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Tell HN: Please bring back comment scores
442 points by Maro on April 26, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 164 comments
I miss comment scores.

Perhaps we could strike middle ground by displaying a range, eg. 1, 2-5, 5-10, 10+




People can be wrong about things, and comment scores are useful information that helps us know if they are.

"that is not how mysql works" with 2 Points And "that is not how mysql works" with 102 points Are not the same piece of info.

I don't see any benefit to hiding this from people. It also helps newbies understand the customs here (they can get feedback on other people's comments)

edit now that I'm not on my phone:

When you google things, you probably skip over results like daniweb, about.com, or expertsexchange.com, and hope for a stackexchange page.

The little URL at the bottom of the description tells you "hey, this is from $foo source" and you're a smart human being that can put this information to good use.

Of course, you could make a case that this is bad, because you should read each one of the results and judge it based on its merits. Maybe we should even strip all of the identifying information away from the page, and just let it stand on its own (this would be a neat experiment, actually [and that's the experiment that I think we're performing here]).

The point counts on the comments act just like the URL does on google results. It's not saying "this is definitely 100% accurate", but it is useful piece of information that we can put to good use. Depriving us of this information doesn't break the comments, but I have certainly found myself reading comments a bit less lately as a result of it (instead of actually reading comments, I'm usually just skimming them now). With comment scores, things seem to have a bit of order to them, without, it just feels like a lot of people shouting at one another.

(Maybe this was the point?)

Naturally, I'm never going to stop reading HN; it is by far my favorite website on the internet. Complaining about the lack of comment points here is like complaining that my favorite bar switched to a new, very slightly different glass. I can see the difference, but it's not really going to change my habits.


But two comments with equal points given at different times on the same thread are likely not equally informative; the newer one had fewer impressions but receiving the same points has a higher points to views ratio. Part of the problem with points is that people try to use them like you are -- to gauge agreement for correctness, or who 'won' a discussion or whatever -- but points are a really crappy indicator of that. Points should be normed by impressions, and then smoothed (or given credibility intervals or something).


>> Points should be normed by impressions, and then smoothed (or given credibility intervals or something).

While technically you're right, that seems like taking a really simple idea and making it really complicated.

Comment scores act as a "trend" of what people are thinking - it's not like a football game where the highest score wins. If I see a discussion it's useful to see a) how many people care enough to bother to vote either way and b) what sort of proportions are involved.

I think most people here can accept that not every comment in a thread gets the same number of eyeballs, and therefore the "scores" are not necessarily directly comparable.


And yet clearly people do compare scores.

The problem is that scores aren't like trends; they're like integrating a 'popularity' measure over time. As a consequence, you get a strong bias towards the stuff with the most points being comments from near the beginning of the discussion, not what's most correct or interesting or insightful.


Since I can't see your score, and you can't see mine, I honestly have no idea at this point whether more people agree with you than with me. Or indeed if no-one cares at all.

When this thread is referenced to a week from now there is no way to see what sort of agreement occurred with either one of us. There are a bunch of "for" comments, and a bunch of "against" comments, but ultimately no resolution (that either of us can see.) So a plethora of "me too" postings occur to fill the void.

Of course the agreement in, and of itself, means nothing - as noted elsewhere popularity does not equal correctness, however it's a data point which exists, and in some cases is useful.


>"When this thread is referenced to a week from now there is no way to see what sort of agreement occurred with either one of us."

That just means that people will have to read the comments and decide for themselves based on the merits of the comments.

One might argue that that is better than deciding based on points because some people interpret points as assent to the beliefs expressed in the comment while others interpret points as a indicating the technical quality of the comment, e.g relevant supporting rationales and examples assembled logically.


But it's not necessarily about judging a comment for an upvote/downvote.

The number can be used to gauge whether you should stop and read something carefully. Maybe an expert comes along and makes an extremely informative comment and maybe I just scan it. Seeing a bunch of upvotes indicates that I should probably slow down and try to learn something from it.

Or maybe a well-reasoned debate has a large voting discrepancy. I value the collective judgement of the HN community and this information helps me learn from the arguments.

The value of this exceeds the more fair voting that we might have now.


>"The value of this exceeds the more fair voting that we might have now."

In your argument, you are using yourself as the measure of value, rather than using the community, i.e. saving you as an individual time by helping you ignore the less popular side of an argument doesn't demonstrably improve the quality of comments of the community in general (or even your comments in particular - though it may help you choose which side to comment on in order to maximize the upvotes your comments receive).

In the case where a "well-reasoned" debate has a large discrepancy then using points as a measure of value indicates an interpretation of votes as agreement with ideas rather than an objective indication of a comment's quality.


>> That just means that people will have to read the comments and decide for themselves based on the merits of the comments.

You imply that the sole benefit of the score would be to allow me to form my own opinion. Whereas I hypothosize that I already know my own opinion - the score allows me to measure the opinion of others. Those who have no opinion of their own are easily swayed, with or without a score, however for those with an opinion of their own, it is useful to know the relative popularity of that opinion.

More data is almost always better - especially for those who respect the value, and limitations, of raw data.


>"I hypothosize that I already know my own opinion"

I think part of the reason for hiding the points is to affect the process of forming opinions and better facilitate changing opinions already formed - I doubt that the use of scores to confirm one's own opinions is seen as beneficial to the community. For people who believe that scores should reflect the quality of a comment rather than the popularity of the sentiment it expresses your argument tends to support the hiding of scores.


> Since I can't see your score, and you can't see mine, I honestly have no idea at this point whether more people agree with you than with me... When this thread is referenced to a week from now there is no way to see what sort of agreement occurred with either one of us.

It's almost as though the future reader would need to form an opinion... for themselves.


