
HN Points - karlzt
http://hnpoints.com/
======
dclowd9901
I know this is probably digressing too far from the topic at hand, but I just
want to say that, having used plenty of sites that _do_ display their points,
it's refreshing to me that HN doesn't. I think _seeing_ points has the
psychological effect of swaying popular opinion one way or the other (the
token "hivemind" -- you probably know more or less who I'm referring to).

~~~
rubergly
Too bad the same behavior happens anyway because of recognizable names.

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mixmax
besides it isn't true.

PG posted at some point that comments which had a lot of points before
actually have _more_ points after the don't-show-points change.

~~~
gnosis
Unfortunately, simply taking away visible comment scores isn't a perfect
solution to the problem of voting with the herd.

Even without visible comment scores there are still some indications of how
many votes a given comment has received.

Highly rated comments tend to be at the top of the page of comments.

This can have a huge influence, especially in long threads where people often
don't have the energy or interest to read all of the comments, so they'll tend
to only ever see (and, consequently ever vote on) the comments near the top.

Also, since most everyone knows that comments near the top tend to have more
votes, seeing a comment at or near could sway someone's vote as much as just
seeing the explicit vote total itself.

The other indicators of how many votes a given comment has gotten are that
comments with a vote total of 0 or less are grayed-out and tend to be near the
bottom.

Again, this could sway people to vote the comment down, as it's a cue that the
community approves of voting that particular comment down.

Like voting on polls, voting on comments would be fairer were the order of
comments completely randomized and there was no indication at all (explicit or
implicit) of how many votes a given comment had gotten.

Unfortunately, unlike polls, the order of comments can't be randomized without
completely destroying the threading feature of HN, and without making the
reading of a comment thread incredibly confusing (as replies could then be
placed above the comments they were replies to, or not, since the order would
be random).

However, even stopping short of complete randomization of the comment order,
some of the other indications of comment scores could be removed. In
particular, HN could be changed so that highly rated comments no longer tend
to move to the top, and so that lower rated comments don't tend to move to the
bottom. And, of course, comments with low scores need not be grayed out.

If these changes were implemented, voting on comments would be fairer, but
(obviously) scanning through a heap of comments to see which are the most
approved/disapproved comments would become more difficult.

~~~
eru
You can still randomize the order of leaves in each node of the tree.

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siddhant
Sometime back, there was a poll about how many users wanted to see points
versus how many users don't. And I still remember that (much) more users
wanted to _see_ comment scores. Is there any plan to bring it back?

~~~
egor83
PG: _I didn't say I'd do whatever got the most votes._

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595783>

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mhb
So what was the point of the poll if a convincing vote outcome has no effect?

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Goladus
Whether poll results are convincing is subjective. A US jury, for example,
convinces only with a unanimous vote.

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mhb
Although that is often the case in criminal cases, it's not generally true
that unanimity is required for a US jury verdict.

And, regarding your main point - duh. What would the result of that poll have
had to have been to make it a compelling (e.g., actionable) argument for
comment points?

~~~
Goladus
> And, regarding your main point - duh. What would the result of that poll
> have had to have been to make it a compelling (e.g., actionable) argument
> for comment points?

I'm not sure, because I don't have a clear view of all relevant data. For
example, I might weigh obvservations of improved discussion against the poll
results. I'm not sure how overwhelming the majority would have to be, but if
there _was_ one, it would probably at least sway me to to do some more
investigation.

And pg's comment was:

 _I'm curious if there has been any drift toward a consensus._

A three-fifths majority isn't really consensus.

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comex
> Or choose: Chrome | Firefox | Opera | Greasemonkey | Bookmarklet

Someone went to a lot of effort over this.

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tobylane
Or made it in portable javascript and spent the last 30 mins porting it.

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StavrosK
If I recall correctly, Opera, Chrome and Safari use the exact same standard
for extensions, so porting would take about ten minutes to do all three. I
ported a Greasemonkey extension to Opera in about five minutes.

It's basically Firefox and then everything else.

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shii
Or just make a way to retrieve the points from hnsearch.com since they have
access to them anyways...

Also, searchyc.com is now back up, but I'm not sure whether it has points
access yet (it didn't before it went down during the initial points removal).

Seems like this is tackling the issue in the wrong way. Points won't be near
accurate even, since most people won't have this installed. something
something over engineering something something occam's razor.

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jackowayed
hnsearch gets points after a few days

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spicyj
Unfortunately, there's no way to look up an item by ID using the HNSearch API,
so it's not much use for building something to show points on all comments.

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inconditus
Previous comments: <http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568453>

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astrofinch
What's the difference between apps subdomain and the news subdomain?

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yason
How many tokens of Arc would it take to make the display of comment scores
configurable? I know that removing options is a good way to impose design but
this just might be one of the cases for which mere user preference is enough.

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creativeone
Installed...anyone else in?

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Joeboy
I am, which is presumably why you can see how many points this post has.

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drdaeman
It's a bit weird. I don't see the score for your post, but see it for a parent
one.

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mmaunder
Interesting psychological hook in this. You'd better download it or you'll be
the blind man in the valley of the one-eyed.

~~~
raganwald
Imagine that only a small minority of users--perhaps as few as just one-- do
not use this and are "blind." What is the disadvantage to them?

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gnosis
Very interesting question.

I am probably not going to use it myself, simply because I don't want to be
swayed by other people's opinions of any given comment.

Unfortunately, even without visible comment scores there's still some
indication of how many votes a given comment has received.[1] But if you don't
want to be swayed by the herd, _not_ seeing comment scores is still a step
forward.

The only disadvantages of not seeing comment scores I can think of are that
without them the reader would be less effective at using the "wisdom of the
crowd" to gauge the relative worth of comments, and his curiosity wouldn't be
satisfied.

[1] - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701906>

~~~
raganwald
This debate has been done to death, but I will not be using this because I
think the existing UI features give me all the value I need. Most importantly,
the way severely downmodded comments get grayed out.

Beyond that, I don't personally care whether a comment is +3 or +103. I don't
want to miss a nugget of wisdom in a +3 comment. I like all you folks, and I
trust you to filter out complete dreck like redditesque attempt to create pun
threads, but beyond that I plan to read everyone's opinions and form my own
conclusions.

Don't think of it as disdain for your opinions about other people's opinions,
think of it as respect for your opinions.

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exterm
Opera "extension" seems to install as a widget when it should be an
extension... anyone else experiencing this problem?

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crizCraig
Related post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2699465>

