

Ask PG: have you seen a change in the cumulative comment karma? - jonmc12

I was curious, when you look at the statistics of total comment karma before and after the karma points were removed from comments, is there a big change?  Are users upvoting / downvoting at the same frequency?
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pg
Comments with high scores seem to have slightly higher scores than they would
have, but comments with low scores seem to have about the same. Probably
because the -4 limit on displayed comment scores was already concealing the
actual score.

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pathik
Please bring back the comment scores. It helps a lot in parsing the comments
and assigning a proportional weight to each when reading them.

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thaumaturgy
I had to think about this a bit, and I disagree so far. I'm finding that I'm
not pre-judging comments as much. It's nice to be able to read someone's
comment without knowing first that 70 or 80 or 3 other people thought it was
worthwhile.

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jasonlotito
However, it also eliminate the ability for me to reference a comment with a
high score with the understanding it's probably _more_ correct. After all,
once I read a comment, I want to know if what others think. Comment scores
help that. Granted, it's not the only solution. Having some other visual
indicator that suggests a comment is of high quality would be good without
needing to resort to simply displaying points.

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mitjak
Replies to comments solve the "I want to know what others think" problem. I
agree with the previous commenter: having the comment ratings hidden was
unusual at first but I definitely do acknowledge that I used to mentally pre-
judge a comment based purely on others' responses to it, despite having dealt
multiple times with comments that I disagreed with which had higher upvote
counts than the ones I felt were better answers.

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jasonlotito
I disagree. First, disconnect the actual score with something that indicates a
high quality comment. You can display something as high quality without
showing a score.

Next, a high quality comment need not have comments. Some of the best comments
do not need followup. We should also discourage comments that merely parrot
the parent and offer no content of their own. This is probably the biggest
argument I have against not having any soft of indicator. If a comment is
good, it deserves an up vote to indicate quality.

Next, replies still do not solve the scanning problem. For me to deduce the
quality comments using replies requires I read through all the comments.
Sometimes this is not an issue, but posts with a larger number of comments,
this becomes problematic.

Finally, the above also means that replies of comments, and replies of
replies, suddenly makes it really difficult what others deem quality content.

At the end of the day, up voting comments is meant to distinguish good, high
quality comments from the normal run of the mill comments. If it's not being
used for that, then up votes are merely being used as a way to obtain karma.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that by removing karma from showing which
posts are of higher quality, it serves no real purpose other than to obtain
more karma. I'm more interested in reading quality comments than obtaining
karma, something the current system doesn't assist with. It only makes karma
something to "brag" about.

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staunch
My guesses:

Voting was used to set a comment to the "correct" level. Now no one can see
where they're at, so good comments probably get more than they used to
(depth).

Overall people don't think about points as much, so overall commenting is down
(breadth).

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jamesbritt
_Voting was used to set a comment to the "correct" level. Now no one can see
where they're at, so good comments probably get more than they used to
(depth)._

That sums up my behavior. While I might up or down vote a comment simply based
on its intrinsic value I tended to also consider "correcting" vote tallies.
For example, if it looks like a comment is getting high up votes simply
because of "me-too-ism" rather than because it is offering a striking
observation I might down-vote (since I want to discourage generally trite but
popular opinion comments).

The lack of feedback, the inability to see the results of my voting, and the
inability to see how others are appraising comments detracts from the site and
make me less inclined to vote at all.

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chalst
The more important question is: are populist comments getting fewer upvotes?
The reason they might is that voting has become for many voters more the
individual task of judging the worth of the comment and less the group task of
deciding what is popular.

Looking at the distribution of comment karma before and after the change might
give some clue as to that. Analysing two popular threads might be better, if
we get the methodology right.

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anonymous246
I'm finding that I miss the comment points, but I didn't think I would.

PG should do another experiment where he hides the submitter and commenter
_names_ while showing the comment points for N hours (N tbd) after the comment
goes live.

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icey
The only thing I miss is an indicator that I actually _did_ hit the upvote
button and didn't accidentally downvote someone.

I use HN from an iPad about half the time, and I don't really trust my ability
to accurately hit the correct arrow.