The readers here tend toward the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, and of course the presence of scores doesn't preclude future readings in depth. We all understand that scores are blunt indicators, but why not have access to that information? Knowing how the community "graded" a particular comment is an interesting piece of meta-information, even if you believe the cognitive anchoring effect diminishes its value as an indicator of the relative quality of the comment. But given the quality of the audience, high scores are likely to be positively correlated with quality comments, don't you think?


> high scores are likely to be positively correlated with quality comments, don't you think?

"likely ... positive", granted, but strong correlation, no.

Keep in mind the change was an experiment to mitigate effects of HN growth and the corresponding trend towards average of audience. The "tend" you mention had been unquestionably moving back to the middle.

That said, I don't have a problem with points switching on after the comments page goes to archive mode. I can ignore them then, while those who want to see them then can neither vote based on bias nor vote to correct perceived bias.

Discussion and reading should be thoughtful instead based on clicks

One's own comments can be self-appraised by seeing one's own score in real time, influencing one's own future thoughtfulness.


There are strong opinions and good arguments on both sides. Perhaps we should leave scores hidden, but provide a user preference to turn them on -- after reaching a certain karma level. If one argues that the rapid growth of the site has led to an exaggerated score influence, maybe a "norming" period makes sense. Downvoting privileges have to be "earned," so why not score visibility?


But that doesn't negate the value in seeing which side of the debate was most widely agreed upon at the time.

Edit: of course, this argument would be satisfied by no more than making comment scores visible on discussions older than n days.


> Points should be normed by impressions, and then smoothed (or given credibility intervals or something).

I agree that this might work better for determining correctness of informative comments than just plain point scores, however point scores work better than nothing at all.


If someone states something that's incorrect, reply to the comment and explain why! ;)


But often there are multiple replies with opposing opinions. Without the points we don't know which opinion HN agrees with.


HN isn't an entity - and you can't rely on aggregation to form an opinion. You still need to think and form your own opinions.


Comment sparklines?


I agree. I actually often find myself only reading the top one or two comments on a thread now, whereas before I would scan down the list of comments for high point values. This is especially true of replies-in-replies, where the sort order is less indicative of agreement/value.

I miss the community-provided context of comment points.


You can see how agreeable a comment is by how far up the page it is.

I think having the scores hidden is a good decision. It means that we concentrate on content rather than a 'karma game'.

""that is not how mysql works" with 2 Points And "that is not how mysql works" with 102 points Are not the same piece of info."

In my opinion, both of those comments are bad comments unless they further qualify the statement. I don't think karma should be used to infer whether a statement is correct.


You can see how agreeable a comment is by how far up the page it is.

Except if it's nested.

Sometimes the most useful comments are replies to less-interesting top-level comments. In this case the lower-scored item is positioned higher up the page than the higher-scored item.


Exactly! Right now it's impossible to tell if more people agree with you, or the person you are replying to. Frustrating.


Agree


Does not work that way if a reply has 100 upvotes, does it?

Also I love the discussion in this post since, when with Georgify (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2410195) I had tried first to seperate the upvotes with points of a comment, everyone (and yes a blanket term) had said it was a wrong thing to the extent that I had to make changes.

Of course it is not my site to make decisions for the users of the site, but still almost a dual reaction when the same decision was taken on HN by two different people in a very nearby time span, one being me (for Georgify) and the other being PG himself (for HN).


His opinion is that such a bad comment would never reach +100 upvotes since, the post being devoid of additional information, people like him might downvote if they saw the numbers getting "too high".


But a really good reply to the bad comment could get 100 upvotes yet be down, right? This is my interpretation of the rules here, not sure if they are correct.


I don't think karma should be used to infer whether a statement is correct.

Completely agree. In my limited tenure here at HN, I've learned that karma scores have never been about being correct, factually or otherwise. Rather, they should be given to comments that help increase and move the discussion around the given topic even if that commenters opinion or assumption on something isn't factually accurate.


Just expand the example: pretend it was "that is not the way mysql works blah blah explanation". I agree that I don't want to read this if it has 2 points but I do if it has 100.


So many of the discussions around these points here center around the "TL;DR" point of view.

I wonder how these people ever managed to make it through a newspaper without scores telling them which articles are worth it.

Learn to survey, skim, and dive in. All your endeavors will be the better for it.

PS. Your method (don't read if don't like score) also ensures you won't be soiled by accidentally reading an unpopular but truthful point of view.


> Learn to survey, skim, and dive in. All your endeavors will be the better for it.

Then why sort comments at all? just order them in date order (or the reverse) and be done with it. Let the reader decide what is useful and what isn't.

Seems like having comments sorted in an implicit order of 'goodness' (even if there is no score) would handicap people in the development of their ability to 'survey, skim and dive in'.


You need to reword this as a top level comment and repost. Some will say that having to make such a request is proof that scores need to come back, but I'm just concerned that everyone on the "pro" comment score side will never see it.


To your point about not beings soiled by unpopular views, the truth is that unpopular views already have that font color applied to them which goes a lot further in making sure I don't ready it (with my eyes I often have to copy paste it to a text editor before I can read it comfortably). I would much prefer all comments be the same font color and being able to see the score so I can make my own decision as to whether to read it or not.


A better example would be choosing which newspapers to read based on your friend's recommendations, versus choosing by yourself. All articles from the same newspaper share a source and it already ensures some quality.


> All articles from the same newspaper share a source and it already ensures some quality

You make an excellent point, applicable here: newspaper brand = web brand.

Articles not flagged [dead] on news.ycombinator.com already ensure some quality, and both similarly share a "front page".


Wait, are you talking about articles on HN? Because only comments have their score hidden, you can still see how many points each article has.

My point was comparing newspapers brands/articles to HN comments, not articles, since you don't have much guidance anymore over what comments are worthwhile or not.


