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Experiment: No Comment Scores
289 points by pg on Sept 26, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 313 comments
Over the years several people have suggested not displaying comment scores. I finally decided to try it. There are so many users now that voting is starting to have a bit of a mob feel to it. We'll see if this makes the site feel better.

Voting still has all the same effects (on karma, and on position on the page), so I encourage users to keep doing it. The only difference is that comment scores aren't displayed in threads.



Wow, this interferes with key elements of my system for voting/commenting on HN. Here are some things that don't work now:

* If a comment is sitting at 1 or 0, I'll try to avoid downvoting it unless I really think the comment subtracts value from the site.

* If a child is attracting more votes than the parent, and I think this is because the child commenter didn't comprehend what the parent was saying, I vote to level out the comments.

* If I see a comment sitting in negative territory that I feel should only be a 0 or 1 because it wasn't that bad, I'll upvote it even if I otherwise wouldn't have.

* If a thread is already dominated by a couple of high-scoring comments, relative to its age, I'm less likely to post a new top level comment. My feeling is that if a good comment just sits at the bottom because it arrived slightly too late, I've only added noise to the thread. The lack of visible points makes it much harder to gauge how a new comment will 'compete' on the thread.

* If the scores indicate that something is being widely misunderstood, I might comment where I otherwise would not have to try to restore sanity.

Of course, if this change were to stick, it would alter the character of the site, and we would all develop new voting and commenting systems. I can already tell that this change magnifies my tendency to vote with an eye toward reordering comments rather than voting on each comment in relative isolation.


Voting patterns showed a lot of users voted to get a comment to what they felt was an appropriate score: they wouldn't up- or downvote something unless they felt its current score was too low or high respectively. But if comment scores aren't displayed, you won't need to anymore.


Hmmm... I always considered that a feature rather than a bug. Only voting when the scores looked "wrong" was an optimization. How do I decide when to vote now? I have a feeling I'm going to settle into a pattern of voting to reorder comments and that I'm going to vote less overall.


I also considered that a feature. I have 3 choices: -1, 0 and 1, and almost always I choose 0.

I do think that people make too much of karma and comments scores. But I don't understand why pg thinks this particular aspect is an improvement.


I can see why the change is for the better: my vote (-1, 0, 1) should not be skewed/altered based on past events (others voting). Also, an "appropriate" total vote count is not something that an individual should be determining; it should be a collective thought. The only thing an individual should decide on is whether to award the comment a -1/0/1 purely based on the comment, nothing more. This change removes everything else (or so we assume: but considering the fact that the position on the page is still modified, it's not perfect, but it's close enough in my book).


"The only thing an individual should decide on is whether to award the comment a -1/0/1 purely based on the comment, nothing more."

exactly


Since global karma (your collected karma over time) does not have any real function in the site as far as I can see you could lose it completely and not much of value would be lost, the way to look at it now is more 'relative', if you see a comment thread with a comment directly above the comment you're looking at that you think contributes less than the comment below it vote to lower one up.

After all, the biggest function by far of the votes is to influence the sort order, so the good stuff gets read by the people that skim. A vote is like a little bit of editorial power, you get to have a say in what goes 'above the fold'.


I always did the same thing, and I (so far) have been up/down voting far more. Instead of keying in on a specific score I feel appropriate for that comment, I'm keying in on just the three options: Up, Down, No change. Without having a visible score, I am no longer constrained by "If I up/down vote this, it will take it out of the range I want it to be in". Instead I'm just up/down voting as I want to.


I think your previous guidance helped create the "vote toward a target score" behavior. You've spoken against piling-on voting, and your clipping of the negative range advances the idea: once a signal is 'far enough' in one direction, people should hold off.

I can see ways hidden scores may work for or against extreme totals. On the one hand, without the satisfaction of seeing a vote take immediate effect, overall voting may go down. But on the other, without the indication that a comment is already 'far enough' in a desired direction, charged comments may rack up unprecedented positive or negative values. I hope you can share info about which effect predominates.

I will miss the chance to quickly 'rescue' slightly-downvoted comments I don't particularly like or agree with, but feel have been unfairly squelched into nether-ratings by hair-trigger down-voters.


In fact I will go as far as to say that the ideal interface would be one that let me specify what the ideal score of every comment should be and my vote should be counted as an upvote if its below that value and a downvote if its above that...


Yes I've had this idea before too. I also think that the votes should be applied to the score in reverse order of the time at which they were made. This means that those who vote earlier end up having more effect on the final score, rather than none at all, as would be the case otherwise.


That would be a star rating system then. Supposedly they work worse.


No, star rating systems generally average. The GP's proposal is not the same.


You're discounting the effect of the age factor -- I don't downvote high-position low-score comments for reordering purposes because I know it'll probably decay down anyway.

I don't want to be the asshat to drop a comment below 1, just because there's a better comment that's currently below it (but probably with more karma). At least from my usage, you'll see a net gain in karma inflation.


I only did that with comments that went below 1 when I felt it was valid. Is that not expected behavior? (Although one can still do this because text color indicates it's gone negative.)


You don't think that this is a good thing?


It's interesting - I manfully tried for a bit, but my interest in voting seems to have evaporated with the numbers. Like tc, I often vote to "balance out" as much as to "join the mob".

My prediction: comment voting will drop precipitously.


My response is different. I find I'm voting more, without being able to "balance out" I am now tending to vote up more than before. I'm also downvoting more, though that hasn't changed as much as the upvoting.


One thing I don't like: The graying out of comments at 0 and -1. Your comment was gray when I came across it, and now that comes across as a very significant visual for judgment. I don't think a single voter should have the power to gray something out before anybody else has read it.


One Idea I've had for fixing this problem is to weight the value of a click based on position on the page. The further down on the page, the more weight its gets. Therefore the most popular topic at the top only get marginally incremented as people read it first and decide its worthy.

On the same note, if an article is waaaay down at the bottom, and someone's taken the time to read it and likes it, then it should get a good solid bump. This will create a "bubble effect" and allow those treasures that are buried deep down in the comment land, to rise to the top and even accelerate as more users find out and rank them.

This essentially is a formula to equalize the comments and give them a fair playing field as they battle for the top most position.


That is a good idea. I will see if I can figure out an easy way to do that. It may be enough just to make the time decay on comment scores faster.


Update: I wrote a new function to rank comment threads, and it's being used now. Seems promising.


Back a while ago I submitted an idea, that maybe there are herd (mob) effects on comment threads happening.

This should do the trick (driving the long tail).


Glad to hear you like the idea. My method for reading through HN and others is to scan through items with a certain threshold. Once I get below the "fold" of the page, I start to lower the level so I can compensate for the "decay factor" you mention.

There's tons of good gems at the bottom of the page, and they need to compete at the same level as those at the top.

You could tweek the "weighting equation" and try linear, quadratic, or exponential type formulas.

You could also apply this technique to articles, so those at the top don't get overly hyped and those at the bottom have a fair chance to making some movement to the top.

