thread.

~~~
Malcx
Not always, that is only used to sort comments at the same level. Often a root
comment may have had 2 or 3 points and a counter argument contained some
useful insight and would be upvoted to 30+ Skim reading would allow me to spot
this comment contains something worth reading...

------
sosuke
The highly voted comments still float to the top of the page don't they? When
I was only reading the highly voted commetns I started to feel like I was only
getting the popular opinion, especially so when it came to touchy topics. If
HN does decide to turn the count back on I'd love an option to turn it back
off in my own profile.

~~~
hrktb
Highly voted comments don't always stand up when the discussion gets into deep
threads. I remember seeing a few threads with 20+ comments and one really
insightful response in the middle changing the flow of the discussion.

I feel it is now difficult to have an idea of this kind of "flow" at a glance.

I'd love an option too show or hide the count. Or perhaps show the count when
hovering or touching a link for a few seconds.

------
blhack
I've said this in some of the other threads on this topic, but I'll say it
again:

The huge (and incorrect) assumption that people are making about upvotes is
that everybody reading the comments is stupid. We're not using the upvote
count as a 100% perfect indicator of if somebody is correct or not, we're
using it as an indicator of how many upvotes the comment has gotten. It's just
one of several things that we can use to judge a comment's merit.

This information is useful, and I cannot fathom a benefit to withholding it.

~~~
abecedarius
On stackoverflow the criteria for voting are considerably more concrete, yet
it's clear that voting there is strongly biased by vote counts. HN might have
more rational voters (though look who's saying so), but they're still human,
and the fuzzier criteria, shorter active lives of posts, and volume of
comments to scan through probably more than make up for this.

(I could've made this same reply to other comments here.)

------
merloen
There are so much more possibilities than just "show vote counts" and "hide
vote counts": different sort orders based on more than just votes, collapsing
threads, marking people as friends, or adding them to a kill-file. Giving
votes different weights based on karma, or average comment score. Tagging of
articles, and filtering or sorting based on that. And so on, and so on.

I understand that pg hasn't got the time to do all kinds of experiments, but
this is HN, where more than half of us are great programmers.

Give us a simple API and let us do our own experiments. That's all I want.

------
jsdalton
I guess only pg can answer this, but I'm wondering how the change has impacted
voting behavior. Have there been more or less votes per comment? Has the
proportion of upvotes to downvotes changed?

I get the sense that my comments have received more rather than less votes
since the change. Previously, when a decent comment of mine had say 10
upvotes, I felt like people concluded "good enough" and didn't bother
upvoting. Now without the score feedback, I actually feel like some of my
mediocre comments have gotten more upvotes than they deserved.

Some behavior data would go a long way toward confirming or denying hypotheses
like these.

~~~
vinhboy
why can't we just have a setting -- those who don't want it can turn it off...

