
Notice: Experimenting with HN - pg
Over the next few weeks I'm going to be experimenting with some of the ideas discussed here<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696<p>so don't freak out of the site changes in some way.  It will probably change back.
======
silentbicycle
Have you considered adding a slight cost for submitting articles? (perhaps 2-5
points of karma?) There's a reward for submitting anything first that other
people are likely to submit, but no cost, so the new page is often clogged
with industry buzz that drowns out more substantial submissions. Many
excellent article fall off within an hour, and then they can't get reposted.

Having more articles on the front page that aren't based on a scramble for
duplicate-submission karma would probably improve the overall discussion
threads, too; those posts tend to draw a lot of shallow comments.

It would also help with spam. Win win win.

I also wonder what percentage of upvotes for submissions comes just from
duplicate submissions - maybe those should be counted differently (or not at
all)? If the front page is already full of threads about some news about Apple
(or whatever), being first to submit a redundant (but distinct) post is
disproportionately rewarded, yet reduces the signal/noise ratio _even
further_.

~~~
DarkShikari
The problem with this is it makes every submission into a karma game. If
submitting costs karma, it will cause more people to think "will this earn
enough points?" before submitting links.

... but that's not what you want people to think. You want them to think "is
this interesting and on-topic for HN?" They're not the same question, as much
as the former tries to approximate the latter.

If people focus too much on points, you're likely to get more groupthink and
more industry buzz (since that stuff always gets a gazillion upvotes) instead
of interesting articles.

Certainly, people think about link karma already, but I think this would make
it worse. Creating a cost will cause even people who _don't_ think about karma
to think about it, even for just a moment -- which is probably not what you
want.

~~~
revorad
That's why i feel its best not to give any karma for submissions at all. karma
only for comments.

~~~
pg
Actually a high ratio of comments to upvotes is a bad sign. That usually means
there's some kind of religious argument going on.

~~~
solipsist
There are two types of articles that belong here on HN. The first type
includes articles that speak for themselves. Everyone learns from them, but
fell little need to comment unless they have something small to chime in. This
type should have a low ratio of comments to upvotes.

However, the other type includes articles that provoke people and cause
discussion. It doesn't just include contributing comments, but rather it
contains debates and opposing opinions. These types of articles need a balance
between a low and high ratio. However, the religious arguments you speak of
are usually easy to find. These arguments are usually found in a deeply nested
comment thread. Once you discard of fourth level comments and all the noise
below, you should find that the ratio of comments is a pretty good signifier
of the quality of the article.

~~~
ecuzzillo
It's very rare that there is a huge volume (>100 comments) of insight provoked
by a single article, just because there's not usually that much insight to be
had in the first place on that topic, and you can be sure that 100 separate
comments didn't have it all on the same thread.

You usually can only get that much noise on a topic by poking people such that
they NEED to correct some injustice done by the article. Sometimes good
articles poke people like this, but in either case the comment thread ends up
sucking.

------
Vivtek
Well, consider me happy (though weirded out a little) with the lack of points
on comments - in retrospect, I think a lot of my downvoting behavior has to do
with what I think a post _should_ have earned, not what I personally think
about it, and that's probably bad.

OTOH, I'm in the habit of scanning for double-digit comments when I want to
save a little time, so I miss that.

~~~
credo
Sometimes, I do the reverse of what you described. I upvote comments that are
at -1 (even though I wouldn't have upvoted the comment if it hadn't been less
than 1.)

In these cases, I have a neutral feeling about the comment, but upvote it
because 0, -1 etc. seem unfair.

Hiding the points will mean that HN will lose some of its self-correcting
capacity (when it comes to comments that were downvoted unfairly).

Anyway, it will be interesting to see the results of this experiment.

~~~
phlux
Actually, I think there is a flaw in not providing the number: _You have no
idea which comments are generating activity_

When my number changes, I click threads and scan for a different number than I
recall for my posts.

This tells me which ones are still being read.

If there was a visual indicator of posts that had the arrows ticked since I
last looked - this would be solved.

Otherwise, it is akin to throwing your comments to the wind with no indicator
of how each is received _unless_ they get greyed out by down voting.

EDIT: I don't feel like I have any incentive to click the arrows on anything
if I cant see the result of that click. This really really is a bad design
choice.

At a minimum we should be able to see _our own_ scores.

EDIT #2: Also, assuming two people reply to a questions asking for a
recommendation for X with a link -- you have no idea what the crowd's opinion
may be of the links without them replying.

Typically good content is VOTED UP as an indicator that it is, in fact, good
content.

The more and more I think about not seeing content scores, the more obvious it
is that this is just flat wrong to not show them.