Also, one thought in terms of the scoring value is to have it with a few digits of decimal precision. So you could still see how competing articles are doing at the very top and see your vote make a difference (be it very small).

Example two competing top articles:

Article Exhibit A: (score 47.25) Article Exhibit B: (score 46.33)

Now when I click to bump exhibit "B" it moves to say 46.38 a boost of "0.05"


Any chance we can see scores when we're looking at our own comments section?

Often when I notice a bump in my karma I look at my comment threads to see what was so popular.


Ok, now there should be scores next to your own comments. Better?


You know how sometimes online stores won't tell you the price of something until you add it to your cart? Hacker News feels kind of like that now. Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.

I feel kind of lost.


Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.

Fuck that. Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying and form your own opinions? That groupthink is just going to naturally turn out better than forcing every member to think about what they're reading?

For the longest time, HN has become more and more "accessible", at the cost of a lot of intellectual discussion. I've seen a lot of conversations where one side of the argument is downvoted to hell and it makes the other side look "correct". I just saw a thread two days ago where somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit. That's utter shit and it hurts Hacker News.

I'm fine with spending more time reading a thread if it means I'm legitimately thinking about what people are saying. This is a terrific improvement to the system, and it feels a hell of a lot less claustrophobic than it did when every single thing people said was being judged as if it were an objective statement capable of being "good" and "bad."

Hopefully this also stops people from downvoting statements based on disagreement. Feels less vindictive when you can't see what your vote's done.


I'm the guy who said "Look at your comment score; looks like I'm right." The details are off a bit, though; it was "judging by your comment score, the parent speaks for the majority." I didn't participate in the discussion before that, so "I'm right" would have been a nonsequitor.

More importantly, though, the discussion itself was about the poster's demeanor. In all other situations, downvoting isn't an accurate measure of sentiment toward the post, because voting mixes such things as agreement, clarity, obnoxiousness, and humor ratings, weighted differently for each person, into one opaque integer. However, in this case, when a person is voted down for [obnoxiously] arguing that they aren't obnoxious, and the parent is voted up for arguing that they are, in fact, obnoxious, the score really only has one meaning, in both cases: how much people dislike the poster. This is an exceptional situation; I never would have argued "by comment score" otherwise.


Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying!


Fuck that.

Don't you think that reaction is a little bit extreme? Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site.


If I'd just said Fuck that, absolutely! As it is, I went on to add a whole ton of details.

Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site.

Really? When you're spending 30 days flying around on a plane and sleeping in airports, I'd imagine you're the one with more time to waste.

The top comments on HN are still the highest-voted ones. Read however many you want before the discussion tires you. Also, I can't think of many HN threads that ended up with more than 300 comments. 300 is at most an hour's reading; an hour isn't very long.


Who are you? Why does it seem like you're angry all the time?

I pointed out an observation. Your response used the word fuck and then called me lazy, which is extremely rude. Would you have said that to my face? This isn't personal, dude. I just get the same feeling now when scanning comments that I get when I am looking at products on Amazon and can't see the price.


You got mad at him for making an impersonal remark, and now you say to him

"Who are you? Why does it seem like you're angry all the time?"

Which is an angry, personal remark.

The word "fuck", not directed at anyone, is not important. Personal attacks are.

If you don't like unalone's style, ignore him, don't psychologize him. Personally I appreciate the fact that he wrote substantive on-topic comments.


Sooo, when will we get pink, dancing polka dots to highlight conversations like this? :-)


You got mad at him for making an impersonal remark

I think Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying and form your own opinions? is a rather personal remark. A psychologizing one at that. Pot, meet kettle.


If by "pot, meet kettle", you're mentioning how dcurtis responded to my remark with a personal psychologizing remark, then the expression makes sense; otherwise, I'm confused. I didn't get mad at what dcurtis said, so I don't know who's the pot and who's the kettle here.

"Are you saying that" is an opener that means, "How is it that you're viewing this, because I see it like this". I wasn't trying to be snide and put him down. I was letting him know that's how I was viewing the situation, and asking him his interpretation. It was also a teeny bit tongue-in-cheek, considering, again, he's currently spending a month of his life flying in planes.


But he choose to highlight the profanity, not the remarks you point out. He told us which remark offended him, and it was an impersonal one.


I'm an art student who is very rarely angry and doesn't think swearing indicates emotion. I also believe that it's better to have to spend time thinking about what to read, how to spend your time, than it is to be offered an easy way out that risks devaluing what people are saying. (I further believe that being called lazy usually isn't an insult.)

In person, I'd probably be doubly critical. Don't think of it as rude; I think criticizing what somebody's saying is a sign of respecting them. To quote a guy I'm in the middle of reading: "The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself."

If I were being rude, I'd ignore your comment and not call out what I thought was stupid/wrong about it. As it is, I'm debating what you said because I think there's a discussion to be had. For instance: Why would you feel the same reading comments as you would buying things? There's no harm to reading a few extra comments. You lose nothing but your time, which you're already spending on Hacker News.


"Top-rated comments appear at the top of the thread"

True, but often times the top comment will not be the highest rated, but the reply or subsequent replies below the comment will be rated higher than the orginal post, but the entire thread gets moved to the top because of that.

Now I have no way of knowing that.

[edit] I also have no way of knowing when the MAJORITY of readers are disagreeing with me.

Up votes/down votes has always been a way to express yourself without commenting. If it's not visible, it's not as expressive, nor is it as rewarding to the commentor or the voter. I officially dislike this.


I officially dislike disagreeing with somebody without explaining why. That's not what upvotes and downvotes were meant for. They're meant to maintain commenting relevancy by downvoting irrelevant comments. It's a brilliant idea dashed by the fact that most people would much rather downvote things they dislike and call it "democracy".


Oh, I agree with that. I rarely downvote, and if/when I do I always leave a comment. It's more the opposite that I'm talking about here.

Someone may not down vote my comment, which, say, has 7 points. But they may leave a reply that is argumentative to my comment. With this new system, I can only see that my comment has 7 points, but I can't see that the counter-point reply to it may have 34.

The fact that many people are agreeing with the counter-point to my comment is significant, as is my inability to see that.


> I also have no way of knowing when the MAJORITY of readers are disagreeing with me.

Why would that matter ? The majority isn't always right.

HN is not a popularity contest, but when you look at the comments that way it certainly starts to look like it.

Let's see what I can say that many people will agree with so I can be voted up ?

As unalone already remarked, now you have to make up your own mind about what you are reading, which is a huge improvement over the groupthink mentality. It forces you to think for yourself before casting your vote, it takes care of the huge feedback loop that was in HN before this change.

Even now, there is still some of that left, after all the sort order still tells you what the majority voted for, but that's subtle enough that it probably won't matter too much, and the new sorting algorithm seems to do a very good job of bringing the good stuff to the top.


Ok. This is starting to congeal for me.

