

Ask HN: Do you miss public comment point counts? - md224

Comment point counts, as a measure of social proof, are double-edged swords: they might create feedback loops where more people tend to upvote the higher-voted comment, but they also act as informational signals. The message is simple: X number of users thought this comment was worthy of attention. But that can be a powerful data point when attempting to make sense of conflicting and equally persuasive views. Sometimes when reading a thread, I may wonder &quot;how many other people agree with the comment I just read?&quot; The most I can know is how many people upvoted it relative to the sibling comments, and even this is unreliable due to the time factor and the potential absence of any siblings.<p>Some people may find this to be intellectually &quot;weak&quot;... after all, in a perfect world, we would judge a comment based solely on the merits of its content. But sometimes our judgement fails, and it can be useful to see how it compares to the judgements of others. For example, I may read a comment and think &quot;that&#x27;s pretty stupid,&quot; but then see that it received 100 upvotes, leading me to think: &quot;Well, maybe I missed something. I should reconsider the arguments being made; perhaps my perspective was based on faulty assumptions.&quot;<p>Additionally, if we see a comment that we strongly disagree with, but notice that it has received barely any upvotes, we may be less inclined to respond; we may think to ourselves: &quot;well, nobody else seems to agree with this guy either, so it&#x27;s not really worth picking a fight.&quot; On the one hand, the poster&#x27;s views may go unchallenged, but on the other hand, it may avoid triggering a disruptive flame war.<p>Hiding comment points may be the best way to go; personally, I&#x27;m undecided. I just wonder if anyone else has any thoughts on the absence of public comment points, and how it affects your HN experience.
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chippy
Comment points, or karma points are meant to be for contributions to the
discussion, rather than agree / disagree. Think of it as insightful versus
wasteful. It's obviously abused and thus the mechanic doesn't work as
intended.

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Mz
This has been rehashed a fair amount on Hacker News. My recollection is that
they were removed with a specific purpose -- to cut down on Paul Graham
getting dragged into the middle of stupid fights, essentially -- and pg felt
it was successful. So they are unlikely to come back. He got what he wanted
and I see no reason for him to put up with the issue that prompted him to make
them invisible.

HN is a free service. It has a business function for Ycombinator but it does
not directly make money. I think especially as it became more popular, some
hard decisions had to be made to keep it from getting out of hand in terms of
sucking up too much time and energy for no real pay off.