Since we don't see points anymore, instead of upvotting you because I agree with you, I just have to add a comment saying "I agree". Is that what people want?


See kristofferR's comment above. He got downvoted for saying "I agree." This may have worked if implemented in the beginning of HN, but now the community has pretty strong norms against simple "I agree" or "I disagree" comments. Either eliminate voting completely or show the results, this in-between situation is foolish, bordering on stupid.


I'd be curious to see how this approach compares to the opposite, which strikes me as being more effective at reducing karma gaming. I.e., your own karma is invisible but you can see everyone else's.


You can see how agreeable a comment is by how far up the page it is.

This comment is near the top of the page. Does that make it agreeable?


lol... ok.. then it is agreed.. we should bring back comment score because the top comment is ----- "bring back comment score"... =)


Why aren't they the same piece of info? Scores just reflect popularity, not expert analysis. I find scoring systems like at reddit or slashdot just promote, usually wrong, group think (ZOMG OBAMA IS A COMMIE KENYAN!!) or whatever group values the majority accepts (GAYS SHOULDNT GET MARRIED!!).

There's a lot of faith in the wisdom of crowds with these systems and that's not a faith I find particularly convincing. The lowest common denominator shouldn't be encouraged. These systems are good for getting rid of trolls and other cruft, but not magical quality or truth machines.


I don't think you've been a member of the community long enough, then. On YC, I certainly find a correlation between the points for a certain comment and the thoughtfulness put into that comment. This isn't true on other systems (reddit, etc) where clever noise is preferred to depth, but I generally find the most helpful comments getting voted up here.


Surely that's no different to what we have now: the most "popular" comments / submissions are, with the application of some secret sauce, the most visible and promoted to the top of the thread. The fact that we can't see the underlying numbers makes no difference.


I agree. I've almost forgotten how disappointed I am that sites like HN, Reddit, and so forth don't use my up votes as signals for a collaborative filter and suggest which comments and stories I might find interesting. (And by "interesting," I mean interesting, not something I agree with, a distinction too many people on HN don't seem to understand.)


That's a great idea. I could see a simple implementation that'll could work out. If I like comment 4954 and you like comment 4954 and later I like comment 5004 then it should recommend it to you.


All comment scores do is reveal the inner workings of the site. HN already has an algorithm to turn vote count and time since posting into relevance, that's how we order posts now. Perhaps that could be a bit more fine grained, so that you can know more easily to skip barely upvoted leaf nodes, but all seeing the vote score does is let you replace that algorithm with your own internal one.

You are absolutely right though about source links on Google. They give us context for Google's ordering. While Google has done the work to return the best ordering of results possible, which might be the best results in the average case (though maybe not) site have earned a personal reputation for us. Personally, I know that I don't want to check the expertsexchange.com sites, so I skip over them.

I think that what HN would benefit greatly from is a more codified personal reputation system. Right now, the only way we have that is by learning to recognize the names of HN posters which, for me, has only happened with a precious few of the most prolific and respected. If HN would only give me some indication that I had up (or down) voted this commenter n number of times in the past, that would be far more useful than displaying the current vote count. It would allow me to discover whose voices I like, and who I might ignore.

I recognize that not having this is part of the design of HN. Instead we are encouraged to consider every comment fresh, without any context. It's a meritocracy of comments. I don't have much answer to that, other than to say that I would really like to see people be able to earn a good reputation. It would make the community feel a bit smaller and closer.


I'd venture in the opposite direction as an experiment. Make all posts temporarily anonymous until the thread is closed or less popular. Allow the discussion to exist ONLY according to the merits of the content. Then maybe after a thread is closed or enough time has passed, show the usernames and maybe the points as well.


Start with the assumption all comments are wrong; after all there's no absolute truth. The scores are a measure of popularity, which is often right and sometimes wrong. Plus everyone is entitled to an opinion. I don't think scores help anything, it's a measure of someones self-righteousness that i 'd rather not have. It's enough that unpopular opinions float to the bottom, where they belong.

If anything i'd suggest that comment scores should also have minimal impact in karma, except for questions, where an answer is a valuable contribution. Otherwise, everyone's entitled to an opinion.


>> It's enough that unpopular opinions float to the bottom, where they belong.

Unpopular opinions are exactly what make the conversation interesting. While not every unpopular opinion is necessarily valid, it's fair to say that on many occasions the "unpopular" viewpoint is both valid, and often correct.

But regardless of the correctness of the opinion, it is the unpopular viewpoint which makes us stop, think about, and then articulate our own viewpoint.

Now wouldn't it be ironical if this very comment is deemed unpopular?


Unpopular opinions more often than not are valid and uncomfortable truths, so they're likely to attract trolls and personal attacks. It's best to keep them down there, for those who are interested enough to browse all the threads.


Starting with an assumption that all comments are wrong is a prudent approach, which also considerably lowers the utility of HN for certain types of usage.

I read HN primarily for the informative comments, not the opinion pieces. A high comment score on an informative comment that contains a factual statement is a relatively good way how to easily tell that the information has been validated by the community and is likely to be correct.


The only place I really miss having them is in older articles and on searchyc.com. I feel a much greater compulsion to engage each comment on its merit when voting and when reading, and I feel like reading HN has become more intellectually stimulating.

However, this is more of a problem when I'm trying to assess information in areas that I'm not already familiar with. If I'm searching for information on which DNS providers are best and I find an Ask HN from 4 months ago, I can no longer tell what the true community consensus on it is. I expect the current masking of comments will provide less biased voting, so I think displaying comment scores on stories that are more than two months old would eventually provide the best of both worlds.


ABSOLUTELY.

Comment scores in the midst of an active discussion narrow thinking. Comment scores on historical artifacts are useful for research.


