
Ask HN: Don't show points? - jackowayed
I was thinking about group think and how to keep it out of HN. And I ran into a fundamental problem/cause:<p>Psychologically, people naturally follow groupthink. No matter how much you stress not following it, they'll still be inclined to follow the herd.<p>So just saying "try not to follow groupthink" isn't good enough. Instead, why not make it less possible to follow groupthink?<p>So here's my suggestion: stop displaying the points. Maybe still gray out downvoted comments, but I think even that is unnecessary. They'll float down to the bottom of the thread anyway. And I know that when I see a downvoted thread, I read it differently. I don't say "maybe a couple people just didn't like what they said, and it was actually ok" coming into it, I say "what did this person do wrong? What stupid thing did they say?" I come into it biased because of the points it has.<p>Same goes for a comment with a lot of points. I say, "what great wisdom does this person have for me?" and thus am naturally more inclined to upvote it or at least like it.<p>The rankings would still work the same, so the good comments would still float to the top, but there wouldn't be an absolute number to tell you "this is amazing" or "this sucks." High posts might just be very new. Low posts might just have gone unnoticed or been overshadowed by more amazing ones.<p>I realize that the points serve many positive purposes too, and it's just an idea, but I think if individual, unprejudiced discussions are what we want, eliminating the display of points would help a lot.
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staunch
The way it works on Perlmonks(.org) is that you don't see points on a
comment/submission until after you've voted. If you want to see the score you
can do a "null vote". I definitely think this is a better way to handle it. I
really can't think of any reason why you'd _want_ to show score before voting.

~~~
chandler
>> I really can't think of any reason why you'd want to show score before
voting.

When I vote (here), I'm pushing a comment towards an idealized score. To make
the decisions "do I think this is rated too highly" and "do I think this is
rated too lowly" requires knowledge of the current score.

~~~
ricree
This closely matches the way I mod comments as well.

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wehriam
I'd much rather deal with the ramifications of "groupthink" than wade through
dozens of banal comments.

Vote counts give me more information. While that may affect my understanding
of an idea, it's for the better.

Points may have an inherent bias towards older posts or well known authors,
but I value what they represent.

~~~
jackowayed
But part of what groupthink does is make the points mean less. The opinions of
a few can start a groupthink snowball burying good comments and raising
mediocre comments to high scores.

So as of now, that information you're using is unreliable because it is
affected by groupthink.

~~~
cchooper
Which is exactly what happened on Reddit, where you have to wade through all
the up-modded pun threads to get to the real comments.

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mighty
Completely agree, and said as much not long ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447563>

 _I tend to find myself influenced by the karma count more than anything else.
I have to log myself out after commenting to increase the cost of checking the
change to my net karma.

I'm a strong advocate of hiding the karma counts entirely (for users,
submissions, and comments). That greatly reduces the conditioning effect, not
to mention karma-related drama and groupthink (as Surowiecki argues, crowd
wisdom is best procured when evaluations are performed independently).
Submissions and comments can still be ordered by net karma over time, as they
are now.

Whatever you choose to do, I think there's a strong argument in favor of
experimentalism. Especially since the site isn't a commercial undertaking and
can deal with the occasional disruption._

(Um, and yes, that user is me. I locked myself out of my account to keep
myself from compulsively commenting and visiting the site. Apparently I still
wanted back in.)

~~~
wehriam
You are not good at locking yourself out of your account. While I appreciate
the struggle with compulsion, I'm not sure you're fit to dictate guidelines.

~~~
10ren
Why do you think he is not good at locking himself out of his account? (He is
now posting from a new account)

In what way do you think he is "dictating" guidelines?

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kyro
Sometimes I'll just upvote a submission on the 'new' page with 0 points to
trigger group think because I might think the article will spark interesting
debate, or to help prevent an 'ask hn' or 'rate my startup' submission from
falling, which keeps other users here from seeking advice from the community.

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10ren
Seeing the scores doesn't affect my opinion! I'm impartial!

... except that a few times, I've _observed_ my attitude towards a comment
change when its score changed. What is a little frightening is I have also
witnessed a struggle within me between what seems to be true to me, and
fitting in with the group's opinion.

This psychological phenomenon has been confirmed experimentally (though I have
met one extremely detached person (borderline autistic?) who I would bet would
be above it). <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments>

A struggle for perception of reality is a struggle for reality.

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critke
I would think that people should be able to handle the truth (either way) -
painful as it may be. I mean if the Internet stands for one thing, it's
transparency. Hiding stuff is not something we should strive for.

~~~
TomOfTTB
I’m not sure adherence to simplistic ideals is something we should strive for
either. The goal of HN, as I understand it, is to generate thoughtful
discussion. If transparency is counterproductive to achieving that goal than
we should abandon it.

As far as "handling the truth" I don’t think that speaks to his point. When we
use that phrase we are talking about someone controlling their reaction to a
change they can perceive. Such as someone preventing themselves from
emotionally falling apart when something bad happens.

But group think, and the desire for acceptance which is its root cause, is
something people don’t perceive is happening to them. They therefore can’t
consciously control their reaction to it.

His suggestion is that we remove the root stimuli so as to not provoke the
reaction to begin with. So your point doesn’t really apply.

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markessien
The points provide information about what others think about the submission,
which is useful in guaging the status of the comment. It does not have to
affect your opinion, unless you let it.

