
Want Hacker News Comment Scores Back? Check out HNPoints.com - HNPoints
http://hnpoints.com
======
blhack
If we're going to open a new dialog on this:

Has anybody noticed the drastic decline in quality of links and comments in
the last month or so? I think one of the problems is that, without comment
scores, new users don't have feedback from the community on how they're
supposed to act. There's no way for them to learn the culture.

So it's September, but with no way to tell the new students to mind their
manners.

~~~
tptacek
Bad comments are still grey.

People can see their own comment scores.

HN is still in decline, but I don't think it's worse than when it had public
scores.

Meanwhile, not having up-to-the-minute scores makes the site more pleasant to
participate in; one isn't prodded to make statements in reaction to ludicrous
(and likely ephemeral) voting swings.

~~~
blhack
Yeah, but there's no context for the new users. I know that a +20 comment
score is really good, but I only know this because I've been around for longer
than the removal of the scores.

New users wouldn't have this feedback. They might think they're making good
contributions at +2-3.

People talk about "group think", but when you've got an intelligent group
(like HN), a bit of group think can be a good thing.

~~~
tptacek
I can see why you'd want feedback that worked this way, but HN comment scores
never did. Also, +20 isn't a "really good" comment score. Depending on the
thread, it's:

* A comment made by someone with name recognition whose comments are read in RSS by 20 people.

* A comment on a political thread that states a clear polarizing opinion for people to glom onto.

* A mystical winged unicorn "good comment".

* A mediocre comment on a buzzy thread ("TechCrunch Says Apple App Store Approval Process Makes iOS Better Than Android!").

My best comments on the site are not, as a rule, my top-scored comments.

Meanwhile, public scores clearly do create problems: they promote groupthink,
they prod reactionary voting or, worse, reactionary commenting, and they act
as nerd pheromones driving tangential discussions to the tops of threads.

The harm of public scores outweighs the good, in my opinion. Reasonable people
can disagree about that point. But I'm not sure they can disagree that there's
_nothing_ bad about public scores (which is not an argument you made).

~~~
wheels
_My best comments on the site are not, as a rule, my top-scored comments._

My best comments usually get about 5 points. That's because the _best_ things
that I write are usually on very specific topics that I know a lot about.
However, the way that breaks down is that there's a tiny number of people who
also know enough about those things to know if I'm just talking out of my ass
or actually saying something useful. And even if they could tell, there's
often not enough backstory for someone who doesn't at least have a passing
interest in those areas to make sense of them.

On the other hand, my 50+ point comments tend to be some combination of well-
timed, snarky and generic. Basically, they're the sort of thing that HN wants
to _discourage_. As such I'm generally a fan of the scores being hidden.

~~~
tptacek
Strong agree.

One of my highest-rated comments (inexplicable; I'm embarrassed by it):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2184067>

Meanwhile, here's a comment I actually had to do research to write. Skim it
and take a guess how its karma relates to the previous comment:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994085>

Hint book: _ZBER GUNA RVTUG GVZRF YRFF XNEZN._

~~~
pkteison
Why are you embarassed by the first one? Targeted specific criticism is
_fantastic_ and hard to come by. The world needs more "this is bad -and heres
why-" and less "yo Dawg I'm just not feeling it Dawg"

~~~
tptacek
Can we just suffice it to say that I think the scores on these two comments
should be --- at least --- reversed?

~~~
jcr
Of course the scores should be reversed on a place called "Hacker News" but
you know the reason why the scores are the way they are; As the popularity of
this site increases, the average skill set of the users deceases. Your
"embarrassing" post is comprehensible to unskilled people, but your beautiful
post is well beyond the skills of most users to understand.

------
user24
Yeah, having got past the initial "ooh, this is cool" phase, I do actually
think HN was better off with the comment scores.

For example, I was looking at a popular submission the other day and someone
had said "Hey is there a PHP port of this?". Back in the day, I'd be able to
see how many points it had as a rough indicator of how many other people would
have found a PHP port useful. Now I can't tell if that was just one guy, or if
50 people thought the same.