So the evident solution then would be to show comment scores after X (24?) hours since the news item was posted.


More like after 1 week, I would say, but yes.


I think if people in general see a comment that has been upvoted heavily they are less likely to contribute their opinion to it if they agree with it. I like not being able to see its weight as I feel like more readers will comment with their opinions rather than just upvote, which creates more discussion, etc (I have no numbers to back this up, just what I believe).


This is true for me--I have felt more encouraged to contribute to discussions now that the votes are hidden as opposed to before; As long as the higher voted comments bubble up to the top I don't see a reason to see the votes count with a comment.


That sound like it worsens the signal/noise ratio. If a comment is definitive (and ratified by up votes) then there would be fewer comments reiterating the point.

Are we going for more informative or more participatory?


Research into what?


HN already has "modes" for comments. Comments that are two weeks old are in archive-mode: you can't reply to them. Displaying scores on such comments makes sense to me.


Exactly. Don't show scores for active threads if you want, but please, after x days or so, let the numbers show so searchyc can cache it correctly and people who come back to old threads have a sense of direction from the discussion.


I really like the lack of comment scores. Things are still sorted, so the cream floats to the top, and it made me realize I felt group-impulses based on the score.

Now, there is little to no incentive to one-up someone, and I don't consider people refuted based on their score, but rather based on what I think of their comment. That last part has nurtured my curiosity, I find myself exploring thoughts I didn't on the 'old' HN


This is my dilemma, and based on pg's recent poll may be part of why that vote was split. Basically, I feel that I'm interacting more intelligently but receiving less value from the conversation.

I feeling that I am contributing differently, assessing comments more on merit and adding my own thoughts less. I'm certainly voting on comments less (both up and down).

But I find I lack context in many of those discussions - when there are two different views on technical matters, I can't tell the difference in the group's opinion (especially if one is a reply to the other, so not comparable by which is 'higher' in the tree). Group think is bad, by blhack's mysql example is positive group interaction.

I also notice a similar lack of feedback on what is and isn't acceptable by the group. If a snide one-liner sits at the same level as a well-reasoned response, there's nothing to tell us all that one has 15pts in support and one has 1pt (an extreme example - other, more subtle ones, are now only noticeable if someone is greyed out for a negative score). There's no opportunity for us to learn from other's experience.

All in all, I want them back.


How do you vote down?


When you get to a certain level of Karma, you will have the ability to vote down comments (but not articles). The figure changes - I think the level is currently 500 (it was less when I rose through the system, but there were fewer members so fewer votes to go around back then).


There's some point threshold, I believe, which you have to reach before you're able to give downvotes.


You must have 1000 karma


It's 500 Karma.


Perhaps they should be visible for the author only?


Comment scores are currently visible for the author. That's what I mean by not learning from other's examples:

Let's say you say "mysql won't help with foo" and get no upvotes. Ten minutes later, in the same thread, someone says the same thing but adds a link and get 20 upvotes.

You can't tell that their behaviour - adding the link - was valuable to the group. They're above you, which could be a time thing only, so you learn nothing from their actions.

And next time, you make the same reply. If you could see their votes, you would learn from that (for most HN instances of "you").


The example seems more hypothetical than actual.

A more likely case is a person who posts "mysql won't help you with foo" with no link and for no upvotes and "this is the ninja lisp trick" with a link and notices that they get far more upvoates for it.

But the most likely case is a person who notices that the first person to refer to Balmer as "monkey boy" in a hit thread gets massive upvotes.


Very well put. I have experienced the same thing.

Yes, at times I'm curious what a comment's score is, but that's my lizard brain talking.


I believe that I can make a fair determination of the quality of a comment without the need for scores. heck, I do that every day in my job. I think scores incentivize the wrong behavior.

In fact, I think the general quality of comments has improved since the comment score mechanism has been removed.

Of course, that's the wonderful aspect of comments - we are all free to disagree.


Sorting works well enough for me too. I would even add a bit (10% or so) of randomness to the sorting, to give the less popular comments a bit of time in the spotlight.


Nah, I like not seeing the comment scores.

But today I did think of a different improvement I'd like to see, which for lack of better place to put it, will say here:

When I click on "reply" to a comment, it takes you to a page with just that comment and a text box. I'd like to see that comment's parents all the way to the OP, to give me some more context as I frame my reply.

I think it would improve discussion as you'll see the context in which the person you're replying to replied, and might interpret their words a little differently.


I'm struggling to understand why you need comment scores to know what to think about something. I can make up my mind about a comment's quality using the info available to me right now.

Let's take the oft-repeated example in other comments: two comments on MySQL, one with a handful of points and the other with a lot of points. There are a number of indicators of comment quality:

>> comment sorting works very well

>> if a low-vote comment is controversial, you will surely find spirited discussion below it--the volume of discussion would be an indicator of community disagreement

>> hit up Stack Overflow and find out if MySQL works as stated in the low-vote comment or if it works like the high-vote comment describes.

The arguments for visible points boil down to "I don't know how to think about this statement, so I need external confirmation." Indicators of comment quality still exist, and karma gamesmanship looks like it has decreased a lot. Finally, you really want to avoid groupthink--hiding scores accomplishes that pretty well.


I like the new system. It discourages winning an argument with numbers. 20 people upvoted the previous comment so that guy must be right.


This is spot on. It encourages continuing the discussion even if the other side has support of its fan club.


Do not confuse highlight quality comments with displaying scores. And while numbers shouldn't be the ultimate arbitrator, knowing that 20 people found X's arguments to be better then Y's arguments lends some weight to someone's arguments. Having been on both sides of this, I feel it's fair. It's important to understand when your view runs contrary to the community wisdom of HN. It doesn't mean you have to give in, but it's still good to know where your ideas stand.


so why cant we start down voting with less karma, as opposed to now it being 500. so more people could counteract your issue. AND i think that if a comment has more upvotes, then they DID win the argument and that should be seen that they won.