What the old system did was to provide a numeric indicator of other readers' emotive participation in the discussion. It wasn't a popularity contest (although it could be for some) and it wasn't an agree/disagree rank (although it could be for some)

These "bad" uses of the score caused the system to get out of whack as more and more people participated. The problem is, there are "good" uses of the score, which is to use it as a way to filter the site. After all, there are thousands of comments added per hour and it's crazy to think that I'm going to have time to read every single one. I need an indicator of those comments that seem to affect the most number of readers because that's where I want to add my limited amount of effort.

I am not on a treasure hunt for good comments. I am not here to please PG or the other readers. Some might be but I am not. I am not jumping onboard to upvote things already upvoted -- the sad fact is that I can't read everything, so some things will have to have higher priority than others. If you take away the numeric system, I'll find some other way to filter -- perhaps by comment author or by scanning the front page for buzzwords that interest me.

I, the user, have a need to skim. Now the system can either easily provide that for me, or I'll probably go somewhere else. I don't mean that as a threat or anything -- I'm sure nobody gives a hoot where I read on the net or not -- but as an indication of the type of reaction the general public is going to have.


> I, the user, have a need to skim

The sort order is what gives you exactly that, and that is still there, so the 'good' stuff is still at the top (and even better than before now with the improved sorting algorithm). It's just 'relative' now, instead of 'absolute'.


I'm trying to give it some time, jacquesm.

But right now I look at this thread and all I see is a bunch of jumbled-up comments. I don't know if the one at the top is worth-while for me to read or just matches some arcane criteria established by the programmer.

I'm forced to use "threads" to see where I've commented before and to use the new comments page to see where people are currently commenting. Any semblance of being able to apply my own sort criteria is gone.

And I think it gets to my ability to sort by my own criteria and the nested nature of the comments. Do I want to find highly-ranked comments under a lowly ranked parent? Sometimes those are the best ones.

I don't know. Let's see how it goes.


HN is not a popularity contest

Yes it is.


That explains why you have so much time to read all the comments.

I don't have time to read all the comments so I'll look at the greatest hits. You can find the conversation based on the kharma scores, both positive and negative. If someone says something -4, it might be worth reading because it got such a reaction out of people. But a bunch of 1s and 2s on an old thread are noise that aren't worth reading.


That explains why you have so much time to read all the comments.

What, that I'm a student? Reading comments doesn't take that long. As I said above: Fifteen minutes at most? And that's if it's a seriously long thread. Most threads are five minutes' skimming at most.

If someone says something -4, it might be worth reading because it got such a reaction out of people. But a bunch of 1s and 2s on an old thread are noise that aren't worth reading.

Not necessarily. Perhaps somebody made a brilliant comment, but only after people were done reading. In any case, that hasn't changed now: Top-rated comments appear at the top of the thread, same as always. So if you want the most "valued" conversations, read at the top.


I take a lot longer to read a thread, but I think it is well worth it, even the downvoted comments sometimes contain really good stuff, and sometimes the downvotes are based on ambiguity or misunderstandings (or cultural gaps).

So if I pick a thread I read all of it, sometimes again at a later point in time (or via the 'threads' page).


I generally pick one or two most interesting topics from the front page, and read most of the comments on them. It seems better to read a few things in depth than reading sound bites on everything.

This also frees me of any need to complain about offtopic stuff, as long as a few on-topic posts remain.


Most people use swearing to indicate emotion. If you go against this convention, then you will often be misunderstood.


That's why I try to be careful how I swear. I thought that "fuck that" was casual enough to come across as being neutrally dismissive. Guess not; apologies to all!


The problem is that in-person you can use body language and tone of voice to moderate the effects of using something like, "Fuck that!" but when you're expressing yourself completely in text you are at the whim of the reader's interpretation of your words.


somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit.

That's assuming that the majority is right. If somebody gets voted down there is a pretty good chance that they were wrong, or even if they were right, they said in the wrong tone/manner.


"Pretty good chance." But here's the thing. What if they're not wrong? What if a bunch of people read the comment, didn't quite understand it, and then downvoted it because it already had downvotes? I know I act like that a lot while reading.

I also see a curious downvoting pattern on those frequent incidents when somebody mass downvotes all my comments for some reason or other. I'll assume for argument that on average I make useful, relevant comments. When new comments that I make get downvoted, there's about a 50-50 chance that the next person to come along also downvotes the comment, even when it's a good one. They see the other person's downvote and it reenforces in their mind that there was a good reason the comment was being downvoted. The ones that get a reverse upvote, however, then soar upwards.

I had made one comment a few days ago that go downvoted such, then for a while hovered between -1 and -2, with very little differentiation. Then it hit 1 again, and within a few hours had hit up to something like 16. That's a pattern that I see a lot. People are less willing to upvote a comment that's grey than they are to upvote something solidly in the black. That's a flaw.


"Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth.

The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that". Also consider pg's comment recently about "bogus" research, and how so many people then jumped on him. Actually, someone got sued in the UK for calling research "bogus", instead of factually and objectively calling out the problem with it. It's also in the HN guidelines to use neutral and factual language without connotations.

By observing myself, I've noticed that my interpretation of a comment is affected by the upvotes/downvotes on it. It's not surprising, given the experimentally confirmed tendency to conform in humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3).


"Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth.

There's no such thing as a democratic theory of truth. The truth isn't something that can be voted on. Does God exist because more people believe in Him than believe in a secular universe?

The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that".

"Fuck that" obscures nothing. It's a concise way to say what I wanted to say. I could have said "I disagree", which takes twice as long to say and sounds garbled. I think there's a place for the word "fuck": It's for saying something very clearly and quickly when there's no need for delay. So, "Fuck that" doesn't have connotations. Not in the way that "That's shit" does, or even "Fuck you".

Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3).

I agree completely. As an aside, it's interesting right now watching my comments just in this thread. Once they hit 0 and turn grey, there's a lot of turbulence and they hover around there until they go black again, but the comments here that are in the black have quite high scores. That reinforces my belief that reading a grey comment biases you to think it's a bad comment. So in my mind, the threshold now where a single voter can grey a comment is too low. Setting it to -2 means there'd have to be a three-vote discrepancy between ups and downs, which I think sounds about right.


So, "Fuck that" doesn't have connotations. Not in the way that "That's shit" does, or even "Fuck you".

I disagree with that. Of course I could have said "Fuck that." However, just like you probably wouldn't want me just saying "Fuck that" in response to your viewpoint other people aren't going to appreciate a comment that says "Fuck that."

I will vote down any comment such as that, and I'm sure that many other members will as well.


I think the problem is not so much with the choice of words as it is in the company in which you choose to use those words.

I swear a lot, I grew up in a fairly rough area of a big town and it took me some self control to get rid of it.

It's not that I mind, it is that other people mind, and the use of it in 'polite discourse' is therefore discouraged, there are other ways to express exactly the same thing without chancing stepping on someones toes. In general, if every third comment on HN would contain swear words we'd have to start calling it 4chan, and I'm sure plenty of people - including me - would leave.

That says noting about your freedom to choose whatever words you want, but you have to be aware that you are changing the atmosphere in a non subtle way by your choice of language.