Please, PG, bring the points back? (and while you're at it, stop new users
being shown in green?)

~~~
ericb
Speaking of coloring, what if, instead of points, highly voted items showed
orange-red or something to that effect.

I lost information when comments went away. When someone suggested a payment
processor and got 150 upvotes, I would know they sound respectable.

Maybe bringing comment scores back isn't needed, just a rough sense of how the
comment was received via coloration.

~~~
user24
Yeah that would solve it. (even better, make the shade of colour relative to
the number of votes deployed on that page. So it's indicative of the
percentage of votes on the page, rather than some absolute value)

------
michael_nielsen
On the issue of scores vs no-scores, it'd be possible to A/B test this, so
half of HN users see scores, and half don't.

Metrics to track might include the number of comments made, number of hits on
the site, number of upvotes / downvotes, and probably many more.

Some people obviously feel strongly about this issue, and it might be
necessary to take steps to prevent gaming of the outcome. Keeping the metrics
secret until after the test would help with this. So would publicly announcing
that only a small (say 10%) but undisclosed subset of users will be used to
determine the outcomes of the testing. So any individual user wouldn't know if
their behaviour would affect the results, and so would have little incentive
to waste their time trying to affect the outcome.

It'd be nice to take a data-driven approach to resolving this question.

~~~
gnosis
An interesting idea. But what would stop someone from continuously creating
new accounts until they got an account which could see the scores?

~~~
michael_nielsen
You could exclude recently created or low-karma accounts, or at least track
them separately. Indeed, there are many subgroups of HN users it might be
interesting to track. E.g., new users, or users who've had accounts for a long
time, or users with particularly high average comment scores, etc.

------
gnosis
I much prefer the new HN, without visible comment scores.

When comment scores were visible, it was obvious that many people would just
vote with the herd, downvoting comments with lots of downvotes, and upvoting
comments with lots of upvotes.

This is still a problem, since HN still tends to put highly rated comments
near the top, and low rated comments near the bottom. But it's not nearly as
much of a problem as it was when comment scores were visible.

I think the quality of comments has increased with the new system, and I find
myself reading more of the comments now that the scores aren't visible.

I also find myself voting less, and voting only on comments I personally feel
are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad.

One change I would like to see HN experiment with is making the score of a
given comment visible only after you've voted on that comment.

This will both encourage voting and also satisfy people's curiosity, while
still discouraging voting with the herd.

~~~
user24
> When comment scores were visible, it was obvious that many people would just
> vote with the herd, downvoting comments with lots of downvotes, and upvoting
> comments with lots of upvotes.

Hmm. First of all you had no way of knowing that people were voting because of
the high (or low) scores. Your theory seems to be "Hmm, the score on this
comment is un-naturally high, therefore people must have just been voting on
it because it was high". Secondly, now that we can't see the scores, you've no
way of knowing whether the points awarded are just as 'un-naturally' high as
they were before scores were shown. For example, one of my comments in this
thread has got 11 points in the last ten minutes or so - that's without scores
being shown.

In the past, you may have attributed that score to herd-voting. But clearly
that can't be the case, as no-one can see the score _. (_ except the few
who've installed the points plugin!)

~~~
gnosis
Well, it's true that I can't read people's minds and find out the real reason
that they voted for something.

However, it's not true that there weren't signs that herd voting was going on.

I've spent quite a bit of time on HN, and have monitored many popular threads
and have seen how comments fared when they've gotten lots of up or down votes.

It was my feeling (though just a feeling, without hard data to support it)
that comments would tend to get upvoted substatially more when they already
had a relatively high rating, and downvoted when they had a relatively low
rating.

Also, I noticed many comments that I considered to be of high quality get
passed over for low quality comments with higher scores, and what I considered
to be kneejerk downvoting on valuable comments with lower scores.

Now that comment scores are no longer visible, it's harder to gauge these
trends, but not impossible.

HN still tends to place higher rated comments near the top, and lower rated
comments near the bottom, so you can get a feel for how people are voting on a
given comment by making note of how the comment moves up and down the page.

The scores of your own comments are also visible. So you can draw some
conclusions from monitoring voting on them.

I would certainly love to see public release of anonymized HN voting data, and
some good analysis of these sorts of trends (also on voting patterns in
relation to how long a given user has been on HN, and how active that user is,
etc..).