~~~
spydertennis
I _think_ you can use notifo for this?

------
dgallagher
I had an interesting first experience with the hidden vote count. I was
reading through comments in a thread, scanning for those with high vote
counts, skipping everything else. Subconsciously I saw a "1" next to every
post, ignored them, and skimmed along.

Eventually I started reading some of the comments in detail, thought one was
pretty good, but subconsciously still saw a "1" next to it. I didn't vote and
moved on. By the third or fourth time I did this, I asked "Why isn't anything
good getting votes?" After a closer look, seeing that there was no "1", it was
obvious my subconscious was fooling me.

Expectedly, I'm more inclined to read a comment with a high score since it's
filtered. Not surprising. But this was striking; I'm more inclined to "vote"
for something if it already has a high score, regardless of its content. It's
a popularity-based multiplier effect.

It would be interesting to see what happens to the "bell-curve" of vote
distribution as vote count remains hidden (mean/median/mode/standard
deviation). I'd predict that highly-voted comments won't be as common, and
maybe lesser-voted comments might get more votes.

Has anyone else noticed or experienced this? Or maybe something else entirely?

~~~
GFischer
I usually skim the threads for high vote-count comments as well (and feel safe
in upvoting them even higher).

So yes, I'm biased by the vote count as well, but I'm not sure if it's
negative (I want/need a way to filter when I only want to read some comments!)

------
citricsquid
I... I feel quite pushed away now I can't see if people are liking my
contributions. I feel as if maybe people aren't liking my comments, and I
can't tell so I can't adapt. I post comments similar to those I know users
like, in the hope that I provide value to others, without knowing how well a
comment is being received how do I provide what users want?

I would like to see point display re-enabled for the owner of the comment.

Edit: hey looks like this happened, thanks pg :-)

~~~
MichaelApproved
I think the point is _not_ to write for what users want. You should write
based on what your personal opinions are. That way we get more new and
interesting opinions.

~~~
jarek
I'm not sure I care to spend half an hour writing out a new and interesting
opinion if no one ends up reading it. With no points visible, obvious feedback
of people actually reading it is limited to reply comments.

------
jjcm
Is there a way we can see the current list of changes that are in production?
While things like new users being colored green are obvious, other things such
as a change in the decay function on the front page may be less obvious. Just
curious to see what's going on at any given time.

------
vessenes
I'm coming late to this conversation, as I was mostly internet free last week,
but

a) Thanks for doing all this work b) I imagine you generally feel this way,
but I would love to have changes err on the side of keeping the community
small UNTIL it proves it can scale in culture and quality.

I say this having lived through the following community site's initial quality
and esprit-de-corp rise and fall:

Kuro5hin, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit

Probably the only truly excellent community I was part of which did not have
this problem was the Plato Network, but I expect it died before it could grow
into many of the growth/quality problems HN or any of these popular sites
face.

To my mind, the idea that one is required to grow beyond one's quality and
community goals need not be true. Another way to say this is that if we
graphed the ability of community websites to attract new members against their
ability to maintain / improve quality and culture, so far that graph is
significantly below the 1:1 line.

Creating technology to change that slope above 45 degrees would be a totally
huge gift to the world, seriously. On the other hand, the best sites out there
might be at less than 25 degrees right now, so even a little would be a big
improvement.

All that to say, I'm all for experimenting, and I know for sure that you don't
really want to start HN(^2); you'd rather keep using and feeding HN in the
right way -- I always find a big goal / framework to be helpful, and I haven't
heard you say much about what your longterm goals are here; since talk is
cheap, take mine!

~~~
vessenes
One additional thought I had here; based on this graph idea, it seems to me a
useful thing to do would be to create some sort of way to get a handle on
community on quality using metrics.

They would probably be terribly inaccurate metrics at first, but they would
also provide a means for people to decide how to assess.

As a start, you could use people, for instance paying people on Mechanical
Turk to evaluate a post and its comments for specified HN guidelines; these
could be used as a first attempt to get a feel for how well a given day / week
goes.

~~~
phreeza
I was thinking the same thing, but maybe also using sentiment analysis or
other NLP techniques. Even simple word count trends might yield some insight.

If we could get a dump of all the comments tagged with submission time that
would be a nice starting point for people to throw their algorithms at.