"The democratic theory of truth" is a joke.


I do agree wholeheartedly. I guess the lesson is never downvote or upvote something unless you have a solid reason for doing so.

Don't just go along with the pack.


"Best indicator" are not the words I would have used. Like other (all that I know of, in fact) voting systems on popular social sites, Hacker News' is biased in favor of comments that repeat the established, arrive early, and are written by popular authors. All criteria which are subtly different from quality of contents.

My first comment was http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739112 Being my first intervention on HN, I thought I would be able to post anonymously so I included my name at the bottom of the post. The first reply (which, I admit is polite, well written and from a relatively famous person in this community, although not completely on-topic with respect to the article originally linked) got upvoted above ten. My comment, which revealed a lesser-know but true fact strongly related to the original article, with reference to an experiment that you can reproduce at home, was upvoted twice or something like that.


Yes; if anything, hiding the username might be just as useful.


I'm a big fan of forced anonymity in online forums. I wrote a very long article about it (which was previously covered on HN) here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000


> Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.

It can be when the site is new and only an overall smart population lives on it, but yc is (I guess) growing, and as it grows the quality of the voting (and therefore the score) decreases: insightful comments running against the general opinion get mercilessly downvoted, useless comments matching the general opinion rise.


>Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.

You mean in the same way a book's price is an indicator of its quality? ;)

The nice thing about comments is that they are short and quick to read. Unlike books or films there's no need for reviewers or critics to help you find the better ones. Just read and decide for yourself.


Surely the content is the best indicator of context, class, and quality? If you feel lost, perhaps you were relying too much on others to judge an opinion for yourself?


Apropos of nothing, let me not one side effect of this recent change to HN: I'm really having a much harder time resisting the urge to downvote ideas just because they're really bad.

Instead, let me just say that this common notion -- that because good content is the ultimate signal of quality, we should read all the content before making a choice -- is like saying that, because the way your spouse gets along with children is vitally important to your future happiness, you should try having a child with all the eligible spouses you can find before you choose one.


That's the entire premise behind this site: popular items become more visible. There just isn't enough time to go through all the content; it's much easier to learn the site's bias & compensate.


There just isn't enough time to go through all the content; it's much easier to learn the site's bias & compensate.

That's one man's opinion. I read all the comments on every thread here, and find that not all the high-quality comments rise to the top. It's hit-and-miss. In a way that invalidates the theory of upvote-judging, no?

It's a shitty system that forces you to adapt to biases. Right now PG's experimenting with removing a bias and improving the system. You're arguing that it would be better if he left the system flawed.


Most people here don't want to or have the time to read all comments on all threads and would appreciate help in finding "good" things.

It's true that PG is experimenting with the system, but it's a value judgment to say the old way is more flawed than the new way. In other words, your last two sentences beg the question.


Sure, content is the best indicator of context, class, and quality... given you have unlimited time to read all the content.

Since most people don't have infinite reading time, people use a heuristic to work out what's worth reading and what isn't, and upmods are a reasonable, if fallable, heuristic to use. I've just come back from an 8 hour shift at a warehouse, and I'm not going to bother reading all the comments - it's simply not going to happen. Sorry if that offends people, but I'm tired. I'm going to miss out on the the good comments because I don't have time to read all the comments.

Secondly, upmods smooth out discussion by preventing redundant comments and people repeating the same point ad nauseum. While this might be perceived as "groupthink", being able to separate a fringe viewpoint (even if they're not necessary wrong) from a popular view is an extremely useful heuristic, because the prevailing opinion is often (but not always) more likely to be a reasonable and reliable answer.

I have a feeling that most people actually practice these heuristics in real life too. Given finite reading time and the contents of all books in history, most people read books that others people have recommended or are popular.


I wonder if someone will now habitually look at their own comment's position in http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments to infer the (relative) value of other people's comments in different threads :-)


That's great. Thanks. I really love this idea, by the way.


Yes, this works for me.


+1


I am not alone in the world! And to register this, I clicked the up arrow next to the comment above me, but it redirected me to a blank page. (Chrome, Windows Vista.)


Hmm, will investigate.


Ok, should be fixed now. Sorry, the javascript for modifying displayed scores was breaking now that there weren't any.


Now when I upmod a story on the main page, the score of the story doesn't change :/

BTW Cool experiment, think it might get rid of some of the group-think


Same problem when upvoting the story on its comment page (e.g. here). It seems to be the javascript: the score is increased if you reload the page.


works fine for me. FF on OSX


same here (FireFox 3.5.3, Ubuntu Jaunty)

EDIT: Fixed. Wow that was fast!


[deleted]


Good programmer FTW.


"arc ftw"

REPL ftw?


If you click on "threads" to see your comments it still shows your scores per comment.


I just added that.


"I just added that."

This is great. So now I can see which of my comments are getting voted up/down and so have feedback for my writing, but I have to vote other comments up or down based on content (and author sometimes I guess).


Just curious... why author? Why not just content?


"Just curious... why author? Why not just content?"

Oh i was just referring to the "vote pg up anyway" trend.

If the author is someone you know (and I've made many friends from YC) there is a minor incentive to upvote a comment even if it doesn't read well because you know the person and can guess at what he was trying to say. So instead of judge(content), the subroutine becomes judge(content, person). It sort of feels like "voice tone" is added to a comment if you know the person. The "tone" and (perceived) intent with which something is said makes a huge difference

This could lead to a known troll getting a downvote and a known "good guy" getting an upvote for the same comment.

And that is probably a good thing.


I'm not so sure about that. I think content should stand on its own, regardless of who wrote it.


If I knew that someone were qualified to talk about whatever we're discussing, I'd be more inclined to upvote them.


But now I cant quickly skim off information from a thread. There are 87 comments in this thread at this moment. I am not interested in reading 87 comments about this experiment. I am however very much interested in seeing what the top few most insightful comments in this thread are. That feedback is very important. Right now I am feeling blind as a bat...


I feel your pain. I don't think I like the new system that much. At least so far.

I'm used to scanning comments as a way to determine which articles to read. Postings with a lot of comment action usually indicate something emotionally appealing.

Once I go to the comments section, then I filter by score, only looking at comments above a certain threshold (depending on how much time I have). I usually try not to comment, unless some comment has been upvoted to a high level and doesn't make sense to me.

Alas, there are a huge number of comments that I disagree with or fail to understand, and only by knowing the score am I able to determine whether or not my adding to the discussion will help the other readers.

That don't work no more. Now I'm just blindly poking around in the comments section, not really feeling connected to the discussion at all...


This is precisely the problem. Without some idea of what earlier readers think of the comments it is much harder to skim.

The top-level comments presumably rise and sink based roughly on their karma (though the algorithm also seems to have other considerations, like momentum). But what of the second-tier comments and below? Ripostes are often where the action is.

I might find that I'm reduced to skimming for names that I recognize. That's how the rest of the web works. The web in general has no karma system, so the way to "upvote" something is to repeat it with your byline: You Twitter it or reblog it (or retweet it, or re-reblog it) with a link and your signature, implying a certain degree of implicit endorsement.