I think you're missing the point. Logic wins arguments not upvotes.


Yes, logic wins arguments, but to continue with metaphors, I'm sure you have heard of the halting problem. Without upvotes, the thread will go on forever. Vote counts allows for closure. So threads are shorter and I'm happy to extract more information faster.


yeh, logic wins arguments. but people will upvote the comment that is most logical, which should also be the correct one. if a comment is illogical, then its also incorrect. so basically, the right and logical ones will get upvoted. whule the stupid, illogical, and wrong ones will get downvoted


The most important aspect of the comment scores was that they let me know what the HN community thought of a particular point or argument. I'm capable of making up my own mind about any topic. I find it interesting and useful to see what other people think. As a geek I miss being able to see that "people agreed with this side of the argument at +20 as opposed to that side at +10".

If some people want to treat it as a "who can get more points" game, then so be it. I find that I can learn a lot from looking at which way public opinion is leaning.


|The most important aspect of the comment scores was that they let me know what the HN community thought of a particular point or argument. I'm capable of making up my own mind about any topic. I find it interesting and useful to see what other people think

That seems like cognitive dissonance to me and a rationalization. If you truly make up your own mind about something then why would you care so granularly about how much/little HN likes a comment. The ordering of the comments allows you to know where the comments all compare, so I don't see what you're really missing other than the exactness.


Why care? Because up votes are also coming from the community and I believe we are all here because we respect the opinions of the people here.

Also, comments sort within threads. Sometimes the best reply is to a no-so-great parent comment.


|I believe we are all here because we respect the opinions of the people here.

What does that even mean? That by not showing the comments we're somehow disrespecting those opinions?

|Sometimes the best reply is to a no-so-great parent comment.

And even then those replies are sorted again... what is your concern? Time? If you were saying hey, I only have so much time, I could maybe understand. But... I think it would be better for HN as a community to train people for more thought out discussions, fewer flame wars, and more of a focus on actually reading the comments and evaluating them based on their own content and not just on what others have said.

As someone in this thread also pointed out, it also ends the perception that an argument can be won by popularity or upvotes-- I believe this has been especially beneficial at preventing/reducing typical fan-boy flaming. I think HN has already begun to benefit for the changes. Also, I would rather read fewer threads with better comments, than more threads with worse comments.

Note: Better subjectively being defined as more thought out, less antagonistic, more discussion based, more logic, and more citations/sources.


| What does that even mean? That by not showing the comments we're somehow disrespecting those opinions?

What I was trying to say is that I value the votes of the community. The culture at HN is that "+1" type comments are noise, but 73 upvotes gives me an indication that the comment resonates with this community (whose collective opinion means alot to me).


I found the comment scores a good motivation for thinking about what I'm typing before hitting that 'add comment' button. Good imperative to participate instead of troll.

The opposite is true for others, I'm sure.


Adding +1, since you can't tell if the parent comment has been upvoted.

EDIT: this -> parent comment


The author of a comment can tell if it's been upvoted - no one else. I really wouldn't like to see comment threads full of posts similar to yours; it lowers the signal:noise.


Obviously it would be terrible if everyone posted 'I agree' comments, that's the point. Numbers show the viewers sentiment towards a comment without clogging the thread.


It is self-evidently true that removing visible comment scores mostly removes methods for trivially measuring "viewer sentiment". It is the contention of those in support of non-visible comment scores that trivial measurement of viewer sentiment harms, rather than aids, discussion. You have made no argument against that point.


Trying to aid discussion by limiting information is fine, unless you happen to want that information.


You can see the points on your own comments.


You can see your own comments' scores.


I don't usually want to post, "me too" posts but...

I really miss the comment scores.

Sometimes I am not totally familiar with whatever the original post is talking about, often the top rated couple of comments give me some good insight or jumping off points to look into it further.

I respect the HN community and have learned a lot here. I generally trust their judgement and I have found if a comment is rated highly, it most likely adds a lot of value to the discussion.

Sometimes I disagree with the highest rated comment(s). I then see my opinion is in a minority and maybe I re-examine it or stand firm and make a comment to the contrary.


Without the comment scores we're confronted with a wall of text that is hard to filter. Should I have to read every single comment just to find the gems? Comments scores have their downsides but they make filtering out noise much easier.

Unfortunately I don't think everyone has time to judge each comment on its own merits -- there are simply too many comments -- so we need a little crowd-sourced ranking. It does lead to some group think at times but that's a (relatively) small price to pay.


In my experience, "wall of text" and "TL;DR" began as terms used by those generally uncomfortable with literacy or focused attention.

Skimming is a valuable skill, becoming even more important as the world generates information ever faster.


How about just having a finite amount of time in which to read the news?

I'd prefer to focus on attention on filtered comments rather than waste time skimming hundreds of comments.


Focus on "filtered" comments is a completely different discussion, and offering users an unnumbered slider to set personal threshold for where the grey vs black text divider falls on a percentile line between top and bottom scored remarks of the given thread, would accomplish 90% of what the TL;DR crowd want w/o all the problems of showing scores.


It's not really a different discussions if you viewed scored comments as filtered comments.


Cant we have a "showcommentscores" option for displaying comment scores? Personally, I really (really) miss seeing comment scores, but its apparent that there are a lot of people who like HN the other way.


The problem is that part of what we like about not displaying the comment scores is the effect it has on other people's behavior. Letting others opt in to seeing the scores would defeat a large part of the purpose.


> The problem is that part of what you like about not displaying the comment scores is the apparent effect it has on other people's behavior.