~~~
vessenes
I really like this idea; isn't that what the "comments" link does at the top?

------
DarkShikari
The "green user names" might be nicer if it was a continuum -- that is,
"newest possible" would be bright green, and it would fade to gray over the
course of days or weeks.

------
tgriesser
An observation about the disappearance of karma on comments, is that in
searching older threads (I'm currently looking at a more technical thread
~1000 days old) is an inability to distinguish between the utility of
comments.

E.g. if there is a solution set of A,B, or C to a particular problem or
question, it's impossible to tell if 20 people thought A was a good idea while
B and C were both 1 point answers.

Maybe threads past a certain date threshold could display these vote counts?

------
imajes
Also while you are hacking on it pg, can you implement the bookmarklet hack to
collapse/expand comment trees? often it's fun to be able to just see each
conversation starter and dive into one that's interesting, rather than the
expanded list view which is hard to parse what are the interesting
conversations.

this is the code, i don't recall where it came from:

<https://gist.github.com/914520>

------
Dobbs
I really like having the flag button on the main page. My only suggestion
would be to move it to the left of the comments button.

Either:

    
    
        points by user time ago | flag | 32 comments
        flag | points by user time ago | 32 comments
    

Otherwise it is too close to a commonly pressed button. Particularly on a
touch screen.

------
adw
As we all know we get what we measure, right?

The problem here fundamentally is that there's not a clear metric which
correlates with "good", because there's no clear definition of what "good" is.
(This is my utility function. There are many utility functions like it, but
this one is mine.)

It's a social problem, and as such I'm intensely suspicious that any
technology can fix it. In particular, I suspect that any technological
solution which "works" for some people is going to amount to a dictatorship of
that sort of people - which is OK! It's a big internet! Everyone else can go
somewhere else! - but doesn't hit our geek pleasure centres like an elegant
algorithmic solution is. In other words: if I were trying to fix this, I'd cut
straight to the chase – find and engage some people who shared my
understanding of what a good HN looks like, and empower them to moderate
aggressively and wield the banhammer.

------
ComputerGuru
Can you please consider reversing the "xx comments" and "flag" links? I think
everyone here is used to clicking the last link under a submission to go to
the comments!

~~~
threepointone
+1, please. I very nearly flagged some submissions; on a slower day, I
wouldn't have even noticed.

------
gnosis
I'd like to suggest a simple improvement:

Hide the number of votes a given comment has received until after you've voted
on it.

After a given user has voted on a given comment, the number of votes that
comment has received can be revealed to the user who voted on it.

I don't see much downside to this. It would discourage voting with the herd,
and at the same time encourage people to vote.

~~~
dominostars
This might encourage people to vote only to see the vote total.

~~~
nikcub
I hope your comment got more votes than the suggestion

If only there were a way to find out

~~~
dominostars
You can just upvote it and see. Trust me..

Anyway, it makes no difference, unless an abundance of karma will make my
comment the parent one.

------
andywood
FWIW, my immediate gut reaction to the lack of comment scores was extremely
positive.

~~~
huhtenberg
So here's a problem -- I think we all know that up/downvotes are routinely
used to agree/disagree with the comments. With one notable exception, which is
when the comment sits at 1, in which case it is not likely to be downvoted in
disagreement.

Take parent comment for example. I disagree with it and if it had a score of
2+ I would've downvoted it, because my gut reaction was not "extremely
positive". Now however I look at it and do not know if it's 1 or 2+, and so I
cannot cast my disagreement vote without potentially pushing the comment into
non-positive range.

(edit) Actually... what if there was separate agree/disagree indicator for
each comment. As in "I was going to say something, but this comment is exactly
that -> agreed". This will turn up/downvoting back to its original role of
interesting/junk quantifier.

~~~
mirkules
I was always under the impression that voting is not to be used for agreeing
or disagreeing, but rather to reward a good contribution to the discussion
(and punish a bad one). I have on numerous occasions upvoted a comment even
though I disagreed with it just because I think it has been valuable to the
overall discussion.

~~~
necubi
That's the idea in theory. In practice, it's clear that upvotes/downvotes are
often used to guide the discussion in the direction that the voter wants it to
go, which is often towards his/her innate biases.

------
noahc
Pg,

Is it possible that building on a 'broken' system isn't enough to fix the
problem(s)?

The reason I point this out is that I think its possible that as a community
grows the assumptions about the community become a part of the code and they
aren't necessarily true anymore.

When a community is small by definition it has shared values. As the community
grows it starts to fragment those shared values, but the code assumes that
they still have shared values.

I am indifferent to the idea of down voting stories, but the code doesn't
allow it because the assumption being made is that the stories being posted
are being checked against the common community values, when in fact newer
members (perhaps my self included on the newer point) see hacker news as the
next technology/startup based Digg/Reddit/Slashdot, etc.