Until then, all we have are our own subjective interpretation of what we've
seen happen on the site.

------
CWuestefeld
It really bothers me that so many people here seem to be saying " _I_ am
capable of scoring articles fairly, but the rest of the community seems not to
be able to think for themselves, falling victim to group think and a herd
mentality."

This seems like a lot of fundamental attribution error [1] going on here.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error>

~~~
mixmax
I don't think that's accurate - I want points back because it allows me to see
what _other_ people have voted. Because I trust this community I'll be fairly
certain these ar ethe comments that will hold the most value for me.

~~~
CWuestefeld
I agree with you. It seems to me that those _opposed_ to visible points are
saying that "other people don't vote properly".

~~~
tptacek
I don't think I voted well either. I think you may have set up a false dilemma
here.

~~~
scott_s
Agreed.

------
larryfreeman
In my view, the comment scores made the site more fun and more social.

One thought is that maybe the score gets hidden if it is 1 or less. I think
that scores are especially interesting when it highlights a great comment or
provides feedback to the person making the comment.

The ordering of comments without a score is a good example of why a visible
score is needed. You assume that the best comments are on top but it is not
clear how good are the comments below the top one.

Since the scores were removed, I have been commenting less often and often
ignoring many of the comments below the top ones.

------
tokenadult
The submitted site is interesting. I will not go to the trouble of
contributing any scores I am aware of to the database, however. Here in this
thread, we are once again in metadiscussion about whether or not it was a good
idea for HN to experiment with not showing users the comment karma scores of
other users, a change that happened not long ago. When pg wrote his post "Ask
HN: How to stave off decline of HN?" just 47 days ago,

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

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

That's still the key issue. In the view of the site founder, who has had a
registered account here for 1684 days, many of the high-scoring comments
carried a false signal of quality, likely to mislead users about which
comments are factually accurate or helpful to the community. If some change of
voting rules or comment karma visibility brings about higher scores for good
comments, and lower scores for mean, dumb, or other bad comments, that is
helpful to all readers of HN.

Feel free to review the site guidelines

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

and the site welcome message

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

for guidance on what is desired here and thus guidance on how to vote. I defer
to the site founder on all issues of site governance. I have found HN largely
to be a worthwhile website for my 914 days as a registered user, and my
interest is mostly to make sure that the site founder and the members of his
volunteer editor ("curator") team

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

continue to enjoy the site and find it useful for themselves. They are doing a
good job, and I want them to have incentive to keep up the good work. On my
part, I have been able to find good comments more readily since the comment
karma scores were hidden than I was before.

~~~
Hawramani
I wonder if a system that weighed upvotes based on the commenter's karma would
make things better. The top 10% (or 50%) of users could get full upvoting
capability, while the rest can give a fraction of an upvote based on their
location on the karma order.

------
blhack
I love this. A hacker approach to getting the points back :)

~~~
HNPoints
Thanks for your support! Yep, just trying to make something people want. :)

~~~
blhack
This is _definitely_ something people want. Thanks for building it :)

------
spottiness
There is a huge asymmetry in the power of HN users between those that can
down-vote and the rest. The problem is that many of the "powerfuls" use their
privilege to punish other users based on disagreements, whims, or simply to
silence opposite opinions. It is OK to indicate the popularity of a comment by
moving it to the top but it's wrong to silence an unpopular comment by fading
it away. That should be reserved only to comments that violate the rules:
spams, trolls, shameless ads, etc.

Put the unpopulars at the bottom or indicate the degree of popularity with a
number, but don't disappear it. Fading away honest unpopular comments is a big
turn off that ultimately harms the debate.

------
user24
How about throwing the code[1] up on github?

[1] The XPI is a slim greasmonkey-compiled script which just loads
<http://hnpoints.com/hnpoints.js> into the page