That, I believe is more correct. I miss the scores, personally, and found them rather useful.


No, because the point of not displaying comment scores is to invite different commenting behaviour from us. If we make it an option, then we don't get the different behaviour from the whole userbase.


Previously, I used to read the comments first and then the article. Now I'm reading the article first and ignoring the comments/vote.


I think that people are missing the point. A comment's quality is not measurable by it's score. If anything, that is a rough aggregation. By this logic, Ke$ha is a better musician than Joshua Bell.

Top comments on HN were becoming more "top 40" and something had to be done before people started posting links to Trollface, etc.

One approach would be to use category-based voting, which adds a lot of complexity.

One approach would be to implement some sort of vote weighting sytem (time based, reputation based, context based), but that's ad-hoc and may not fix the problem.

And one approach is to simply hide numerical comment scores from all but each user's own comments. This turns the quest for high karma into a personal battle against one's self, not a sport.

PG wisely chose to make Karma a personal Everest for each individual to care about (or not).


FWIW, I find myself up/down-voting less without the scores. I guess I mostly tend to vote to rectify imbalances. If a comment has a lot of upvotes already, I probably won't upvote (I figure once it's near the top, it doesn't matter much anyway). But if its popularity seems unwarranted, I may be more likely to downvote.

Conversely, I tend to upvote mostly what appear to be underrated comments that are low on karma. Not saying there's anything admirable about this approach -- what am I, some kind of Karma Robin Hood? -- but the new system definitely discourages it.


Another thing (and some might accuse me of "doing it wrong" this way) is that lack of score showing changes my motivation for voting overall.

Some comments are so awesome, they deserve 50+ upvotes. Other comments are pretty good, and deserve maybe 8. I do not/did not personally try to upvote every single comment. I try to add upvotes to the comments that seem "best" in a particular thread discussion, and allocate votes in this way.

Perhaps my behavior is something that pg was attempting to fix with this change, but I have a feeling I'm not alone in this regard.


Since I registered a username here on HN 890 days ago, I've seen a lot of comments about comment karma and about upvoting and downvoting. The most significant statement I have seen about comment voting here on HN was posted recently by pg, the founder of HN, in a thread-opening post 22 days ago titled "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

So the founder of HN thinks that before the recent experiment there was a comment voting problem: (a) mean comments were getting too many upvotes, and (b) dumb comments were getting too many upvotes, and (c) too many of the comments that got the most upvotes were either mean or dumb or both. Let's stop and think about what that means. That means that, according to pg posting as of that moment, comment karma scores were often NOT reliable signals of good comments, comments worth finding rapidly when skimming a thread.

With that condition of HN less than a month ago in mind, how do the highest-voted comments visible in the bestcomments list

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

look to all of you recently? Are there fewer mean comments than before? Are there fewer dumb comments than before? Are the comments that are "massively upvoted" since the experiment began mostly comments that are reasonably kind and well-informed, helpful comments on the whole? In most of the treads you visit, do helpful, thoughtful comments seem to rise to a position of prominence, while mean or dumb comments gray out?

A link and comment in another recent metadiscussion thread largely sums up the back-and-forth about visible comment scores as a signal on comments in active threads:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465357

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

> 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.

My impression too is that even with comment scores not visible, it is still convenient to browse threads to find thoughtful, informative comments, but now there is less anchoring bias

http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm

of most votes on a comment converging to one score level that shows up early in a thread's development, and more engagement by readers of HN in actively reading comments and upvoting (or downvoting) based on each comment's characteristics in light of the context of the thread. So far I can still find good comments quite readily here on HN. Indeed, I think that since the experiment began I am seeing more good comments more readily than before.

The main motivation stated by pg for the current experiment with making comment karma scores less visible is to "stave off decline of HN," and that is what will decide if the experiment was successful. If the previous visibility of comment karma scores led too many casual readers of HN to upvote mean or dumb comments, and too few readers to upvote thoughtful, informative comments and to downvote mean or dumb comments, the arguments on the side of reader convenience aren't going to be convincing. It isn't convenient for ANY reader of HN if the comment scores are a poor signal, and if bad comments become more prominent and good comments get skimmed right over by readers in a hurry. If a change of rules here makes every reader read comments more carefully and more thoughtfully, and vote based on comment inherent quality rather than on crowd appeal, that is a feature rather than a bug. For comment scores to be a good guide to every reader here, every reader can help by actively upvoting informative, helpful comments, and also by downvoting comments that are either mean or dumb--and especially comments that are both. As I recall, the experiment has also involved some changes in the effects of flagging, so flagging inappropriate comments is also helpful.

After edit: many comments in this thread ask about the karma rules and voting rules imposed by the software. We can all read the news.arc software ourselves

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

if we would like to see what the rules do (except I think that maybe a few aspects of the current experiment are hidden from the current distribution of the source code), as previous HN threads have pointed out.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307128

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2034449


One of the big assumptions that's being made here is that people are dumb calculators.

I can tell the difference between a stupid comment that got a lot of points for being stupid, and a useful comment that got a lot of points for being useful.

When I look at amazon and see that twilight has 3000 5 star ratings, I don't assume this means it's a great piece of literature, but it is useful information to me: it's a popular book.

Same goes for comments.

I'm not stupid, I can tell the difference between "popular because it's funny/pandering" and "popular because it's useful"


I'm not stupid, I can tell the difference between "popular because it's funny/pandering" and "popular because it's useful"

Let me make sure I understand correctly what you mean in light of what pg said about the reasons for the current experiment (quoted in my post to which you reply). Is it simply a mistake to say that high comment scores on comments that are mean or dumb is a problem? I ask, because pg has said that there has been a recent problem with comment scores.

One of the big assumptions that's being made here is that people are dumb calculators.