~~~
riffraff
it would be cool if the score of an object in the system was a vector-like
thingy in which every value is the result of operations created by people in
your same account-demographic (e.g. accounts older than 3,6,9,12,15,18
months). You would be able to filter for stuff that has the most total votes,
the most votes among people in your age class, and the most people across all
age classes at vote time (people who are now one year old but voted for it one
year ago)

This way you could still select between stuff that is useful/interesting to
everyone, such as a new $X by $Y and stuff that was interesting for people
when they first read it but it's now boring since it's the tenth submission
("harry potter and the methods of rationality" comes to mind).

------
jacoblyles
I contributed late to the last thread - but having a monthly "Erlang Day" (not
necessarily about Erlang) would help establish a baseline for the kind of
culture we want while relying completely on informal methods, i.e. no changes
to code or rules of the community.

------
retree
I like the no comment scores, orange dot idea (which has made a comeback).

I hope it leads to less of the mob voting mentality which seems to take hold
every so often in some of the more popular threads and less of the "Sorry I
downvoted you" comments that appear every so often.

On the other hand, comment scores are a very quick and easy way to see what's
popular, which is still normally an informative comment. Having to wade
through a lot of highly voted comments may take a bit more effort but will
expose people to a greater variety of opinions.

------
matthias
Suggestion: the Rerun button allows veteran users to signal that an article
has reached the front page before. Far from flagging the links for removal,
the rerun button signifies that the content has a timeless quality.. it
definitely isn’t news, but it is still worthwhile. A link that is getting both
sufficient upvotes and rerun clicks is moved to the Reruns page, which would
feature all manner of old chestnuts and stop them clogging up the front page.

~~~
ugh
I really don't think that duplicate content was ever a problem for HN. It's
just not an issue.

The community has done a very good job of providing links to earlier
discussions and has generally accepted that occasional repeats of old content
are nothing to get worked up about and may even be desirable.

~~~
latch
I agree. Though I'd like something to address duplicate submissions within a
small window. Like the double front-page stories of bing's 30% market
share...or the double ask-page entries on the new karma-less comments.

------
mcantor
One risk behind hiding comment scores is that people will lose a cue for when
they accidentally downvote.

~~~
random42
While I agree to it (I was gonna point it out myself), it is a (separate)
problem already before the change. Showing the comment score change, is after
the fact of (down)voting, after which not much can be done.

A better placed/sized voting buttons, should solve this issue to a large
extent.

------
Timothee
I was just about to ask you just that. I've noticed in this thread
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2433424>) that some comments don't show
their points and that a few comments have an orange dot.

Intriguing. But I'm glad you're working on keeping the quality of HN up.

Also, clickable link for the discussion you mention:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

edit: some comments still have points. Is that just a transition period?

------
Xk
It seems that you can still see how many points a comment has when it's
nonpositive.

Edit:

And there are other comments with negative points where the number doesn't
show. And still other comments with positive score that are showing up.
Consider me confused.

~~~
Vivtek
You can see points on your own posts (which is a good idea!) but not others,
it appears.

~~~
tjr
I see that your post here currently has 1 point.

~~~
Xk
Maybe it's just switching around randomly for now? Because now I can see the
points of both of your comments.

~~~
nbpoole
Like pg said:

" _so don't freak out of the site changes in some way. It will probably change
back._ "

The orange dots / hidden points change has probably been temporarily reverted,
that's all.

~~~
Xk
We're not freaking out -- we're just curious why things are working the way
they are.

~~~
nbpoole
Didn't mean to imply you were: I was suggesting that the change might have
been temporarily reverted. Looks like it's back now.

------
mathgenius
What about something like "netflix for comments?" Ie. your votes would endow
you with a profile (a sparse vector) that then tailors HN so that you see more
of what other similar users also upvote. This would also encourage people to
vote more.

I originally thought in terms of one uber-editor that fed (votes to) a machine
learning algorithm, but then why not allow everyone to be their own editor.

~~~
gnosis
That sounds similar to something I suggested in a previous discussion on this
topic here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266>

------
triviatise
8% of men are red-green colorblind.