I expect that if this system holds we'll start seeing more "amen" comments. I kind of hope so, frankly: Now the only way I will spot an incredibly insightful but short comment buried downthread is if I see a bunch of comments from people I vaguely know saying "amen".

I'm not sure this trend will represent progress, however.

If we want to tinker, consider this: relative rankings on a page. Find a way to distinguish the top-voted 20% of comments from the second quintile, and the second quintile from everything else. (My instinct is not to bother distinguishing things below the top 40%, and of course negative-karma comments presumably are still doing their disappearing act, my favorite cute HN feature.)

At the risk of repeating the legendary eye-searing Orange Name experiment... we could turn the byline of comments in the top 20% a different color from the second 20%, which in turn is a different color from everything else.

Red is probably the wrong color for any of this -- too loud. Think "green". I'm thinking shades of green: Comments in the first quintile have very green bylines, comments in the second quintile have slightly green bylines, and all the other comments have their usual light grey bylines.


I may be off base here, but perhaps HN isn't being designed to make skimming easy. Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content, and then voting on that content, is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding.

PG wrote an essay which discussed the 'fluff principle' at work in other voting-based aggregator communities, in which the most superficially sensational content usually rose to the top, beating out longer-form but more intellectually substantial content: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

I think this move by PG is aimed at reducing the herd mentality of voting, and reducing the ability of readers to engage in voting without having engaged the content first.

However, I think your scheme of highlighting comments by quintile is probably a good one. It gets us away from thinking about raw scores, but also serves to reward and reinforce good commenting contributions/behavior by setting an example for others to follow. In order to stave off the herd mentality of 'piling on' upvotes or downvotes, perhaps votes made subsequent to highlighting (or greying out in the case of negative comments) should have half the weight.


Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content... is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding.

If you think that the secret to encouraging engagement is to flatten out the structure of the information, and ask everyone to read everything in order to discover the influential, popular, or insightful bits...

... you desperately need to read The Paradox of Choice:

http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000...

There is nothing engaging about thirty screenfuls of undifferentiated choices. When presented with that, I'll just leave. If I wanted a firehose of undifferentiated, recent, quality content, presented in a way which made it very difficult to nucleate a conversation or form a community, I'd be using Google Reader.

[EDIT: Incidentally, if not illustratively, I should point out that I haven't actually read the entirety of The Paradox of Choice myself. I listened to the author lecture about it for an hour in a podcast, and I started to read it, and I appreciated the concept, but I felt that the book kept repeating the same point too many times and I had other uses for my time... ;]


This is precisely the problem. Without some idea of what earlier readers think of the comments it is much harder to skim.

Yes. It's like "we want the voting system for our own purposes. You schmucks can just read every comment under an article because your time is not as valuable to us as our desire to prevent mobbing"

I'm sure that's not the case, but that's the way the new system feels.


Amen.


I don't look at the score to understand a comment, I look at the score to understand the community response to a comment. To me there is just less information now.


For me, comment rankings also serve to verify the correctness of my thoughts about the article or a previous comment. I believe this is completely normal and reflects the ability to doubt yourself. The fact that I initially think a story or comment is valuable, does not mean it actually is valuable: I may be wrong. As there will usually be comments reflecting different sides of the issue, I need to know what the community thinks the value of these comments is, relative to each other.

20 Points for a comment 'supporting' my position and 20 for a comment arguing 'against' my position indicate that I shouldn't be too certain, but that my position is (probably) at least rational.

20 Points for a comment 'supporting' my position and 1 for a comment arguing 'against' my position is an additional sign that I am probably on the right track.

1 Point for a comment 'supporting' my position and 20 for a comment arguing 'against' my position is a clear sign that I may have missed something and should read that comment carefully.

I really dislike this change.


That implies you trust the community more than you trust your own judgment.

If somebody refutes you elegantly, then you should look into their refutation regardless of whether or not the refutation has many points.


I'm in a similar boat to Confusion on this one. I don't care about elegance; if I make a comment and then someone shows up with 2 sentences that basically say "You're an idiot. Obviously the answer is X." then context is important. Without knowing what the score is, I'll probably disregard the comment because I obviously disagree. However, if my comment has 1 point and the responder's has 50 points, then I know there's a pretty good chance I'm wrong, and know to go investigate.


Perhaps I'm in the minority; I'd downvote that even if it was right because that's a shitty attitude for somebody to take.

Meanwhile, I think if somebody replies to you with something like that, it's worth investigating regardless of if they're the top answer or not. I'll draw a parallel to Reddit's "What's your favorite album?" threads. If you were to go by comment points alone, you'd think Radiohead's OK Computer was the best album of all time and that NIN took the four spots under that; meanwhile, albums out of the hive mind don't get as many upvotes, even if the commenter is more passionately in love with them.

Similarly, just because a lot of people think one thing on HN doesn't mean that one thing is the best answer. Looking up multiple solutions may take more time, but that leads to learning and growth, which I think should be the point of any community.


I don't know what kind of time you have available in an average day, but I can tell you that I don't have the time to go research what every yahoo with an opinion has. I don't mind being wrong, but if I say something, I am saying it because I think I'm right. Just because someone disagrees with me doesn't make me think I should go spend the time trying to prove their position.


You're awake for sixteen hours a day and you can't spend five minutes looking up what somebody's talking about? Research nowadays doesn't take a long time.


Five minutes multiplied by several people is a long time in a day.

You obviously participate in HN a lot. Don't fault the rest of us for only wanting to do it part time.


It's not a matter of doing it "part-time". The original example given was that if somebody said "this way is better" and they had lots of upvotes, then it would be worth looking into. Thing is, that's a rare case in a conversation. Most talks here are opinionated, and opinions don't require research. In the off-chance that there is a comment that has, say, five responses suggesting alternative methods, then that's obviously a subject that warrants research on the part of the original commenter, if he cares at all about the subject.


I trust both my own and the community's judgment. In general, I don't value one above the other. However, when they are at odds, that is an indication that I need to pay special attention, either because I am wrong, because many people are somehow wrong (which I think is quite relevant knowledge), because the situation isn't as clearcut as I may have thought, etc. In specific cases, I may come to value one judgment above the other, which does not necessarily mean dismissing the other judgment. These things are quite gray and I feel comment scores help in distinguishing the shades of gray.


To me, the points are a way for other readers to signal agreement without needing to clutter the thread with dozens of "me too" comments. A score of 50 gives a comment the force of many voices, but it compacts those voices into two efficient bytes.

Sure, it's a noisy signal because scores don't just indicate agreement, but the context usually makes that clear. If a factual claim is up- or downvoted, it usually indicates that people believe the claim is true or false. For analysis or opinion, it may have to more with whether the comment is insightful or thought-provoking.


Ones near the top are some kind of product of age (more recent) and score (higher).