~~~
jsmcgd
I think people are much less in control of what influences them than what we'd
like to admit.

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unalone
I can confirm this. Halfway through reading his post, I noticed that you had
more points than him, stopped to read yours, then read his with skepticism.
Possibly it's because you do make a legitimate point, but I'd suspect that
your score disrupted the flow of my reading.

~~~
MaysonL
Read _Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion_ by Robert Cialdini. Anchoring,
framing, and sex are _very_ powerful.

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almost
I think this is a very good idea, but for a slightly different reason. The
whole points-for-posts thing creates a meta-game of accumulating points above
the normal game of participating in discussion. This leads to those annoying
meta-disucssions where people complain about being down modded and all that
goes with that.

The modding system is useful for ranking comments so that when I read a
massive thread the most interesting ones tend to be around the top.

It may also be useful for users as a feedback mechanism to figure out when
they're doing something that's not cool (like the things we've been discussing
in the guidelines thread today) but I don't think you need a precise numerical
score for that. And I think it's the precise score that gets people in the
karma-game mindset. It certainly does that for me.

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TooMuchNick
I'm honestly not being cheeky, I suppose I'm just slow: Wouldn't it be easier
to just not think about the points? I've found the points useful when looking
for a summary, takeaway, or rebuttal that earned attention.

~~~
jackowayed
Theoretically, that's the optimal solution. They have advantages for
situations like what you listed.

The problem is that pretty much _everyone_ is in some way influenced by them
just by seeing them.

Do you really approach a comment at -10 points with the same open mind as one
with +30?

~~~
sgk284
I think the more important question is should you? If 10 other people before
have expended the mental energy to figure out that this comment isn't worth
reading, why should I expend mine to determine the same thing? I like where
you're going with this, but it uses our group mental capacity much less
efficiently. There is probably a better solution... looking at a number is a
pretty efficient filter and I don't think we should lose it.

~~~
TomOfTTB
In most cases you’re probably right. But not always.

The problem is you don’t know the moral character or intelligence level of the
people who first stumbled on to a comment. If two ignorant people happen to
see a quality comment first and both vote it down that comment is essentially
lost to the group. I think we can all agree there are at least a few fools
running around here so the idea isn’t farfetched.

So the question is do you want to trust what might be insightful comments to
the randomness of timing?

~~~
wehriam
But 10 people's moral character? 30?

If the comment was really sparkling, it seems unlikely that the first two
ignoramuses would drown out the larger cast of HN. It's not all about timing.

~~~
TomOfTTB
But the whole premise is that once a comment gets a negative score people
don't read it anymore. 2 or 3 people could easily do that.

Also, 10 people on a site that gets in the area of 200,000 uniques isn't that
significant.

~~~
sgk284
What if we don't assume every vote is equal. What about weighting a user's
vote by some factor of their karma? And/or capping the threshold that a user
can vote. i.e A user with 0 karma can vote on comments with 0-3 points. A
person with 100 karma can vote on comments -3-6 points. A person with 500
karma can vote on comments -9-9 points, etc... This implies that a comment
with ridiculous votes (either positive or negative) has been decided by
members of the community that the community has already shown approval for.

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jacquesm
Points have their uses in making it easier to zoom in on the important parts
of a discussion (or the best contributions), it's helpful if you have a
limited amount of time to spend and you want to make the most of that.

Unfortunately they tend to turn in to a goal by themselves.

Points are the root of all evil ;)

It's a classic case of influencing the system that you are measuring, same
with google pagerank or a volt meter with a low internal resistance.

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swombat
I'm not so sure. How do you know that groupthink is the problem? Perhaps the
problem is instead that the new users fit in a different groupthink pattern
than the old users. In that case, you want to encourage groupthink when it
leads to the correct behaviours.

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jules
Maybe we could do an experiment with randomly upvoted/downvoted new posts and
see how much more likely the posts are to be upvoted/downvoted?

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karim
And what about hiding karma points too ? Imo, the problem with karma is that
people try to get more karma, per se.

~~~
Raphael
It serves a purpose, though. When you see a user with high karma, you can
easily tell that he has contributed a lot to the conversation.

~~~
cchooper
This is important, because it helps defend the site against trolls.

But perhaps it would be better not to be confronted with your score every time
you log in.

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babo
Good idea, that could be an easy way to prevent the absurd up- or down-voting
phenomenon.