------
gamble
I've been trying to give it a chance, but so far it doesn't seem like hiding
the vote counts has done anything to improve the quality of comments on HN.
Honestly, I think it's had the opposite effect. The number of in-depth
comments seems to have plummeted.

~~~
alex_c
It's pretty hard to quantify quality of comments, and I've seen at least one
other comment in this thread saying the quality of comments has gone up
(personally, I'm undecided).

I wonder how much one's perception of the change in comment quality is colored
by their initial opinion about hidden comment scores.

------
grellas
Since HNers are so divided on this issue
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039>), why not do one month on, one
month off for a time to do a sort of A/B testing over a sustained period while
keeping everyone at least semi-happy half the time? This would have the added
benefit of letting cumulative totals get updated on searchyc from time to
time.

------
tokenadult
_When I first started reading HN I learned a TON very quickly and everyday
about completely new stuff, and was able to do so because I could easily sort
through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes._

And yet the founder of HN said 25 days ago that there is a problem with HN,
"the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

He summed up the problem by saying "The problem has several components:
comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." If
pg observed a situation like that, isn't it a bad idea to "sort through the
legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes"?

A link and comment in another recent metadiscussion thread largely sums up the
back-and-forth about visible comment scores as a signal on comments in active
threads:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465357>

>> Please bring back the comment scores. It helps a lot in parsing the
comments and assigning a proportional weight to each when reading them.

> I had to think about this a bit, and I disagree so far. I'm finding that I'm
> not pre-judging comments as much. It's nice to be able to read someone's
> comment without knowing first that 70 or 80 or 3 other people thought it was
> worthwhile.

Once I had thought about that a bit, I reached the second conclusion. Readers
on HN are gaining more quality comments as readers look at comments according
to their inherent value and not upvoting or downvoting based on the crowd
appeal of what someone else has already voted. Cognitive scientists have done
a lot of research on what is called anchoring bias,

<http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm>

and I get the impression, after 892 days as a registered user of HN, that
comment upvotes and downvotes for the last year or so have not been based on
the same careful consideration of comment quality as they were in the early
days of HN, but rather have been based too much on what net karma score is
already displayed as people vote. I like the new comment score system of not
displaying net comment scores on OTHER people's posts (of course I can still
see my own comment scores) better than the previous system. In the spirit of
pg's statement, I try to help the quality of HN by actively upvoting
thoughtful, helpful comments, and being on the lookout for mean comments
(which pg hopes will not be upvoted by anyone) and dumb comments (which surely
don't help any users relying on comment scores to learn new facts) for
downvoting those. A comment that is both mean and dumb ought to be downvoted,
not upvoted. We can all do our part to help the quality of the community.

In his thread, pg mentioned comments that are mean or dumb "that (c) get
massively upvoted." With that condition of HN less than a month ago in mind,
how do the highest-voted comments visible in the bestcomments list

<http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>

look to all of you recently? Are there fewer mean comments than before? Are
there fewer dumb comments than before? Are the comments that are "massively
upvoted" since the experiment began mostly comments that are reasonably kind
and well-informed, helpful comments on the whole? In most of the treads you
visit, do helpful, thoughtful comments seem to rise to a position of
prominence, while mean or dumb comments gray out?

Remember, pg's claim is that recently HN has not been a place where there is
an "easy way for readers to differentiate the noise," but rather a place where
the noise has had an attached badge of being signal rather than noise. That
isn't good for anyone reading HN. As you correctly point out, we STILL have
"the location on the page," which is useful at least for comparing multiple
comments at the same reply level as a comment thread develops, and the actual
sources and reasoning used by one or another user in supporting points made in
comments. People who LOOK UP what the facts are can find out a lot about who
is taking care to do good research and who is just making stuff up. And that's
always the safest path to learning, to check the sources to verify other
people's factual claims.

~~~
random42
How about this solution to improve the readability of HN threads, without
degrading the quality of comments/discussion?

1\. Show comment-ranges. (1-, 0, 1, 2-10, 10-50 etc.), instead of absolute
values. This indicates the quality of a comment, without _promoting/prompting_
voting, based on existing votes (that much.)

2\. Do not show username (use a placeholder for profile link). This will solve
the problem of "instinctive" up(/down?)voting from commenter's fan base.

3\. Any related changes required in the UX, to bubble the better comments more
visibility.

~~~
jokermatt999
Usernames can be very valuable though. If it's a story about Delicious, I'd
like to see joshu's comments. If it's about Google search, I'll be looking for
Matt Cuts.

I do like the first idea though. It would be a loose indicator of quality
without giving too much away.

~~~
random42
Well, It is true, but they are exceptions, not the rule.

Potential solutions

1\. If the author feels like he is the authority and/or is the important part
of the comment, he can always declare it in the comment itself. (The profile-
link can always be verified by the users, to ensure that any such claim is
correct.)

2\. or you can click the links of the comments.

3\. or even there might a functionality implemented to show all the usernames
on the thread (by default, the author names would not be shown). Later PG can
see, if default off makes sense, based on the data captured and user trends
(eg. if 99% people are always want to see the commenter name) .

------
ilitirit
I think the best solution would be for everyone to just start posting "better"
commentary (and submissions), and revert back to the old ways of downvoting
things that add no value to the discussion.

The "old" HN was a lot drier (for lack of a better word), but the discussions
were generally much more informative and/or insightful. I remember people
complaining about getting downvoted for a comment that would have probably
gotten many upvotes on other sites, and I was always pleased to that these in
turn were downvoted as well. This doesn't seem to happen any more though,
which is a shame IMO.

------
kuroir
The point you make is totally valid; and now that I think about it, when I was
able to see the upvotes I could at a glance identify the answers with one or
more of the following:

1\. Correct Answer (real, like a founder answering about his app). 2\. Popular
Answer (comedy, something people "lol" to).

Identifying the difference between those two is done with only common sense;
but supposing you still lack of that, you can still feel what the community
liked by looking at the numbers.

"50 upvoted this" that must mean something vs "3 upvoted this"...

------
knite
I don't need to know a comment's score, just the score's _magnitude_ provides
a lot of utility. In the same way that a grayed-out comment signifies a poor
reply, find a way to show me whether a comment is neutral, slightly positive,
very positive, or stupendously positive.