I think that there is a huge body of research showing that all human beings, without exception, high-IQ or low-IQ, are "cognitive misers"

http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Cognitive_Miser

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/11/04/...

(there is a good self-test at the link above)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ey/a_taxonomy_of_bias_the_cognitive...

in the sense of preferring less effort-demanding problem-solving techniques to more accurate, but more effort-demanding, techniques. Snap judgments spare mental effort for everything else that we are busy with.

Here on HN, the only thing most participants contribute to the community is good comments and good submissions and votes about other participants' submissions and comments. A few founders, pg and his core of curators (editors),

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

do actual work to keep the site running, and they get the best compensation for their volunteer efforts if all the signals about story quality and comment quality are true, thoughtful signals rather than noise.


One of the things I liked about the Slashdot comment system was that you assigned a rating "Insightful" "Funny" "Helpful", etc.


Removal of the comment scores is a great innovation that has improved the quality of Hacker News.

With scores visible, most "discussions" end up as little more than opinion polls.


Seeing comment scores helps me to quickly scan comments to find the ones of most interest. It's not about "who's right" or "who's wrong" --- but what comments are more insightful and interesting. This is what the community of HN provides in voting people's comments up and down. This concept is missing now.

All in all, not showing comment points is a step backwards in helping people get the most out of the site in the most efficient way possible.


I understand the minimalist theme at HN, but would a simple toggle switch to show/hide comment scores be a terribly bad idea? These could be set by logged in users (wouldn't apply to drive-by or anon users).


Please do.

But also, please split upvotes from downvotes. There's a huge difference between a +25 / - 24 comment (apparently a controversial one) and +1 / -0 (probably a mediocre one).

Or perhaps, display only upvotes, and use some weighted form of (UPVOTE * U_WEIGHT - DOWNVOTE * D_WEIGHT) for positioning the comment among other ones.


Removing comment scores seems to have increased the amount of mediocre/poor comments around contested topics: I am noticing more more brother/sister comments that are basically reiterating each other and more debates that veer to uncontrollable levels of indentation when the key points were already covered in the top level post and first child.

The relative absence of these black holes of discussion is one of the things that brought me to HN in the first place, and I think that showing comment scores discouraged them on multiple levels. Public upvoting lets people express their view on the topic without posting points similar to those already expressed. When two comments have a lopsided point spread it lets one "side" of the debate feel more comfortable letting the other have the last word.


Ah, no, don't. Stop fixating on the score and trying to write comments that other people like instead of writing what you actually have to say.


How about allocating a 'hotness' quotient to comments?

At the moment, a comment that's down-voted past zero becomes lighter. Perhaps very popular comments could be made more visible, or highlighted?

I think this kind of fuzzy indication of popularity might be a good compromise.


I agree. One of the more useful things I used comment scores for was to be sure to avoid missing useful comments that were down low on the page. Having a mechanism for setting apart well-regarded comments would be useful.

It would likely have to be normalized based on the score of the submission or the total number of comments on that submission, though, which might be more complexity than pg wants.


No one on this thread has picked up on the 'range' suggestion by Maro yet, so I'll add a thought:

For my purposes, displaying actual scores within the range -4 -> 10 would be sufficient. the low end is already capped, and the high end could either just have a ceiling of 10 or a score of 10+.

I am occasionally a "someone is Wrong on the internet!"[1] type and my inclination to wade in is directly proportioanl to the perceived traction of the inaccuracy. Without such a heuristic the choices are: reply to all, none, or a random sample which result in "poor information", "needless pedantry", and " undefined behavior" respectively.

[1] http://xkcd.com/386/


Disagree. I believe that I can make a fair judgement of the quality of a comment by simply reading it. I don't do TL;DR on comments that I care about, so using scores as a proxy for quality doesn't mean much for me.


Hidden comment scores help us avoid groupthink.


But make it harder to filter information. I feel safe from groupthink, hence the post.


Definitely agree on that as well - it's a pros and cons argument. Frankly I miss the scoring for the reason you mention, but I think this method promotes merit. Of course, now we are all subjected to whatever secret algorithm pushes comments to the top of the page, but I'll naively trust that it's doing its job properly ;-)


I have been quite surprised at how my enthusiasm for contributing to Hacker News has diminished at the removal of comment scores. Not necessarily a bad thing for anyone.


By removing comment scores, does it increase/decrease traffic to HN?

My gut is telling me that traffic is likely to be lower. Reality might be different of course.


The only issue I see with not being able to see the scores of comments is that joke or off-the-cuff comments are probably getting a lot more points.

If there was a comment that made me laugh (while sticking to the point) I will be more likely to upvote it, but if it already had 10+ upvotes a laugh on my part probably didn't justify another upvote.


I really miss comment points on book recommendations. I can't tell you how many books ive purchased over the years based on a highly rated HN comment.

I second what others have mentioned that it would be good to re-display comment scores on older posts. This way we could at least see the community consensus after some time has passed.


I like the lack of comment scores (to avoid everyone piling on one comment), but I think I would like it more if I knew what went into how high a comment was on the page. Is it a fact that the first displayed comment will be the one with the highest score? I know some different inputs are used, such as the karma of the submitter, how new it is, etc. but I guess we don't know "for sure".

I don't think the solution is to bring back scores, though. A possible "simple" solution could be to color/star a comment above 50/100 points, etc. Comment scores could also be displayed as percentage or on a scale of 0 to 1, 0 to 10, etc. I'd be more likely to read a comment with a score of 95% than one with a score of 20%. This way you at least get an indication of the helpfulness of the comment other than just its position on the page.


> I'd be more likely to read a comment with a score of 95% than one with a score of 20%.

