

Ask HN/PG: Stats on voting since hiding comment score? - johnyzee

As an aside in the ongoing discussion about the hidden comment scores, I thought it would be interesting to know how it has affected participation on the site in the form of voting. I personally have a hunch that voting activity must have gone down a lot, based only on my own usage pattern and theories about how/why people vote.<p>Since it is an easily quantifiable measure (compared to 'comment quality'), could anyone with easy access to the data dig up this information? I.e. total number of votes cast in a period before hiding comment score vs. votes cast in the same amount of time after the change.
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tokenadult
Here's a set of friendly follow-up questions to your question about vote
counts:

1) When we see that pg opened a thread 77 days ago titled "Ask HN: How to
stave off decline of HN?"

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

and wrote there, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a)
mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted,"

wouldn't that mean that a reduction in total votes was exactly what was
expected?

Later, when pg looked back on the experiment of hiding comment karma scores
while posting a user poll

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

and he wrote, "There was a nasty kind of argument that used to happen, where
people would literally try to score points off one another, and users voting
on the thread became like a mob egging on two people fighting. I prefer HN
without comment scores, because those fights really disturbed me, and they've
practically gone away since I hid comment scores," was there any concern about
total vote count?

On my part, to answer your question by anecdote, I still vote a lot,
especially upvoting comments that are thoughtful and informative, and at least
some of my comments get upvoted a lot by other users, especially those that
are the most thoughtful and informative from my keyboard. These days, as I
reported in the last thread opened by pg, I can usually tell by comment
placement in threads which comments are thought to be helpful comments by the
community, even without numerical scores. I definitely have voted as much as
or even more than ever, to let users who post good comments know that they are
helping the community. I've also reviewed the Hacker News online documentation
about what to upvote and what to downvote since pg posted his last poll. The
Hacker News welcome message

<http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>

gives an overview of the community goals here, summarizing the site
guidelines.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

The Hacker News FAQ

<http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>

gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. All are
good guides about how to comment, and how to vote (up or down) on other
participants' comments.

~~~
johnyzee
I appreciate your points about voting behavior, but the point of my question
was to get the hard data. (I don't read any indications into PG's comments one
way or another and either way, actual data would still be interesting).

Will try rephrasing this question for the 'ask' section.

