

Tell HN: The utility of comment karma - simonsarris

There are several insightful posts, like this one:<p>"Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?"<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444709<p>As well as other ones where the submitter is soliciting advice from other HNers, or else threads where HNers are sharing their experience with some technology.<p>In comments like these the up-vote is used to say "I agree and share the same experience." Since replying with "I agree", etc is frowned upon, the karma makes for an important tally in determining how many people agree with the statement or share the same experience. Whats the ratio of people who like service-foo to service-bar?<p>In the topic on Rails 3.1 shipping with CoffeeScript, one comment starts:<p>"After a few months of CoffeeScript development I vastly prefer it to JavaScript."<p>How many HNers feel the same way? 2? 55? 109? Without comment karma shown I have no idea how many people agree. For all I know, nobody feels the same way.<p>"It's hard to debug when you get compile errors"<p>How many people have had this experience? I no longer have the rough tally of karma.<p>I think HN is missing fairly valuable information from not having the comment karma shown.<p>Thoughts?
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tlrobinson
The intention of karma wasn't for stating whether you agree or disagree, it
was to separate posts that add to the conversation from those that don't,
regardless of whether you agree. The reality is people use it to express
disagreement as well.

Perhaps showing both upvote and downvote counts would be useful. A comment
with lots of vote that average out to close to 0 likely adds more to the
conversation than one with very few votes in either direction.

~~~
bmm6o
I agree. I've never felt this way, but it's obvious some people do. I made
this comment[0] about a rendering issue a while back and was surprised when it
got 3 upvotes.

[0]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852048>

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entangld
I just mentioned this in the "Legal Mistakes Made by Entrepreneurs" post.

I know they're experimenting, but something very useful is lost when we can't
see what we all agree on. I'm using _all_ loosely, but it makes a big
difference when you're trying to learn something new.

When (if?) the upvotes get changed back, it will be difficult for me to go
through all of the old article comments I didn't get a feel for and see what I
missed out on.

Upvotes numbers are too valuable. Please bring them back.

~~~
pavel_lishin
How about only showing them a day (or whatever arbitrary amount of time) after
the date of submission? That'll avoid all the charges of groupthink, force
people to evaluate all comments fairly, and advice threads will still be
useful.

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JeremyBanks
This post should be a comment on pg's post about it[1], this doesn't need to
be on the front page itself.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039>

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teyc
Quora got this right. The identities of those who endorse a comment is
significant. There may be people who voted on the coffeescript comment who may
not have direct experience on it. There is no way one can tell.

Further, there may be different reasons a comment may have been voted up:

1\. The comment voted up is considered relevant

2\. The reader agreed with the sentiment.

3\. The comment was irrelevant, but was humorous.

Similarly, a comment may have been voted down because:

1\. The comment was irrelevant.

2\. The comment was relevant, but the reader disagreed with the point of view.

3\. A polarising comment may end up with a net score of 0, but it is actually
very relevant.

4\. The comment was relevant, but was delivered in a brusque manner.

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aphyr
I agree; comment karma was valuable for me. It also allowed for polls.

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rodh257
I Liked comment karma as when I'm just taking a quick HN break I can skim down
and read the best comments based on how many votes they got. Now I often just
don't bother.

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chopsueyar
I was actually looking through several year old hackernews articles relating
to sysadmin best practices, but I could not determine which comments had the
"pearls".

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wladimir
Apart from karma (good post or not), there needs to be a way to signify
agree/disagree. These are orthogonal.

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gojomo
I think I've noticed more 1-liner 'I agree' or 'similar thing happened to me'
comments now that a simple upvote can't be used to send a public 'me too'.

Also, totally empty 'nice!' comments (that should've been a public upvote to
the parent) are now harder to censure with a single downvote.

There was a definite instructive value in communicating shared sentiments,
short of groupthink, via public tallies.

So, it's time for me to resuscitate one of my hobby-horse proposals: two-axis,
four-button voting.

The up/down axis is 'appropriateness', the sometimes-platonic ideal of the old
voting (though in practice it was always contaminated with a little
agree/disagree). 'Up' means 'valuable; more-of-this-is-good'. It accrues to
long-term karma. 'Down' means 'subtractive; less-of-this-please'. It also
accrues to long-term karma. The net of these two, per comment, need not be
shown – or they could only be shown very indirectly as 'positive/negative' or
via ordering/shading.

The new left-right axis would be explicitly 'publicly agree/disagree'. Left is
agree (keeping with English conventions of usually listing the affirmative
first or promoting popular items to a more leftward position). Right is
disagree. Neither accrues to karma; they are completely local to the comment.
But the net _is_ displayed alongside each comment – or possibly even the total
of each agree/disagree, because +100-99 is very different from +1-0. It's just
like, it's just like, a mini-poll, a mini-poll.

The right design could keep this from appearing too visually busy: spacing out
the buttons, using very faded colors, hiding some details (perhaps even
agree/disagree totals) until mouseover or click-for-details, etc.

It would resolve the eternal 'can upvotes/downvotes ever be used for
agreement/disagreement' debate by providing an easy outlet for the
irresistible human impulse to express sentiment with a single click. It would
eliminate many now-superfluous vertically-wasteful comments that are just ways
of registering agreement/disagreement. (Many group discussion dynamics require
that certain salient statements _must_ trigger at least a grunt of assent or
dissent, lest they be misinterpreted as being more or less widely held than
they actually are. Having at least one public place to capture this saves a
lot of other typing!)

~~~
akkartik
Hmm, I haven't noticed more one-liners. Why would people be less likely to
upvote something if they can't see who else has done so?

~~~
gojomo
If upvotes are visible, one function they serve is as a simple, 'me too'. If
you know they're invisible, you may still upvote – I meant no strong
conjecture on that – but if you want to signal to the group your agreement,
now you have to add a comment.

 _Maybe_ you'll work to ensure that comment also adds a new detail. But it
also might just be, 'I thought the same thing when I saw that' or 'That
happened to me too' or 'I had the same problem'. All of which are more-
compactly/quickly accommodated by a visible +1 tally.

~~~
akkartik
I see.

Though it's a little bit mitigated by you being able to see votes on your own
comments.

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swolchok
pg: "Notice: Experimenting with HN"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333>

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Mz
It seems to me that part of the value of the experiment is that pg is getting
vast amounts of meaty feedback that is based on actual experience rather than
conjecture. "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." It's just kind of
a shame that so much of it is framed so negatively. I also hope that
complaints or popular vote are not pg's highest priority. I hope he has some
more meaningful measure in mind/ in use for determining the value of the
impact on his goals for the site.

Peace.

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Dramatize
I agree and express the same opinion.

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drivebyacct2
I agree.

(no seriously, I do, but I enjoy the irony as well)