------
cglee
I like not seeing vote count, but agree with you that it's a handy metric to
sift through the cruft. How about a color scheme to show popularity instead of
the specific vote count?

~~~
wdewind
Sure - to be clear I'm not tied to upvotes as a number specifically, and I
doubt anyone else is. But give us SOMETHING.

~~~
adharmad
How about sorting comments in any subtree by the number of votes? That way
hierarchy indicates the comments with the highest number of votes, while
hiding the actual number itself.

~~~
dwolfson20
That's the easiest and most effective solution, I think. But we could also do
with an optional visual cue, since a lot of people want it.

------
tolmasky
What I found weird is that the points went away but the greying effect stayed.
The truth is that that goes a lot further in making sure I don't ready
unpopular views (with my eyes I often have to copy paste it to a text editor
before I can read it comfortably). I would much prefer all comments be the
same font color and being able to see the score so I can make my own decision
as to whether to read it or not.

~~~
stretchwithme
The fact that a comment is grayed out makes me want to read it.

~~~
tolmasky
But seeing it say -10 wouldn't accomplish the same thing? Or are you implying
that this is literally a swimming upstream situation for you and the shear
physical difficulty of the task makes it appealing?

------
famousactress
I miss them also. Was a weighted voting discussed as an alternative? One where
the up/down vote is weighted against the karma of the voter? Seems like that
would help elevate big-karma users to sort of meta-moderators and might help
soften the concerns about reflexive voting?

And yeah, maybe for display the numbers aren't the best option.. just some
sort of watered down "+" "++" "+++" type scheme...

------
jshen
"because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their
upvotes. "

This is a mistake. People frequently vote down things that are right because
they don't understand the material as well as they think they do.

~~~
jasonlotito
Except the mechanic for voting down (dimming out the comment) remains.

Also, my experience is that the down votes are usually countered. Good
comments get a good number of points.

By removing points from comments, you've made points worthless for determining
comment value. In that way, having them is pointless.

------
dmak
I, literally, stopped reading comments and even started to stop reading hacker
news because I didn't feel like spending extra time to read through and filter
out the informational comments.

------
evo_9
Thanks for posting this. This is exactly how I feel about it.

The one upside to this change I guess is I'm spending much less time on H-N
now.

------
ronaldj
I miss the voting. I don't even bother reading comments anymore.

------
rriepe
I could see this change working for other sites, but HN actually does have a
sort of collective wisdom.

I've also stopped looking at comments entirely. Before, I would sometimes
click through to _just_ read the comments. There was value there. It's not
necessarily gone now, but it is much harder to find.

------
pluies
Yes please.

