
Show HN: HN Demetricator – An extension that removes upvote and comment counts - brianyu8
https://github.com/brian-yu/hn-demetricator
======
andykx
I'm curious, do others perceive undeserved upvotes as an issue? As far as
communities like this go, I think HN is pretty fair about what kind of content
is valuable.

Sure, maybe some high-quality niche articles don't get a ton of attention, but
that's the nature of writing about niche topics.

~~~
ratsmack
I have a problem with people down voting things that they disagree with and up
voting things they agree with. I had always assumed that voting was for
"quality of post" and not for agreement.

I see this same scenario played out in many forums where a very good, high
quality comment is made which quotes what "someone" said and subsequently
heavily down voted because of the person that said it. In other words, the
message is quashed because of the person that said it, and not because of the
message itself... this is a sad testament to online dialogue.

~~~
dvtrn
Apparently that’s their intended function according to mods[0] I just prefer
downvoted comments don’t turn grey just because some may disagree with it,
it’s an annoying UX personally, as I’ve actually found some interesting
information I hadn’t previously been exposed to from comments a few people
decided they disagreed with.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996858)

~~~
ratsmack
I have a problem with the greyed out posts because they are difficult to read
with my poor eyesight. I usually select them with the mouse so they are
highlighted, which makes them easier to read.

~~~
contravariant
I always assumed that's what you were supposed to do anyway. If it's just
slightly downvoted it is still somewhat readable but after that it gets hard
to read quick. I don't think this has much to do with eyesight, it's by
design. I guess poor eyesight might make it hard to distinguish between normal
and slightly downvoted comments, but that's not too important a distinction
anyway.

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pwdisswordfish2
Great idea. I have been having this idea for years of doing a little stream
editing to change the color of the grey text to match the other comments. But
I use a text-only browser so I cannot see text colors anyway.

I think what happens is we learn to "play to the crowd" when posting comments,
knowing certain "inside the box" ruminations will garner support. This seems
almost like a form of self-censorship that we are doing, sometimes without
even realising it.

Is there really any definition of a "vote"? It is ambiguous. Better that we
ask commenters "Is this what you mean?" Many times voters are probably
misinterpreting comments. It is quite challenging to write comments where
every single reader gleans the same meaning.

Another idea is you could pull new comments from the Firebase endpoint and
insert them into their respective threads, randomising the order, or maybe
just have chronological order. It would be an interesting experiment, if
nothing else.

The web today has seemingly become a series of filtered, ordered "lists" where
the top spots are the only content that is deemed to matter (and, for the vast
majority, the only content that is seen). Not saying this is necessarily ill-
advised, but one has to consider the effects, which are becoming more
difficult to understand as we lose _the ability to choose_ non-opinionated
ordering (alpha, chronological, etc.).

~~~
dvtrn
_Better that we ask commenters "Is this what you mean?" Many times voters are
probably misinterpreting comments._

I’ve observed two interesting outcomes from this, even as someone who has
challenged himself to seek clarity and understanding by asking more questions:

\- People who ask for clarification are downvoted heavily for reasons that I
can’t assume (this happened a few weeks ago, it was a positive interaction
with the person who inquired of me, and I enjoyed the back and forth: their
questions were relevant, they sought clarity and they were polite and
deferential, I told them as much-yet all of their posts in our conversational
bivouac were heavily downvoted by parties never revealed themselves or what
their problems with the questions were)

\- People who are asked _for_ clarification take it as a sneaky and
underhanded attack (this happened two days ago, I asked someone if they could
expand on a one-line comment because I was having trouble understanding the
intention of the comment, someone else came along and called me a troll).

Both of these are anecdotes, but not isolated ones, if you’ll permit the
examples as far as pleasant conversation here will allow. I don’t have
solutions, it’s just...there’s an awful lot of _assuming_ going on even _when_
people ask questions is my observation.

~~~
pwdisswordfish2
Always strikes me as somewhat bizarre than there can be "bystanders" to
"1-to-1" conversations had on HN and then these folks cast "votes" on the
conversation. Yet they are not taking part in the conversation.

------
thih9
To offer a different perspective, I find upvote counts useful.

Part of why I’m on HN is to follow the community and understand what the
community finds important.

In practice I read submissions that look interesting to me and I also read
those that received an unusually high number of votes, even if I find them
uninteresting or disagree with them.