~~~
HNPoints
I'm planning on doing that, but wanted to fix up any bugs that crop up first.
In the meantime, as you noted, the un-obfuscated JS file is up on the server
for all to see. It's used in the bookmarklet and Firefox plugin directly, and
the Chrome, Opera, and Safari extensions use the same file bundled up with
minor or no changes.

~~~
user24
By the way, I don't think you'll get past the mozilla review process with this
extension structure. When I wrote one for my job, I seem to remember them
being nervous about loading and executing JS from 3rd parties (the thinking
being: if you're hacked, suddenly everyone who installed your extension is
also hacked, especially as the JS is executed with raised privs.) Not that
you're at that stage yet, but I just thought I'd give you a heads-up :)

Nice idea, well executed.

PS: You aren't using the extension yourself? edit: ah you are now :)

~~~
HNPoints
Thanks for the tip! Given how technically savvy most of HN is, I was thinking
the XPI download would be sufficient at least for now, but when I do go to
submit it to the addons repository, I will be sure to put the actual JS in
there.

I am indeed using the Chrome extension, but it only updates comment scores
every 10 minutes while on HN as not to slow down the HN reading experience. :)

------
wccrawford
I'm onboard, but I think it's funny that this is the only thread I've seen
numbers in so far.

~~~
HNPoints
Yeah, in its infancy, it's natural for all of the participants to be
congregated on the inaugural thread. :) Comment scores for people who have the
extension should show up for any comment they've made in the past two weeks,
though, and it should start filling in around HN as more people start using
it.

------
ozataman
Dear PG, please bring back the vote counts and vote-based sorting. If you want
to give the option, make it a per-user setting to disable.

My recent approach to having to weed through ALL comments to find the
interesting ones has been to completely avoid reading them and switch to
different channels of obtaining information (blogs, apps, reddit, etc.)

------
noneTheHacker
Apparently Websense filters the site as "Potentially Damaging Content Sites."

I am not saying this thinking that the site is potentially damaging. Websense
is pretty dumb about most of the things it chooses. I just wanted to let
HNPoints know that because it blocks people from seeing it from behind a
Websense filter.

~~~
HNPoints
Thanks for the heads up; I will see what I can do. :)

------
KeithMajhor
How do you infer comment scores. The order of comments appears to be
determined by both score and elapsed time. You'd have to have pretty exact
knowledge of how it worked. Is that information available?

~~~
HNPoints
The source code for Hacker News is available with the Arc download. pg has
said that the actual ranking algorithm differs slightly from the code listed
in order to thwart abuse, but for the purposes of ranges I thought it'd be
close enough. Knowing the time, relative ranking, and the known scores of
participants, the ranges are basically "how many points would this comment
need to be one rank higher/lower".

~~~
brianpan
Thanks for this extension.

A suggestion- I understand what you're trying to convey with the point range,
but for usability I'd prefer always seeing one number there. I don't mind a
best guess and marking the score as an approximate number. Having to mentally
parse ranges and less than symbols adds a slight speed bump.

------
resdirector
Goodness and badness is subjective. Up/down voting should exist only for the
purpose of recommending articles to each individual _user_. This is far
different from the typical use of up/down which is to recommend articles to
the _collective_ , which is not robust against influxes from other
communities, e.g. reddit, digg etc.

In other words, when I log in, I should see my own _personal_ HN list of
stories, that have been submitted by people I respect (i.e. people I've
previously upvoted), or people that they respect etc.

I call this idea PeopleRank.

------
DTrejo
I would love to see information from PG on the following in relation to the
recent changes in HN:

    
    
        - increase/decrease in activity of users with highest karma
        - increase/decrease average in comment score, normalized 
            by time after post of OP
        - amount of time the highest rated posts stayed on the front page
        - trends for # of flags
    

Also, it would be great if he __put the guidelines on the submission page __.

I've posted this before, but haven't heard anything.

------
marknutter
Seriously, just bring the friggin' scores back. I feel this experiment has run
its course and at this point it's really just more irritating than anything.

------
smosher
I was relieved when the scores disappeared. The less unnecessary information
the better, I find. Besides, I think score visibility just promotes
groupthink.

I don't use score sheets with my friends. Moderation becomes necessary in a
pseudonymous environment, but there's no reason for it to become visible where
it's not necessary. Reply-order shuffling and grey-out seem to be a pretty
good fit there.