------
antirez
no points in comments: very interesting, a lot less bias. Unfortunately fast
scanning of the best things is compromised. Probably it's still a good idea to
avoid points, at least for a few days. When the comment is old enough there is
no reason to don't show points again.

~~~
calibraxis
Thoughts on skimming:

* Very high-rated posts could be distinguished subtly. (Maybe a small element is bolded or italicized.)

* Skimming might actually be a symptom of something wrong. Like too many low-signal posts in a thread. Also, maybe skimming even correlates with people posting too fast, or the point system leads to worse posts.

* There are other skim-markers. For example, post length and author.

* Maybe skimming using points isn't actually faster. Could people be wasting time judging whether the post's worth the points?

------
bgalbraith
Apologies if this has been suggested before.

I'm curious if something like the BCS ranking system in college football could
work for online communities. The specifics don't translate, but the general
idea is that you use a weighted combination of human and machine generated
rankings. This can be seen as maintaining the user-driven voting system but
tempered with an impartial community spirit moderator in the form of a machine
learning algorithm.

How could this be applied to HN? Let's leave the standard karma/voting system
as it exists, as that seems to generally work.

Next, determine the general distribution of votes per comment. This will allow
for things like z-scores to be determined that can notice if a particular
comment has received significantly more votes than usual.

Next, perform a machine learning algorithm on a corpus of comments. Something
as straightforward as Bayesian filters can work, though self-organizing maps
also have potential. This is effectively doing the same thing as spam
filtering, but instead of simply flagging something as spam, it would provide
its own +/- vote. The initial training would start with a baseline of existing
comments, and then periodically, say once a night, be updated with recently
added comments and votes. Additional information, such as the karma of the
commenter, can also be incorporated.

The final ranking then, which here would be how high up on the page it
appears, would be a weighted combination of user votes, z-score scaling, and
machine votes.

------
BrianAnderson
Way to issue a challenge that all large communities struggle to solve!

So I have two thoughts that I think are in a different vein than many comments
below (tried to read them all but may have missed some. Apologize for repeats)

1\. Similar to other suggestions, but with a slight twist, modify the up/down
votes to utilize the Net Promoter Score methodology. It has its issues but it
reduces a really difficult problem to a simple question that provides a
broader spectrum than y/s. Could limit the "would highly recommend" super-vote
to one story per day so users would save those votes for those articles they
find extremely valuable.

Actually, thinking about it. Would be cool to get a view of only stories that
people have "spent" their one super-vote as that is signaling extreme
importance. I think many people find many stories interesting, but would only
find a few EXTREMELY interesting enough to spend their super-vote on.

2\. One challenge is that HN has grown in size so much that there is no set of
top stories to satisfy the entire group. Would be interesting to provide a
view that matches your personal preferences. Reddit does this by subreddit,
stackoverflow by tags. My personal background is personalization in the
context of eCommerce, which looks more at user segments. So users who find
hard-core tech knowledge interesting vs. VC news vs. geographic location. In
some ways this is already being done via segmentation in the classic view:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/classic> Are there some other obvious segments on
HN?

------
nbpoole
I'm seeing green usernames for submissions and comments by new users (not sure
exactly what the threshold for "newness" is, the person I saw created their
account in the past hour)

~~~
arondeparon
I think using green usernames for 'noobstories' is wrong. Green is usually
linked to positive behaviour, earned reputation/karma or a special (empowered)
user status; not for indicating that a user is new.

~~~
brudgers
Green is also used to connotate inexperience or lack of maturity, e.g.
greenhorn, green lumber.

------
MrMan
Here is an idea. Individual karma scores, no matter how they are scored, will
create certain kinds of incentives. What if you create a global karma score
for the entire site, which is an aggregate of all user activity? Posting,
commenting, voting, would all not only be scored for each user individually,
but for the site overall, or perhaps in the future topic categories could
either be teased out by hand, or assigned using some NLP technique like LDA,
and each topic could have a score. It would at least be interesting to see the
health of hacker news on a 0-1 scale somewhere on the top menu bar, and maybe
some little stats behind the score to help illustrate the thought process
behind the score. You could use cosine distance for each posting from the n
highest scoring posts, and take the inverse of the sum of the distances to
score a potential for each post. The sum of all the potentials of all postings
within a certain time period, taken as a ratio over a trailing average
potential over a longer period would a an interesting way to possibly get a
view into how diverse and how high quality each posting tends to be.

A sitewide score would also allow you to make each user's score be a weighted
combination of individual score and their contribution to the whole. Consider
it a form of shared fitness.