By the way, the kind of skimming you're describing is what leads to mob voting :) People skim for the highest rated stuff, read it, then rate it up more. Plenty of good comments never get rated up, and people who say the most inflammatory stuff (or just make stupid jokes) get the votes early on and stay in the "lead" as it were, the system having been made into a game.


Repeat after me: you cannot have a system with points and expect people not to play games with it. Just accept it as a given and try to work around mob voting in other ways. Perhaps there is a way to make the system work against it's own mob tendencies.

The entire point of using karma is that it means something -- it has value. Heck, I bet to some folks it has a lot of value. I'd further bet that it has so much value to some folks that you could monetize it. But that's a discussion for another day.


Repeat after me: you cannot have a system with points and expect people not to play games with it.

Exactly! A lot of games just got killed, and now we're hearing some protesting about it.

The entire point of using karma is that it means something -- it has value. Heck, I bet to some folks it has a lot of value. I'd further bet that it has so much value to some folks that you could monetize it. But that's a discussion for another day.

You don't find it slightly pathetic that people would be judging themselves by the score of their comments on a web site? And I say this as an upstanding member of the Karma Kommunity.

There is, actually, one system of points that works brilliantly. Metafilter's favoriting system, which allows upvotes but not downvotes, lets top comments get notified, but doesn't penalize any other comments, and because MF uses a flat commenting system the conversation isn't at all affected by what people like and dislike.


Of course it's a game. But it should be a game that fosters insightful comments and interesting threads, not one-liner jokes and inflammatory outbursts.


I agree.

I wonder if you could just have three buttons/widgets: insightful, funny, and troll.

Then just click what you think of the article, and insightful articles rise to the top.

Heck, you could even make it a user preference whether to sort insightful first, funny first, or troll first (why you'd want to do that I don't know, but some might)

It would involve just one more graphic element than the current up/down arrows, and would give people release to say the funny things when they feel like they have to instead of having the site self-police.


or troll first (why you'd want to do that I don't know, but some might)

At least on slashdot, the "troll"s are sometimes, in their own way, funnier than the "funny"s (if only because of not involving overdone /. in-jokes).


I'd go so far as to say that I'd enjoy reading jokes and one-liners the folks here have to say about the news. We've got some really smart people that read HN. I bet their jokes are hilarious.

But that's only sometimes, not all of the time. If there could be a button for turning jokes off or on (or sorting by funny) then it'd be a hoot to see the site in that asepct.,

In short, I don't think it's a human behavior problem. Computer systems should let people act like people naturally act. This is a display problem. Some folks are seeing things in spots they would not like them to be in.

Instead of viewing the site as some huge function to take limited input and provide maximum output, perhaps it's better viewed as a big bucket of various randomized data. Then the purpose of the site is to sort and organize that random data in such a way as to provide maximum utility.


> I'd go so far as to say that I'd enjoy reading jokes and one-liners the folks here have to say about the news. We've got some really smart people that read HN. I bet their jokes are hilarious.

I agree. HN, while of course useful in other ways, seems so humorless to me. I understand that some HNers are paranoid about HN turning into Slashdot or Reddit, but it would probably be nice sometimes to have a more community-like feel, even if it were totally segregated from the "real" HN.


I think you just described slashdot without visible karma counts :)


I agree. As an administrator on Wikipedia since 2004, I have to say that, while Wikipedia is not perfect, I do appreciate their skeptical stance toward voting. Especially where points matter and pseudonimity allows for multiple accounts, voting runs into awful problems. The Wikimedia foundation has codified some of their thoughts on the negative effects of voting here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Voting_is_evil


I think you hit the nail on it's head in the later part of your comment. I think what is killing reddit is that funny attracts 10x votes when insightful attracts x and lately that is exactly what is happening here. But I don't think this experiment is a solution at all. The thread as ordered by the HN algo is definitely not the right order to read a thread.


there is no one single "right" - there is better and worse.

I think this change is for the better.


We could always make a compromise where people who choose to moderate can't see scores. It would be trivial to circumvent but it will deter 90% of people, and here that's 90% as good as deterring 100%.


This change might improve voting, but it decreases the value of that voting.

I'll stipulate that the voting might be more "fair", if that is a goal. I'm not sure it should be. It might make the "game" of getting high karma more fair, but I'm not bothering with or bothered by that game anyway.

On the other hand, I can no longer use the results of this voting to help me skim a conversation. I want to know what everyone else found most valuable, without having to read through every comment on my own. I can't do that anymore. This completely breaks how I use HN.


Maybe the issue is just the absoluteness of the scores. Behind the scenes, unbounded numbers are fine, but when presented to users they cause a tendency for gaming. I propose a follow-up experiment:

1) Keep the absolute scores secret

2) Continue graying out down-voted comments

3) Do not show any numeric indicator for conversations with less than N comments (I'd experiment with N near 10)

4) When the number of comments is greater than the threshold, show which percentile the comment is in for the set of positive comment scores in that thread.

This way, when you look at a comment you don't think "Does this guy deserve more points?", instead you think "Is this comment better than 75% of the other comments here?"

I think this would improve voting AND increase the value of that voting: people would have the right frame of mind when voting and the UI will present an easier value to determine how worthwhile it is to keep reading.


Ok, comments over a threshold (currently 5) now have a red dot prepended to them. Is that better?


It should probably be scaled to the number of comments in the thread, or to the average score in the thread. Any static threshold will be easier to hit in the threads with higher traffic, and too many threads with a red dot adds to the noise.

The other side of that is that threads with very little traffic don't need as much meta-information, but there's an in-between.


> Is that better?

No, it's about the same.

It's not a problem with hiding/showing scores/hints, it is a fundamental problem with the voting model. As it stands, the process of voting is meant to re-balance the discussion tree to make it more interesting to an average reader.

IMO what makes more sense is to use votes to determine the preferences of an individual specific reader. If I keep voting up posts by a user X, then in all likelihood I will be more interesting in X's posts in the future. The same goes for downvotes. Additionally if X votes up Y's posts, then I may also be interested in Y's posts as well.

Lastly, the up/down voting score for a specific post is going to be equivalent to the score under existing model, and that can be used to sort posts for anonymous or uninitiated users.

PS. This is not a trivial change and it is a lot of work. I realize that.


Reinforcing the average makes good sense if your goal is to keep the community aligned, rather than simply please the widest array of readers.


Perhaps this is just me, but doesn't red seem counter-intuitive for a positive score? I think we're conditioned to think red is bad and green is good.

Could this dot be changed to green? Also, could you put an alt or label on that dot with something like "over 5 votes" or some other descriptive text? A bit more accessible.


I'd stay away from red and green and go with orange, to match the header color. These dots shouldn't map to any specific connotation; they're just visual indicators.


It's not every day you get a genuine "what color to paint the bike-shed" discussion :)


It's more common than you might think. It comes up every time you design a website, brochure, and many other products created everyday.


The dot adds visual noise (just as the redundant "by").

It might be worthwhile to try and map the color code onto the arrows. Red up arrow instead of red dot could serve both as highlight and as "stop, don't click me".