Seconding this idea, I really love it. The biggest problem with a linear point count is the large dependency on a comment's visibility and number of impressions, which in turn leaves posters competing for that as much as for inherent comment quality. The implementation would be up for discussion, maybe something like show a comment's positive percentage once it garners a sample size of 5 or 10 votes, and maybe round off to the nearest 10% so you can't triangulate back to the actual score from the change inflicted by your single vote.


I think a middle ground would be good. I understand the reasons for dropping comments scores but it makes it harder for me to get a quality experience out of the site and easily find the information I need. The scores mean something to me.

I liked someone's suggestion of basing the comment score on "upvotes per view" so older comments don't dominate, and I also like the idea of using a dark-to-light gradient (dot) instead of a concrete number.

Just sorting to the top (kinda) really just makes it hard to wade in, and makes me less likely to take a look at a topic I know little about and would like to see a couple of definitive words on it. It may be groupthink to some extent but this is a damn smart group.


Remove scores/points for people entirely.

That way only posts/comments get points/scores, not people.


I'd prefer a system that reveals the score of comments you've already either replied to, or voted on. Gives you some kind of feedback on where the rest of the community's mind is with regard to that comment.


One observation: I think that comment ordering is an inadequate substitute for numerical scores. A lot of interesting information goes missing when reducing a scale from interval to ordinal.


My initial reaction was also "just bring em back".

With reflection, I think a good idea might be to show the score after you vote.

This way you get the feeling of making some difference i.e. immediate feedback, but also the knowledge that your vote wasn't subconsciously affected by a visible score beforehand.

The main downside of this would be people voting out of curiosity to see what a comments current score is. Perhaps displaying the score of a comment once it reaches a certain age (maybe three or four days old) would mitigate against this.


[...people voting out of curiosity...]

If voting reveals the score, then there would need to be a new way to abstain and reveal the score.


Why? If you feel positively or negatively towards a comment, then vote thusly. Abstaining to reveal the score is far too easily gamed with a secondary account.


With the comment score not being displayed, I find myself commenting less often for some reason. Others have echoed a similar sentiment in some of the earlier threads.


I found it particularly hard to read the recent Amazon Outage thread. There was so much information to sift through. It had me missing the comment scores.


I'm not going to read all the comments when they're more than 50. Finding insightful comments is hard without any number next to them. But I understand that it might bring more karma to "stupid comments" instead of "really insightful comments"... but who cares, the insightful comments is still there and probably going to get more karma than it would without any number next to it.


Ok I just had another idea, so thought to write it here, in case PG gives it a look. How about showing votes after you took an action on a particular post. Say you upvoted a post, or replied to it, then you are eligible to seeing the points that it has.

This helps because even if in hindsight, I would know if the comment was the general consensus or a popular one or not?


I would like it if the comment rating was only available in an html data attribute (eg data-rating="10"). That way my old user script would still be able to sort and high light comments.

You would have to go out of your way to see the score but could still be used by us hackers who like to customize our experience.


I wonder if showing the rating of a comment only after you had voted on it would work? That would prevent some level of groupthink by forcing people make their own evaluations before seeing what others thought. That would require a +0 vote option, though, to prevent some obvious failure modes.


Ignorance is bliss. I'm happier not knowing that the crowd disagrees with my judgment of a comment's worth.

I also feel like people are avoiding posting crappy comments with the intent of tapping into a popular vein for a high score.

This could be a placebo, or perhaps, if real, it's instead caused by an improvement in voting.


Comment scores help me get to the best points (even if they are in disagreement) without spending a lot of time reading the whole page.

I'm reading a lot let now because there are no scores; I just skim the top and then move on.

Comment scoring allows the community to reveal quality.


I wonder how Hacker Monthly (http://hackermonthly.com/) will pick out the "best" comments.


Supposedly via http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments I don't think that upvote count alone determines which are to be picked, but I could be mistaken.


It's interesting to see an 8 hours post that has 374 points, and 156 comments on the second page instead of being on the first page.


I didn't even notice they were gone at first...


Button to make comment scores visible, please.


I much prefer it without. I like it like this


I would make it an option.


No middle ground. Please bring exact score number.


http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2477527

My comment here explaining it has made me comment less has 40 points. I think a lot of people agree.


It's interesting because (although I can't explain why) it actually freed me to post more comments, and I have far lower karma (and avg/post).

So the system could lead to more posts by undesirables (me) and fewer posts by those with more knowledge (you).


I disagree. It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit. Often times the highest voted comment seemed to be highest voted comment simply because it was the first comment and kept being upvoted for being upvoted by others.

Also, the ordering of the comments does the same thing as having the comment scores!

I do wish there was a way to still search for the highest rated comments on searchyc.com, but I still think it's a small sacrifice for an overall better community/environment. I have definitely seen less iOS/Android/Windows flaming, so I think the site is already benefitting from the changes.


It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit

I understand your argument. Just keep in mind that there are multiple ways that HN is useful. Some of us want to go deep into a topic, will read all the comments. And some of us are in a hurry and want to a quick feel and extract a summary.

In the first case (I call it "researcher mode"), not having votes is a good thing. But it prevents me from browsing in the second mode (the "quick update mode").

I wish you could set this in my preferences, but it wouldn't fulfill pg's original goal of staving the decline of HN (that I don't see - but that's another discussion).


When i am interested in the subject, i usually read ALL comments. Having them in order of popularity helps, but does not really discourage me from reading on. Scores don't really matter.

There is a tendency for short comments to sink down, regardless of how informative they are, simply because people spend less time on them, so they're less likely to hit that upvote button.

Also, like all forums, the first upvoted comments get more replies creating a positive feedback loop, not necesarily because they are the best, but because people know their replies will be more visible.

It would be interesting to have the statistics of number of upvotes vs position of the comment in the page.


+




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