~~~
MrMan
maybe you could argue a different point of view instead of downvoting my idea?
or is that the recommended way of doing things?

------
nikcub
I don't think you should do anything

This is supposed to be hacker news, if you don't like the comment counts, hide
them yourself. Hack it into something that you do find easier to manage. I
started writing my own chrome plugin a year ago and add to it as needed
(voting ppl I like up, others down, etc.)

for me HN is perfect - you will never make it perfect for tens of thousands of
people by changing it on the server.

If you start accepting user submitted tweaks now it will probably never end

------
pedalpete
One thing I've noticed about the way I use HN, is that I find I keep going to
my page, then my comments/posts to see if there are any responses, so that I
can decide to respond or not.

I think it would be nice to have a number next to my score, showing me that
their are responses, and maybe link that right to my comments/posts page.
Would save me wasting time looking at those pages when there hasn't been any
activity.

Thanks, keep up the GREAT work.

------
maukdaddy
Overall I think eliminating the point display on comments works very well! I'm
no longer tempted to pile on, either positive or negative, on comments.

------
aspir
I support the decision to downplay karma within comments; I would even
experiment with removing that data from the article listings view. This is a
data driven group of people who are simultaneously very competitive. It's
likely that the majority of readers aren't maliciously competitive regarding
karma, but this competitive, data driven nature likely has a contributing
factor to some of the referenced issues.

If you notice, many of the comments themselves are about the external of the
karma system, such as justification for downvotes, using karma as a currency,
etc. The current iteration, using karma on the back end for page ranking
purposes, will likely be the best long term solution. I will know the
community's response to my own comments, but I won't be able to notice that a
HN "super member" received 20+ votes and try to emulate their content. Over
time, comment and article rank, the original idea behind a voting
article/comment system, will become the goal, rather than earning 2 upvotes.

 _To put this in perspective, do a Ctrl+F for "karma" and "vote", then do the
same for "quality."_

------
bambax
"Upvoted" and "saved" should be two different things; today they are the same.

The only stories I want to "save" are those with practical content that I may
use later (some new utility or library, for example).

Stories I find interesting but that I fear may clutter my "save history" don't
get an upvote although they would deserve one.

Would it not help to have two separate actions, "save" and "upvote"? (Or did I
miss something obvious?)

~~~
joshuacc
I just use <http://pinboard.in> for bookmarking stories.

------
Super_Jambo
My solution to the voting problem is to separate out good posting behaviour
and good voting behaviour.

Weight votes by reputation, calculate reputation by judging each vote for
difficulty (did you vote before it had obviously won / lost) and success.

So you get reputation for voting up at -10 when it ends up at 1000. You lose
reputation for voting up at 1000 when it ends at -10.

Since judgement is subjective you need a bunch of moderators to seed the site
with good judgement. Then so long as they over-ride votes on the most obvious
examples it should be a self correcting reputation system.

I don't understand why in HN's current system voting power comes from karma
which comes from occasional good posting. You could spend most of your time
flaming, getting into arguments and down voting everyone you disagree with but
so long as you're quick on posting PG's articles or write the occasional good
comment HN views you as a model citizen.

Be interested in any critique of this as it's how ISDaily my news start-up
works. (<http://www.isdaily.com>)

------
famousactress
The red dot helps quickly identify comment threads that might be compelling
(something I used score for before).. but the lack of scores on the comments
view (using the 'comments' header link) makes that view almost useless to me..
I don't use it all that often, but occasionally peruse it to identify threads
that may be more interesting than their titles led me to believe.

------
count
On the front page, can you switch the order of 'flag' and 'N comments' - I
think it's a 'Fits Law' type thing. I click into the comments for basically
every story, but having to get between the time stamp and the "| flag"
indicator ads a second of hesitation to make sure I'm not accidentally
flagging something that I want to read.

~~~
count
That was fast, and much nicer, thank you!

------
alanh
Not showing scores is curious. For one — and this isn’t a criticism — it makes
voting feel slightly idempotent. For another, given the way both arrows always
disappear after a vote, it makes it tougher to see if you clicked the
“correct” arrow (always been an issue given their size and proximity).

------
rooshdi
Along with hiding comment vote counts, maybe you could try experimenting with
hiding story vote counts as well. It may encourage readers to comment on
stories they are genuinely interested in rather than the top voted stories of
the day.