I really don't think that coloring the arrows is going to be a good idea. That will carry entirely too much meaning. People will think the red has something to do with the button and will be confused.

I also suspect that you haven't thought this through. Try mocking up a page full of red arrows instead of red dots. Even without doing so myself, I predict that because the arrows have twice the area of the dots you'll find that it looks far more cluttered.

Meanwhile, my bikeshedding alarm is flashing. ;)


I really, really like the basis of this idea.

But the more I ponder what you're trying to solve, the more I think you should provide scores weighted within the discussion. Perhaps, the quintile a comment is in. Use a bar that adds segments and shifts from one non-judgmental color to another. I wouldn't bother showing anything below a threshold of ten comments on a single link.

Otherwise, your piling-on problem returns, just with a little less fidelity.


Well, twelve hours ago or so I suggested the quintile idea. So I feel qualified to vehemently disagree with myself. ;)

On second thought, the problem with the quintile idea is that it presumes that every thread has an equal distribution of valuable contributions, middling contributions, and lousy contributions. But we don't want to rule out (e.g.) the possibility that an entire thread might be great and that every post deserves a dot.

Moreover, the quintile idea retains aspects of the piling-on problem: A sufficient quantity of super-upvoted comments will push other worthy comments out of the top quintiles.

Finally, quintiles are just way too complicated.

So I'm prepared to believe that I was wrong twelve hours ago. I like the threshold idea. Especially because the threshold can be tuned. If 5 isn't enough it can be turned up to 11 by a well-meaning moderator, acting at the appropriate time.


I'm surprised nobody suggested adding a mouse over to the orange dots. The first thing I did was mouse-over to look for a tooltip to explain the dot and got nothing.


So, now we know if a comment is at 0 or lower, and if a comment is at 5 or higher... Wouldn't it be easier and more consistent at that point to just show the score?

Although I guess I never saw the karma thing as a huge problem to begin with, so I suppose I'm a bad person to opine about this.


It's distracting. Can't the experiment not have any threshold indicators, run it like that for a couple of weeks, get some idea about how the comments are, and then add/subtract features?

People can check Lists, for interesting stories/comments. http://news.ycombinator.com/lists


The dot actually kind of hurts the eyes. . . among all that gray, those little dots are almost distracting. Something a little less loud perhaps that could blend into the overall visual scheme? Smaller dot; gray or silver?


How about none?


No, unfortunately it's really bad. I appreciate it as an example of how far afield you are willing to search for a solution, but it's visually distracting and difficult to interpret.


Leave the numbers all visible, or only show me the number on my own comment, but otherwise, stop messing around. This is distracting. I know there's a mob-voting mentality, but I actually read the comments, not the votes. Stop clubbing me over the head about the votes.


It's just an experiment. We should encourage pg to mess around all he wants -- it's his playground and we stand to benefit from experiments (and the downside isn't disastrous).


The purpose of upvotes here is what? Is it to decide where in a thread which comments will go? If that's the case, I see no reason for any visual cue as to number of upvotes. Their position means I will see them first. (Comments about weighted averages of comment threads used to determine position also work well.) If it's a tool to reward people for their insightfulness, why not let them show it off? Perhaps the problem is that the comment system is designed to do both, and one function is conflicting with the other.

Personally, I like seeing my karma go up when I submit useful comments or stories, so they work as a reward for me (and possibly everyone else here). However, I think the more important function of up/downvotes is bringing the 'best' discussions to the top and burying the garbage.

My dictatorial solution would be to hide comment count (and all visual indicators other than thread position), from everyone but the user they belong to. I would still get my 'reward', the mob-voting influence would be diminished, and comment quality would go up.


Is that better? No and please let us not get two dots for tens lest we start re-discovering variants of Chinese counting rods.


Seems like a lot of people have their own specific ideas to how they may want comments sorted / listed.

How hard would it be to allow people to implement their own version of the ranking function and then have the comments passed through that. Store the function in each person's profile, make them visible, and more importantly, make them share-able (like an app store?) so you can see which functions turn out to be most popular...

There's a giant can of worms there safety-wise (people running their own code on your server ?!?!) and unknown loading effects (nothing to stop people writing infinitely recursive loops...), although that said, it didn't stop you with viaweb did it?

Also haven't looked at the news.arc code recently so not entirely sure which part could be customised...


How hard would it be to allow people to implement their own version of the ranking function and then have the comments passed through that?

Harder than you think, I expect. You're proposing to do a custom query, of arbitrary, user-chosen complexity, for every single page view.

Moreover, the result will be of dubious merit. Individualized filter functions screw up conversation. That's what's wrong with conversation on the rest of the web -- people all read blogs, but nobody reads the same blogs, and people encounter the blogs in arbitrary order, and some blog entries are more out of date than others, and the result is like trying to carry on a conversation with a bright but slightly deaf time traveler who is probably a troll.

We have a distributed, personalized version of HN comments: They're called blogs and RSS feeds. The quality tends to be higher. Your personal filtering options are much more numerous and powerful. And they're just not the same thing. Otherwise I, for one, would be writing for my blog instead of posting on HN. Lord knows it would be better for my career.


To clarify my "how hard" sentiment - I had in mind that the normal sort function becomes a "function selector" that grabs the user's chosen sort function from their profile, then applies that to the comments.

The difficulty in all this would be policing the kind of code that can be written - perhaps a small DSL that compiles into arc code, or possibly direct arc code that gets vetted by a/some moderators.

The actual sort function seems to be (from arc3.tar, but may well have been changed here... nothing is safe from a REPL!) EDIT: indeed! see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845932

  (def display-subcomments (c user whence (o indent 0))
    (each k (sort (compare > frontpage-rank:item) c!kids)
      (display-comment-tree (item k) user whence indent)))
so that in itself should not be too hard to modify, and provided it is not that much more complex, I can't see it putting that much more strain on the server. The sort function gets called for each page view, the user's profile (username / logout / threads) gets accessed for each view, so the only thing that needs to be resolved is the specific sort function.

The conversation threading could indeed become a bit fragmented, but then again, each time you look at a story on HN the comments will be in a different order due to the weighting and voting.


It seems that the dots were implemented rather quickly after removing scores due to user feedback.

I am wondering was there actually conclusive data (other than negative feedback, which might have been enough?) during when the score was removed and before the dot was implemented. As in, without a way to see the high scoring comments, did the quality of child comments go down? And if so what? Voting behavior changed?

Or was it an issue of being able to easily see popular comments? (And if it was the later, then maybe there are other solutions of visualizing highly ranked comments although likely more complicated, like a sort)


Better but in no way perfect. The problem is that the dots don't convey enough information to accurately skim a thread for good comments. In a thread with more than 200 comments a binary value simply isn't enough.

The problem could of course be solved by showing the points...


What do the grey dots mean? <Later>Hm. Grey dots vanished. This is better. I also saw a black dot. What about those?</Later>

And I really don't like the red dot. It doesn't fit into the flow of the layout and it distracts me from the content.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Spot_(Treasure_Island)


Tossing the vote count is an interesting experiment. The orange dot, hard to say. It was confusing to me and I'm not really sure it adds value. It may skew data out of the experiment of eliminating vote count.