------
aaanotherhnfolk
I've worked on some rules for this in my similarly motivated extension
Disengaged[0].

Another thing it does which I think helps a lot is automatically collapses
subreplies.

[0] [https://github.com/a13o/disengaged](https://github.com/a13o/disengaged)

~~~
Mekantis
This looks incredibly interesting. Going to give it a try.

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jgilias
Everything that's on the front page is massively upvoted already anyway. I'd
suggest checking the 'new' tab from time to time instead.

~~~
saagarjha
You can get on the front page with a handful (~5) upvotes, as long as they
come in fast enough.

~~~
jgilias
Sure, I'm not arguing the front page is useless or anything. In general I find
it very useful for getting a quick overview of what's up. However, it's still
a tiny fraction of all posts on HN. It's a bit like hiding the relative wealth
among the 30 richest people worldwide in order to not let the information
about their wealth affect what you think about each of them.

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scott113341
I have a similar script, except that it removes posts that link to domains
that I've found to frequently be non-interesting or low-quality.

[https://gist.github.com/scott113341/56c03bc7f285eefbea0a6146...](https://gist.github.com/scott113341/56c03bc7f285eefbea0a6146bcb59134)

------
nerfhammer
I actually kind of miss being able to see comment vote counts.

Now you can only see that a comment is voted higher or lower than its
siblings, if any. The vote count could show you that HN thought a comment was
50 times better than a sibling, or whatever. Of course it's subjected to
biases, but rank-order voting is as well in basically the same ways, but the
absolute count just gives you more information.

(re: a bias towards first-mover advantage specifically, we should obviously
have an exponentially weighted moving average of the votes over time decayed
to the current timestamp rather than an absolute vote count, of course.)

------
neiman
Great. I think that social media concept is awesome. I want to follow people
in my feed, I want to create discussions with them.

But how those main social networks did it, with likes or other shallow
simplifications of human response, with not showing stuff from those I follow
in a linear order, instead pushing "engaging" content to my face, is just
terrible.

------
627467
I personally rely on frontpage and comment count as an indicator as to weather
I should spend anymore time to read that article/comments. I do read all
titles though so metrics are not the only factor.

I do realize that in using HN in this way I'm "leeching" off of hn curators
work rather than contributing to curating new things myself...

~~~
ranger207
Personally, I place more weight on comment count than vote count. If I'm here
for interesting articles, people discussing a topic is more interesting than
votes. The only use votes have is for seeing how controversial a submission
is.

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oltdaniel
I wouldn't see a good point for this. HN is focused on these counts, because
only they allow you to identify the "importance" and "discussion size". Would
be like twitter without a like and retweet counter. How do I know its
important? Is it something I support and give a like, to boost its rank?

Something like [1] is more useful than hiding information.

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23804469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23804469)

~~~
holler
> how do I know it’s important?

This is an interesting topic. I’m working on a new discussion site (sqwok.im)
and I explicitly opted to exclude voting. Instead to determine importance I’m
using a combination of signals like live activity, publish date, etc, with
plans to include further ones at a later time. I echo the sentiments from
other commenters and even pg himself in regards to groupthink, and I feel that
there’s room for exploration on other alternatives.

~~~
brianyu8
That's a really interesting premise! I'm going to keep an eye on sqwok.

~~~
holler
Thanks I appreciate it, and hope to chat with you on sqwok! It's amazing how
much the state of online discussion is being surfaced on HN and elsewhere
lately... I don't have all the answers, but I believe we need more options and
different perspectives to hopefully open the door to a better state of
discussion online. cheers!

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caymanjim
Upvoting this, ironically enough.

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meesterdude
i use ublock rules to hide scores and disable downvoted comment fading, but i
haven't blocked comment count. HN has been much better for me since making
these changes.

~~~
bjourne
Mind sharing your code?

~~~
meesterdude
this is what i use:

    
    
      news.ycombinator.com##html .pagetop:style(color: rgba(0,0,0,0) !important;)
      news.ycombinator.com##html .score
      news.ycombinator.com##html .default .commtext:style(color: black !important)

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treve
I tried to build a similar extension for Stack Overflow that would remove the
downvote button and close button, but it got rejected by the Chrome Web Store
:(

~~~
cheez
do it as a greasemonkey script

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k__
I'd really like a bigger hide button.