------
tristanperry
Thanks for this; I've installed it. I don't really think that disabling the
public points has lead to better discussions.

~~~
J3L2404
+1

------
nikcub
Are you filtering on the server side for cheating?

(I am testing it with this very comment)

Edit: No

Double Edit: well it was 99999 for a moment, back to 1, so you are doing
something. gg.

------
ck2
Take away points from people too.

Only submissions themselves should have points.

That way there is no "ego" - it's only about the articles.

------
brandall10
Thank you so much for doing this.

------
ryanto
I guess I don't really get the point of this. The whole idea of ditching
points was to see if it could generate better discussion. By using this
extension you are re-enabling points (even if only for a few select users).
That re-enabling is going to encourage those users to go back to their bad
posting habits... or so we would assume if the original theory that points
cause bad posts is correct.

I know a lot of you love your points, but maybe we should see if no points
really does generate better discussion rather than trying to find a way to
create a point system.

PS: I think points is really tricky, it rewards people for great comments, but
it also rewards those stupid-one-line-no-thinking comments. Maybe only show
points for comments with more text... whatever, thats a whole other subject.

~~~
bradleyland
The point of this is that users' wants & desires are really hard to dictate.
The _desired outcome_ of ditching points was to see if it could generate
better discussion. The thing is, there are a certain sub-set of users
(personally, I'm ambivalent) who really, really want the point system back,
and don't necessarily agree with the assertion that HN was on the decline to
begin with.

I have a tendency to use HN in a few ways:

* As a tech industry firehose: I review headlines in RSS (Reeder) and only 'v' through to headlines that really pique my interests.

* As a means to directly interact with smart people whom I would not otherwise meet (I'm in a small town in Florida).

* As a means to understand how people feel about the ideas I'm reading.

That last use case has been more or less squashed by the removal of visible
points. I can only know how much the community agrees or disagrees with what
_I_ say, not those in disagreement with me. What's ironic is that
agreement/disagreement wasn't the purpose of the karma system at HN to begin
with. That's just how it was frequently used.

You can blame this on the fact that the attribution of karma points on HN was
supposed to be driven by causes that many people simply don't think about. Put
another way, voting the way we're intended to isn't intuitive to most people.
This situation is made worse by the fact that virtually every other site with
a similar voting system uses it to express agreement/disagreement, rather than
conversational contribution/detraction.

The benefit of transparency is offset by the many well argued counter-points.
The perception of this issue has a lot to do with one's personal use case. I'm
happy to keep two out of three, but for someone who plays more of a spectator
role, I'm sure the loss of the point system is a big hit to the utility of the
site.

------
lwhi
For goodness' sake people. You don't need to be told which comments are
'good'. In any case, the score system is indicating popularity, not quality.

Use your own judgement, you don't need to behave as part of a herd.