------
Groxx
Thoughts re: zero karma display currently in place:

I'm getting a lot more up-votes for what I consider to be relatively mediocre
comments. _Some_ display is useful, as it helps prevent such artificial
inflation. It is interesting in that it does mask whether the top comment is
high-rated or merely new - I've gotten used to it with my Flattehn extension
and I sort of like it, it helps spread the votes around a bit more.

Not sure what all needs to be done to counter-act everything. Keep up the
experimenting! And may I request tool-tips on color / display differences,
like the green names had a little while ago? Or a current-version legend
somewhere?

------
jchonphoenix
You might just consider making the flagging ability more apparent, and give it
to some of the more senior members of HN. I only recently discovered it, but
it has been useful in removing posts that belong on Reddit.

------
imajes
This might be worth experimenting with.

One of the problems of such communities is the echo chamber nature of hearing
the same voices. I'd be interested to see what happens if you made it so that
the more karma points you had, the harder it is for your comment to rise to
the top. If a post by a leaderboard member is really interesting, then it'll
get upvoted a lot- but because of the group think aspect leaderboard members
tend to get upvoted a lot because they're in the leaderboard.

nb: This problem may be mitigated by not having scores visible.

------
grandalf
Comments with <1 points should be ignored, and an adjusted score should be
calculated thus:

adjusted_score = ln(square(upvotes - downvotes + 1))

This way, all comments/posts that generate some goodwill are rewarded, and the
incentive not to post for fear of hurting the average is removed.

And the log will frustrate karma whores b/c they won't be able to separate
themselves from the pack as easily.

Also I think some measure of how controversial a comment/post is would be
useful, since it would help find interesting areas where the community is in
disagreement.

------
wh-uws
Just putting my 2 cents in for what they are worth.

Its hard for me to keep track of what the community thinks of comments without
their karma score beside them.

~~~
kristofferR
Yeah, usually I don't have time to read all the comments, so I just jump to
the most popular ones and read those. Now I can't see what the most popular
comments are.

------
lazugod
You'd think that text posts (like the parent) that have links within them
would make their links clickable once they pass some karma threshold.

------
6ren
Without seeing comment scores, it's hard to find the ones worth reading - or
are they ranked by score now (instead of by hotness)?

~~~
barrkel
Trouble is, I often (used to) read highly-voted comments that were children of
poorly-voted branches. I don't have the time to read every comment, so I find
I'm reading a lot fewer comments now.

On the other hand, I'm now less emotionally invested in replying to comments
to my own comments. Before, if replies to my comments got more votes than my
own comment, I might be inclined to argue my case further. I'm less likely to
do that now.

------
shii
I'd love if you tried the shipped idea suggested by ericb[1]. A simple input-
form in the profile page that someone could put a link to and that would light
up a 1x1 pixel next to their username if they've shipped a startup yet.

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918772>

------
hanifvirani
What I am looking forward to is submission downvoting. I hope it's one of the
features that gets experimented.

------
nod
I love not seeing karma on comments. I've realized that I've made three
comments today, where I rarely comment normally (once a week or less). I don't
know why, but it takes away the "you'd better write two paragraphs and predict
the group-think" feeling that stops me from contributing more.

------
rms
Should I start flagging stories that I just don't like rather than only ones
that strictly violate the rules?

------
solipsist
How about removing the total number of karma points from user's profiles now?

Excluding our own profiles, what are the advantages of seeing other's karma?

If we're going to remove the presence of karma from comments, why not with the
user profiles as well?

~~~
dfox
And what is the advantage of seeing our own karma? It seems to me that it is
(marginally) more useful to see karma of other users than one's own.

~~~
solipsist
I think the concept of seeing your own karma total goes hand in hand with
seeing karma scores on your own comments. People will want to track and
monitor their karma if they are able to.

------
ptn
FWIW, I'm already liking not seeing the score of comments. I can see how it
really contributes to the discussion. Maybe do a poll later to vote for which
changes should stick around?

------
earnubs
My experience: I just read the comment thread on an HN post and without the
points beside each comment my brain acted like a crutch had been removed. I
approve :)

------
dan335
I wish there was a section where people could only submit things they wrote,
created or had a hand in creating. I can get news somewhere else.

------
kmfrk
Crossing my fingers that it will be easier to tell users apart soon. That's
currently my biggest gripe.

