
Ask HN: Orange dot? - colbyolson
What is this little orange dot I keep seeing around the comments?<p>Is it related to the now-missing comment ratings?
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pg
I'm experimenting with not displaying comment scores. The orange dot is an
alternate way to help users find high-scoring comments. More details here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979>

~~~
yters
I like the idea. The dot is basically shorthand for what we use the score for,
minus a kind of "attractor" effect whereby two high scores, one higher than
the other, skews my mind one way.

Anyways, have definitely noticed a distinct difference in how I read thread.
Instead of skimming scores, I now skim text.

~~~
apotheon
I'm not exactly sure I understand what you're saying. Are you saying . . .

1\. You used to pay more attention to scores than to text? (i.e., "I used to
skim the score to see if I wanted to read the comment, but now I skim the
text.")

2\. You used to pay more attention to text than you do now? (i.e., "I used to
skim scores, then read text more carefully, but now I just skim text and move
on.")

3\. Something else entirely?

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wvenable
I'm surprised nobody suggested adding a mouse over to the orange dots. The
first thing I did was mouse-over to look for a tooltip to explain the dot and
got nothing.

~~~
antirez
I did exactly the same thing indeed, and probably tons of other people we can
no longer count because of lack of score on your comment ;)

~~~
indiejade
Suggestion for what the mouseover could read: "Our most sincere apologies; YC
News has contracted a rather serious case of the chicken pox." (:

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tumult
In case pg or anyone else is still reading this thread, I just thought I'd
throw out my opinion on the experiment:

Today was the best day on HN in recent memory, and by a large margin. I've
followed almost all the links on the front, and the signal-to-noise ratio in
the comments seems to have increased by a full order of magnitude.

Please return the old behavior of displaying comment scores. I suffered an
extra hour's loss of productivity today.

(This is awesome, please don't go back to regular comment scores.)

~~~
hughprime
I disagree -- to me, signal-to-noise looks somewhat lower.

I also found a thread which seemed to have devolved into the trading of
personal insults without getting greyed out. I didn't like that.

------
seiji
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846343> and
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123>

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akamaka
Hey admins, have you considered toning down the shade of orange a bit? It's
pretty distracting right now, compared to the neutral colors of the rest of
the page.

I'd suggest using something closer to #ff9955

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jacquesm
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123>

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tel
In my usage, the orange dot is getting confused with the orange star of "this
is my post". I like the consistent color scheme, but maybe there needs to be
something else to make it more distinct.

Other than that, I really like it.

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chanux
Orange? Apparently PG sees it red :)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123>

~~~
ugh
The color was changed.

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yters
One prob w/ lack of score: I misinterpret time as score.

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mapleoin
Also, it should be topcolor, not orange...

~~~
mechanical_fish
Oh, dear. My topcolor is a light blue that looks good with orange but would be
invisible in dot form.

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colbyolson
I see, thanks guys for the timely replies.

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erlanger
Silliness. A community far too self-aware.

By the way, suppressing these metrics is pointless. We are intelligent people
who notice the difference between two comments with very similar upvotes and
one that far outpaces the other and find these proportions to be of interest.
The new portrayal of comment rankings keeps interesting information from users
and will end up stunting the community's progress. If you're just trying to
ward off users, maybe remove the nav and make the site even slower.

There are far more interesting ways to differentiate. I'd like to see this
site be as light and fast as possible (would appeal to our hacker ethic) and
allow users to customize the hell out of it given knowledge of Arc or similar
(good chance to promote your language as well).

~~~
krav
Agreed. The numbering, for me, is a good sign of which comments to keep an eye
on while scanning the page, rather than get lost in text.

~~~
pg
Doesn't the orange dot work for that?

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dionidium
Well, no. With the numbers I can get a sense of how quickly a comment is being
upvoted by looking at the time it was posted. I can also compare a comment's
total points to the those of surrounding comments for an indication of its
relative worth.

These things aren't perfect measures, but I find them useful.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
I think you are using the numbers to judge the comment, instead of finding an
interesting comment, and forming your own opinion.

~~~
gizmo
It's just a filter. By reading only high scoring comments you will get a
combination of insightful posts and annoying witticisms. Only rarely do you
get a false positive: a post that with a high score that is inane or simply
wrong.

By reading every post you'll certainly find the "diamond in the rough", posts
that don't get the recognition they deserve. But you'll also have to trudge
through loads of posts of little merit. Given that there is an infinite amount
of information on the internet, those 2 minutes can probably be better spent
on wikipedia or reading the top post in a different HN thread.

Additionally: HN isn't just about opinion, it is also for a large part about
fact. And insightful facts almost always rise to the top. On the bottom of
threads you often find things that are wrong or subtly wrong.

Judging by the numbers may very well be the most efficient and reliable way to
get to insightful content.

------
antirez
To work hard is the only way to build great things. You can get rich by
accident, but you can't build _great things_ by accident. Only working hard.

Still it is very important to realize that it's better to improve the quality
of your work and work 6/8 hours a day and find the time to relax and enjoy the
life. To work very well and focused for 6 hours a day without interruptions I
think can be considered to work hard as much as working 12 hours a day with a
lot of breaks, environmental noise, and so on.

Usually I work from home, but I have a company with five people working
together with me, and from time to time I go to work on the office in order to
organize the work, solve the hardest tech problems, and so forth. When I'm at
the office I'm a lot less focused because I receive many questions, I can't
just have my usual working patterns, and my productivity is something like 20%
compared to my working at home productivity.

~~~
antirez
My score is -2 but I got no replies, I wonder if it's because you think that 6
hours of hard work a day are too little, or for other reason. Please feel free
to comment even anonymously because I'm very interested in this issue. Thanks
to downmodders for any hint, I believe that smart people should use critics to
improve themselves.

~~~
allenbrunson
you got modded down because your comment has nothing to do with the topic at
hand. perhaps you meant your comment to go in some other thread.

~~~
antirez
Ooops sorry, I posted in the wrong topic indeed. This post was about "working
hard is overrated".