------
togasystems
Quick question that is off topic, but did you do the design for that page
yourself or did you purchase it off some sort of theme site? Just wondering
cause I love it.

~~~
HNPoints
The design is from themeforest.net, with some minor adjustments. :)

------
MrMatters
For some reason it just doesn't feel the same ;) :

<http://i.imgur.com/3u1Rb.png>

I wish we didn't have to rely on a 3rd party.

------
jcr
Typing is kinda difficult for me on most days, so I don't comment much. I vote
a little bit on comments, when I bother to read them, but I tend to vote-up
more on submissions. I've also have been known to do a lot of flagging on the
/newest queue (and even triggering the "excessive flagger" threshold).

I do try to remember to make new submissions for all to enjoy, but the irony
is, this means I'm off somewhere else looking for interesting stuff rather
than finding it here. The stuff that _I_ find interesting is new tech,
engineering, security and science developments (i.e. hacking up new solutions
and analysis) along with a small splattering of business.

The speed of churn on the /newest queue means some of my submissions are not
even seen. On average, there's maybe two or three other people here with
similar interests to mine, or better said, they appreciated the submission
enough to up-vote. But that is on average, so plenty of my submissions vanish
into obscurity with no notice. --This is not a complaint. Other people have
other interests, and the fast queue progression should be expected when there
is no barrier to entry.

The trouble is, the fast queue means submitters get very little _USEFUL_
feedback. If you post some link-baited controversy, getting 1000+ points on
the submission is not too unusual, but it probably isn't noteworthy new
hacking. The _good hacking stuff_ on HN seldom hits the main /news page,
instead it's buried deeply in the /newest queue. --It has always been like
this. Blame human nature. If you look at /classic or do some HN spelunking by
item?id= or hit archive.org for old snapshots, you'll find the main /news page
has neither improved nor declined.

I think gaining points for submissions is unfair. In my opinion, I think a
submission just says, "Hey, I thought this was interesting, and you might
too." When a submission is sincere, it's just a friendly gesture with good
intentions. But we all know how good intentions work. Whether or not the
submissions is ever seen by others here, or more importantly, is interesting
hacking _to them_ is generally unknown, even to the submitter. The displayed
up-votes on submissions are really just a popularity contest feeding on link-
baited controversy.

Another reason why gaining points for submissions is unfair is a submission
has vastly superior visibility compared to a comment. I believe PG has some
secret sauce running to address the visibility discrepancy. As far as I've
been able to divine through observation, points from submissions don't count
towards the "average" listed in your profile. Well, it seems that way on my
account, but I think even older and more active commenting members (grellas)
may have their average calculated with both submissions and comments. (Don't
get me wrong, when grellas posts, I read it, and usually up-vote. I doubt I'm
alone on that so his exceedingly high average might be warranted from comments
alone).

So the display of points on submissions fails to be particularly valuable
metric. Similar could be said for the display of points on comments. I refuse
to care what other people think of you or your statements, and I would prefer
avoid being biased by displayed points so I make up my own mind on whether or
not I find your comment interesting.

For notes, it was tptacek that made the suggestion to remove the display of
comment points in the "Stave Off The Decline of HN" thread from PG. I thought
his idea was brilliant, possibly because I had the same idea, but as usual,
tptacek thought of and posted it first. If you want a discussion to be useful,
turning it into a game is entirely counter-productive. Worse yet, the display
of points creates an unfair game due to manipulations of visibility, cognitive
bias and other factors.

Since the removal of comment points being displayed, there has been far less
one-up-manship in the discussions, and people are more polite because they are
not competing for points in a game. You are now more free to just state your
opinion without worrying about whether or not others will agree or disagree
with you. As long as you're not being an ass about it, you can generally post
uncommon or even controversial opinions without repercussions.

Some have (repeatedly) argued that the lack of displayed comment points
results in a loss of context or loss of a valuable metric for deciding what is
worth reading. I'd argue the opposite (and slightly less popular view) that
displayed comment points fail to offer any real usefulness and are mostly
harmful. --Just like whether or not my submissions are interesting, the
usefulness of displayed comment points is a very subjective matter of opinion.
Some find it helpful, but others consider it harmful.

To you, my opinion about comment points does not matter. You already have your
own opinion. _And there is the very reason why displaying comment points
doesn't really matter_.

------
plasma
OT: What do names highlighted green mean?

~~~
radq
It represents a new user. (I think it is for accounts having age < 1 day.)

~~~
plasma
Thanks!

------
taphangum
I hope everyone on HN installs this.

------
chrishan
I knew someone will do this.

------
ignifero
I liked it for 2 weeks, but, as a data driven person, i would like to be able
to see the scores . What was the incentive to hide them again?

------
ignifero
Science says that blind crowdsourcing is generally better:
[http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/17/wisdom-of-
cro...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/17/wisdom-of-crowds-
decline)

One could find arguments for both sides, though:

\- HN is not a crowd, it's a niche community

\- Voting is not blind even now.

\- The number actually encourages voting, since it serves to remind that your
vote will change than number

\- It's good to know whether your vote will have little impact or will move
the comment upwards

\- The site should encourage more people to vote, the more people vote the
better.

------
mtogo
Thanks for this! I was hoping pg would fix his own site, but since he won't i
guess the community will have to.

~~~
KeithMajhor
You can't "fix" it. It's deliberate.

~~~
wccrawford
Broken is broken, deliberate or not.

~~~
KeithMajhor
Honestly, I think you're being less than objective. If PG wants comment scores
off and comment scores are off then I'd say its correct...

Calling it broken is like calling piracy "theft". It's flamebait and it
obscures the issue.