Also, the poll at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039> showed that
most people agree.

~~~
Terretta
And yet, an astonishing number prefer without. I'd argue that as the
particular problem being worked on is increasing group think, this would be a
perfect example of herd mentality or popularity contest leading us in the
wrong direction.

Throughout threads such as these, the general reason for votes is to avoid
reading or to be told without thinking what to think, while the general reason
given for preferring them gone is an elevation in discussion.

The second was the stated goal for hiding them in the first place, and the
first is the problem to combat -- glib votes.

------
97s
i agree. i miss being able to skim faster and determine what the community
judges as a good reply, I know many others who feel the same way.

------
ssing
Nowdays I just don't read beyond the first few comments. Request to please
bring back the upvote count.

------
yosho
Can we at least maybe have a star rating or color rating or something that
lets us differentiate high voted comments from mediocre comments? It really
does simply take too long to scan and read all the comments. Most of the time
I'm just looking for interesting snippets of information, I simply don't have
the time to read everything.

Please bring something back, I find myself never reading the comments now.

------
lupatus
Lately, I've been reading the "new" headlines as opposed to the "top"
headlines to find those hidden gems that _I_ think are interesting.

------
albertsun
Why not have a (high) karma threshold, above which you can choose whether or
not you want to see vote counts?

I think respected, established members of the community would know themselves
well enough to decide for themselves whether it's good or bad to personally
have vote counts.

FWIW: Below the threshold I think it's better to not have counts.

------
ANH
I prefer not seeing the number of votes, and think lukifer's idea of a "view
count or vote" model is great. A visible score attached to each comment seems
to me somehow demeaning. But I've never been much for grades...

And has been stated multiple times, the highly upvoted comments filter to the
top already.

------
bandushrew
I am very sorry, but that is just wrong.

Votes are not a reliable indication of whether or not a post is correct.

They _are_ a reliable indication of whether or not a post is popular.

It does sometimes happen that a post is both correct and popular, but that is
not something it is ever safe to rely on.

'Social Proof' is a fantasy that does not exist.

------
besvinick
I feel like all the articles that get posted on HN are ones that I come across
through a variety of other sources (SAI, TechCrunch, etc.) on Twitter. I find
HN to be much more useful for discussions that are started based off the
aforementioned articles from other sites.

------
raquo
Hm, this post is only 2 hours old and is already 14th on the front page
despite having 600+ points. Do all local posts disappear so fast from the
front page, or is this one treated specially? Or maybe its upvote/downvote
ratio is low?

------
JabavuAdams
One issue I'd like to see explored more deeply is the path-dependence of a
comment's final score.

There's this often unstated assumption that "good" comments will rise to the
top.

What about this:

1) Display all comment scores, all the time 2) A new comment is posted 3)
Segment the readership somehow, so that the comment has a (possibly different)
score for each segment. E.g. Allow a comment to have 4 different scores. 4)
Start the comment off with a random score in the range [-2, +2], but one
that's different for each viewer segment 5) track (but hide) the number of
upvotes and downvotes for each score 6) display just init + upvotes -
downvotes to each segment

------
zwieback
I'm not a heavy user of social networks so I don't know if this exists
somewhere but why can't I have a customized view where posters I like are
weighted more than others. Then I can do this:

\- The poster's weighting would show up as a color (good,better,best)

\- The product of the poster's weight and the popularity of the comment
determines the order on the page

Now I can look at the top of the page where very popular comments show up and
then scroll toward the bottom and quickly identify any posters I really like

I realize this wouldn't be too hard to do by scraping the comment page and
maintaining my own database of favorite commenters.

------
stretchwithme
Maybe there should be 2 modes.

One for those just wanting to read and learn where they can see the votes but
where the user is not allowed to vote.

And one for those wishing to vote where they can't see and be influenced by
the votes of others.

------
_sh
Here's a thought: maybe it's time to close HN. That's right, close it down. PG
said all along HN was a production experiment for Arc, so maybe it's time to
evaluate the hypothesis and conclude the experiment.

All this hand-wringing about 'the community' and signal/noise indicates the
membership has outmanoeuvred any means of wrangling it into some pre-conceived
notion of 'quality'. For better or for worse, the thundering hoards of the
internet have arrived and are drowning out the elitist clique. If that is bad
for everybody, then it's time to shut up shop.

------
eande
every time someone posts this I add my 2 cents and say the same, please bring
back the karma most useful.

------
JabavuAdams
Wow. I never realized that people paid attention to upvotes. This explains a
lot...

> Especially as an engineer who knows little about business, it was extremely
> helpful to get a community perspective on the startup stuff.

It's not a community perspective. It's a positive feedback loop.

> The value of HN, from the perspective of simply learning, has been destroyed
> for me since upvotes were hidden.

Now, you're learning.

------
bane
Perhaps pg should set a point where the points are revealed, but additional
voting is locked out (but not comments)? Perhaps 24-48 hours after an article
is submitted? Then provide a link to those articles as they decay into that
group for people who really need point confirmation to catch up on what the
rest of the community thought?

------
runjake
Or at least shove it in a div or span and hide it by default, so those of us
who want it back can style it unhidden.

~~~
kmfrk
That would completely defeat the purpose.

~~~
runjake
because...?

------
larsberg
I hate to be "that guy," but I don't see why the count display isn't an option
in our account panel.

In the previous polls, people seemed to be split 50/50-ish. Unless pg, as HN
Overlord, feels that either removing counts has a performance or pedagogical
purpose, this option seems like a perfect candidate for an account setting.

~~~
xnxn
You've hit upon the answer yourself: it can't be a preference because hiding
the vote count is intended to have a corrective effect on the voting and
commenting behavior of the community at large.

If anyone could switch their vote count on, the majority would -- including
myself -- to the detriment of us all.

------
hkon
Take any site like this, they all suffer from this problem when the number of
users reach a certain point.

I like the slashdot way of organizing stuff. Mods who actively moderate and
categorize comments. It's more work, but the end result will be of higher
quality.

------
Goladus
Learn to read critically and think critically. You don't need prior knowledge
on a subject to evaluate a comment. Look for sound logic. Identify and
evaluate the assertions and any hidden assumptions.

Vote counts are won't ever reliably reveal truth.

------
blhack
To the people who think that comment points should not be visible:

How do you go about choosing which books to read? Do you read all of them, are
you exclusive to specific authors, or do you depend on your peers to make
suggestions?

------
starpilot
To new HN readers, the comments appear to be sorted randomly. There's no
explanation for why some posts are at the top or bottom. That's a definite
flaw of hiding the votecounts and could dissuade newcomers.

~~~
billswift
It is also annoying when you post a reply and the comments have shifted order.
I guess PG expects you to start reading the thread from the top again.

------
FreshCode
Hacker News needs a Meta HN.

