

Ask PG: Is there any chance we're going to get comment points back soon? - blhack

Points next to the comments serve a much larger purpose than just organizing the discussion.  They also [hopefully] assign value to things that people are saying.<p>Somebody saying "mysql is a perfectly fine database for most applications" with 5 points, and somebody saying "mysql is a perfectly fine database for most applications" with 150 points mean different things.<p>The first one means that somebody is voicing their opinion, and that people generally don't disagree with with them.  The second means that somebody is voicing their opinion, and that a big chunk of the community agrees.<p>It's like seeing points next to the articles.  A top-of-the-page article with 120 points and a top-of-the-page article with 1000 points are two different things.<p>To me, the comment points are a valuable bit of information.<p>Fellow HNers: thoughts?  (If I missed a previous discussion about this, could somebody link me to it?)
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pg
Let's see what the reaction is to this experiment:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039>

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Terretta
Points are not a substitute for citations or sound reasoning.

Your example is a perfect one of how useless points are in such a case. 5
points or 150, you still didn't learn "why". Could be that people just like
the guy who made the comment.

~~~
kls
I can't agree with this more, group think has become pretty prevalent on HN
even in the face of proper citation and reasoning, if it is something that the
masses do not agree with down it goes into oblivion. Conversely let someone
like patio11 or jacquesm post something and it rockets to the top (not a
critique of either of them, I value their contribution immensely), but the
reality is they have dude geek eGroupies (in all fairness some chick's too)
and they could post anything and it is going to get votes just because it is a
HN celeb.

Again please don't take that as a critique of either of them they have
contributed more value to this site than I could ever fathom of doing. Reality
is though, they get some votes because they are popular and celebs on this
site and until they get busted in Vegas trashing the casino on a coke binge or
a sex tape gets released, I blame the throng of adoring fans for those
celebrity votes and not the celebs themselves.

Anyways, I am rambling, point is the lack of points (in my opinion) forces
people to take a deeper look at the post, than just a scan of points and then
oh yeah it's that guy let me up-vote.

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akkartik
There was a suggestion in the original thread to show log(#votes), which might
address your point. Most of the time things would be at 1 but when they go to
2 you'll know to pay attention.