EDIT: Aaand negative karma. I like the changes already.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I think it's good that the usernames don't show. Other HN members have
expressed a similar opinion over the years... it prevents voting for/against
the person keeping your impression of the comment (at least the first
impression) based on the content and not the author.

~~~
ericd
I strongly disagree. It's very useful to be able to qualify comments with what
I know of that user, especially when I don't know much about the field being
talked about.

I'm much more likely to take tptacek's advice on security more seriously than
someone else's. Likewise with grellas's legal analysis, Patio11's small
business/SEO advice, etc. That their names along might cause high karma for
them isn't a bad thing. Quite the opposite, it causes their comments to be
pushed to the top, which is almost always a good thing, as they're
consistently the best comments in those threads.

It gives some measure of ability to gauge trustworthiness.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I'm not disagreeing. In fact, I upvoted you.

But I'm saying that the first impulse impression/reaction for a comment should
be based on what it says, not who's doing the saying. After you read it, you
can qualify it by its author. It's not like I'm suggesting we hide the author
or anything - it's right there, when you need to find out who wrote what. But
don't make it stick out any more than it already does. Put the content front
and center, and make it the focus of attention. After you've read the comment
and judged it for what it says and how its written, _then_ reflect on who
wrote it and what kind of weight that will give it.

~~~
kmfrk
Hacker News' display of usernames borders on anonymity; it's not highlighted
nor emphasized in any way. It's like HN is an invitation to debate with its
hivemind.

It should at the very least be easier to scan the usernames when reading large
threads. Now, it's either a strain or something you forgo entirely. I'd be
interested to see an eye movement analysis of HN users in relation to the
username displays.

------
shawnee_
Individual comments sans karma-per-comment is superbly smart. Seems like it
will encourage higher quality comment quality across the board, as a function
of less-biased individual comments in aggregate.

Another + side-effect: decreasing the number of attack down-votes. It is
annoying to see scores < 0 due to another person (coward) who uses downvote to
"disagree" w/a valid point, and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon. It _is_
possible to disagree without downvoting; just takes a little more thought /
energy.

------
ary
_Please_ experiment with not showing comment or story scores. Just show a
user's total karma on the profile page.

------
greencircle
The other thread states one problem is mean comments. A good solution for this
is to require the use of real names.

~~~
MartinCron
Is your real name really "Green Circle"?

------
j_baker
Hasn't the "no scores by comments" idea already been tried? I recall it not
working out well for some reason...

------
vessenes
I'm really enjoying the no points on comments; it's making me think about the
content more. Nice!

~~~
known
I think it is better to disclose the total points after I vote the comment.

------
tvon
I love the lack of points showing when it comes to Apple discussions.

------
teyc
pg,

First up, this _is_ nice. The absence of comment scores throw people around a
bit, and people are generally more careful since it is difficult to directly
receive feedback.

Secondly, the madness associated with karma is gone. Can you imagine in post-
earthquake Japan where for a brief few days, it didn't matter whether you are
a CEO or have a million dollars. It is a brief moment where we are reduced to
who we already are: humans. Beyond the profit motive. I wonder if this is
sustainable in the long run. It'd be like Communism (?) gulp.

Perhaps there could be karma-free days as an experiment where for those days,
you couldn't earn karma even if you tried. Kind of like Sabbath. It forces a
different perspective.

------
shawndumas
clickable link: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

------
maxharris
I hope you don't turn the points display back on. Hiding points makes it more
likely that users will actually _read_ a comment before voting it up or down.

------
mkramlich
Would be nice if all URL's were clickable.

------
drivebyacct2
Please fix downvoting. Even right now, there's a thread that I can my post be
downvoted, and then my reply later that sets the record straight be upvoted.
Apparently people here vote before informing themselves or reading the rest of
the thread. Regardless, not being able to change a vote, especially if a
simple misclick is made, is very, very frustrating.

------
mkramlich
Sometimes we accidentally upvote or downvote something. Would be nice if user
could Undo/Change his vote.

------
DiabloD3
I don't want to attention whore, but I brought this up earlier
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427163>

------
bravura
Okay, I'll come clean. I've been experimenting with HN for over three years.

At first, I would try out HN and the effect on me was quite mild. I simply
didn't see what the fuss was about. But the most I experimented with HN, the
more I realized how powerful it is.

Nowadays, I use HN daily, sometimes more than once daily.

Sure my relationships with people who don't use HN have suffered. But who
cares? They don't understand. That's why they don't use HN.

~~~
memset
Neat - even though we can't see votes, downvoted comments are gray. Maybe all
of a thread's comment's color will be normalized between Black and Invisible,
depending on a comment's relative number of upvotes (or negative score).