~~~
tokenadult
Hacker News has long had a rather rarely used Meta HN, the Feature Requests
thread linked to from the bottom of most of the main pages on HN, such as the
home page.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363>

------
rexreed
I don't understand this. I have no problem discerning good quality content and
comments from bad quality. I just read stuff. It sounds intellectually lazy
and quite possibly self-defeating to rely on the trivialities of other
people's votes to determine what is important to YOU.

After all, what is important to ME or not important to ME has nothing to do
with what's important to YOU. The fact that you have stopped learning anything
on HN, as you put it, has to do with YOU and not ME. So, don't blame the lack
of votes. I wonder how you can get along in this world where you have to
evaluate things at face value. In the "real world", there aren't point values
and upvote/downvote nonsense on things.

I hope HN gets rid of the point system altogether. I'm sure I'm in the
minority.

------
blantonl
Although I learn a lot from the comments on submissions, I tend to learn _a
lot more_ from the submissions themselves.

Maybe the Hacker News team is trying to place more emphasis on submissions
instead of comments?

------
gsivil
How come this post is not in the first page after 8 hours while the following
post for example still is?

Joel Spolsky: Lunch (joelonsoftware.com) 275 points by alexlmiller 12 hours
ago | flag | 175 comments

~~~
pluies
"Ask HN"-types posts (i.e. without a link) are heavily disadvantaged. They
take more upvotes to get to the front page, and fall down faster.

~~~
gsivil
is there an explanation for that?

------
turar
Will setting downvote display limit to 0 instead of -4 help?

------
6ren
Comment age is also a factor: an older comment has more points than a
similarly ordered newer comment.

So, when scanning downwards, score is inversely proportional to age.

------
mattreading
Karma is a form of currency. It's influence should be exploited not
suffocated! There are ways to use it that would benefit the community.

------
espeed
So have two types of browsers -- those who choose to see vote counts, and
those that don't. And discount the votes of those that do.

------
kleevr
I kind of like hiding the points for active threads, maybe after 24 hours it
could show the points. This would be helpful when

------
twodayslate
I did not even notice they removed the vote count. It doesn't bother me. I
don't know how to downvote either though

------
sebkomianos
Having it as an option for everyone to choose if he/she wants it enabled or
disabled could as well be a "solution"?

------
adaml_623
I think you either need an upvote count or the ability to collapse comment
threads.

------
b3b0p
Maybe make the up / down votes on a comment a reward for participating on that
thread.

That is, if you up vote / down vote a comment and make a comment on that
comment you can view that comments vote count. Does that make sense or did it
come out sounding bad?

Just a thought. I think I like it without knowing the vote count.

Edit: Clarification.

------
pnathan
Agreed, votes are a good way to filter out the most of noise from the signal.

------
known
What are the incentives for up/down voting?

------
teyc
I disagree. It is forcing you to think for yourself.

What do you want to learn here? What most HNers believe to be true, or do you
want to learn to be independent?

~~~
blhack
By "Be independent", do you mean "go and learn what people who have written
books believe to be true"?

Or do you mean "go and learn what people who have written forum posts believe
to be true"?

------
BoppreH
Can we get a user preference, as the case with show_dead and topcolor? I don't
see that could be bad for anyone.

"Show score on posts: (yes/no)"

------
solid
How about the Slashdot system? +1/5 Insightful/Funny/etc?

------
fleitz
The only thing you're no longer learning is groupthink. Be glad you aren't
learning it.

It's easy to learn in person, just parrot what everyone else is saying. You
don't need HN to learn it.

You realize that people game the upvote system right? Writing karma whore
comments is so easy when you know the votes. If you really want to know the
votes, just reverse engineer the algorithm, it will show you the relative
votes.

------
lhnn
Could we have a hybrid? We don't need to see the exact number... what if
massively upvoted (100+ points) got a green highlight on the "link" URL, and
massively downvoted (-10 or more) get shaded, like they already do?

This keeps the content from being so quickly judged, but eventually shows
strong content that has been upvoted by hundreds without bias.

------
zyfo
Good comments are still put at the top. Mentally filter out the recent
comments, and you should be able to see quite easily how "good" a comment is.
I honestly don't see the big difference.

------
fuckoff
here here!

------
grandalf
Suggestion: Try getting dopamine from reading the comments instead of from
game mechanics layered imperfectly on top of the forum.

------
kedi_xed
I did see that as '..bring back the upvote c*unt'. Thought it was a little
harsh.