I don't think it's clear what the red dot means. The issue with removing scores is I can't speed read only the "good" comments. Can you make the top n% of comments stand out somehow I wonder?


Why is it other people's job to decide what is and isn't good?


What do the grey dots mean?


The gray dots were something to turn red.


PG: Will you be applying some metric to determine if this improves site feel? If so, what metric?


I think the two obvious metrics are volume of comment votes and average comment score. I don't know which way you would want those two to go though.


If the standard deviation in comment scores decreases, that indicates more people are voting in disagreement with the majority, which is probably the intended purpose.

I believe pg has in the past just used "this seems better/worse" as a metric, but it's hard to say how noticeable any change from this will be.


I'd say the most obvious metric would be whether it evens the distribution of comment scores.


But don't votes also give feedback to the commentor? I have used this to learn what works within this community and what doesn't. Now, I only know by approximation to my total karma, or if i am bad, that I turn gray.


Just as an example, my karma just jumped a bunch of points. Was it because of the above post, or was it due to europe waking up to some posts made a few hours ago?

Perhaps my sense of dislocation will pass in a while.


I feel similarly, actually. It's okay if others' scores don't show up for me, but I don't think scores will serve as effective (dis)incentives for behavior if they're too abstracted from the immediate cause, as is the case with having to try to guess which of my last thirty comments resulted in the upticks in my overall karma score. In fact, if anything, I think linking it to overall karma score may tend to increase obsession with karma, because now I have to watch my overall karma like a hawk and spend time thinking about the likely source of change to determine whether I've stepped on my dick somewhere.

I say bring back the ability to see one's own karma, perhaps with a preferences option to turn it off, regardless of what happens with the visibility of others' comment scores.

In fact, if anything about one's own karma would be hidden, I think the overall score would be a better choice to hide than the scores of (one's own) individual comments.


>Just as an example, my karma just jumped a bunch of points. Was it because of the above post, or was it due to europe waking up to some posts made a few hours ago?

Do you really care so much? Anyway, If I were pg I would play around actually: half users see votes, the other half orange dot or whatever. I bet the numerical scores create a sheep effect and people who see high numbers are more likely to rate comments up.


You can still see the votes on your comments by looking at your comments history.


And that's awkward - maybe even unusable. It takes you out of the context of the discussion.


I just open it in another window to take a quick look at then close that window when done.


Hmm. Yeah, that could be problematic.


I didn't realize how much I was affected by the comment ratings until they went away. Commencing cognitive restructuring.


"Commencing cognitive restructuring."

Indeed. Interesting how fast the brain adapts. I just caught myself looking at the total score and trying to predict which comment is getting upvoted (since I see the total increasing). And I don't even care about comment score!


I can still see the score on the "edit" page, which means I can still edit my post to whine about being downmodded. Since nobody knows the degree that I am being downmodded to (or corrected to), people might upvote more than they should.

(I have also noticed that people don't stop upmodding even if the score is visible. I got 80 points yesterday on a one-line comment poking fun at Joel Spolsky. WTF?)

Just like when there is the delayed "reply" link that isn't showing, you can still reply to a comment by clicking the "link" link.

Edit: why is this being downmodded?


Fixed.

I didn't see the comment you mention, but that is exactly the sort of thing I meant about voting starting to have a mob feel.


It was this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840748

Although I don't have any data, I think that if the same comment was posted today, it would end up with more points. If I see a comment with 80 upvotes, I usually let it stay there rather than bumping it to 81.

One other comment; I find it hard to navigate my "threads" page now. I used to focus on highly-voted comments to improve and reply to; now that I don't know what other people like, I have nothing to go on.

I guess spending less time on HN might not be a bad thing, however :)

Edit: one more thing. I still have a reflex-like urge to click the upvote button when the author name says "pg". With no number, it is even harder to suppress the urge.

So far I have managed, but I can't guarantee that I won't change my mind :)


I was thinking something similar when I saw this change. I know I am affected by by the comments score when I vote, but I think it's more of a moderating effect. I might vote down a smart ass one line remark if it has lots of points, or vote up something that is so-so if it's been voted down.

Interesting to experiment.


I think it would be very informative to collect data on whether or not that sort of mob effect gets diminished by removing display of the comment-votes: will it keep "cute" one-line jabs from soaring to top of page?

PS: please don't ask me how to quantify such data :)


I notice that nobody here is playing devil's advocate, so allow me. What was wrong with the site beforehand? Sure the comments have a mob feel to them sometimes, but that's just something a social anything app has to deal with.

Over all, I like the comments on HN much more than say reddit or digg by far. Plus, I've never seen a community that responds so well to criticism as this one does.


Social anything apps don't have to turn into mobs. Twitter's not a mob. Facebook's not a mob. Most large forums don't turn into mobs. In fact, forums, because they don't allow for comment voting, usually are much better against sensationalist postings because you understand every post is a user's opinion and not the vox populi.


Overall I agree with you, but I think this will be an interesting experiment, I want to see what happens.


As do I. Like I said, I was playing devil's advocate. :-)


In long threads I skim based on scores. I try to give low comments at the bottom a quick read to vote on them, but one thing I definitely look for are long threads like this:

+5 -3 +4 -2 +4 0

That means someone is being generally rude or uninsightful, but the replies are good, so I'll just read the replies. If there's a long thread of a bunch of 1's, then two people are talking at each other both uninsightfully. If both people are voted up a bit, that means it's a good discussion and the whole thing is worth reading.

I'll give this a good trying out before forming an opinion either way, but the loss of skim-by-score ability is slowing me down just a touch right now. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.


I'm seeing dots for some comments instead of the score. It looks like gray dots for comments with a high score and red dots for comments with a very high score. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the change to some extent?

Edit: Sorry, it looks like this was explained after I had loaded this page. Still, this seems like a partial reversal. Also, this story is at #16 on the front page and really should be at #1 considering the magnitude of the change.

Oh and just one more question: I'm seeing this comment at the top of the page. Is that just how it looks for me, or is it that way for everyone because of the new ranking algorithm?

Another edit: From PG's explanation, I thought the gray dots were all turned red, but I still see gray dots for some comments (including one with a negative score).


I've been experimenting with various ways of indicating high scoring comments. At the moment I use an orange dot after the time.

At one point I tried giving all comments initial dots, and turned them red when the comment had a high score.


I think the red was much less distracting than the orange, although it may be that it is after the time that is causing that (rather than next to the arrows).


Where was it explained? I'm still searching.....


Got it...

Thanks. The comments here are getting to be so much that they are hard to follow. ;)


http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123


I think you can remove the word "by"


"10 points by ivankirigin" is actually quite misleading. It looks like "ivankirign" gave the comment 10 points.

We are having the same problem on how to show it correctly on GraffitiGeo. We ended up using "by ivinkirigin, points: 10", which in my opinion is still not perfect.

Any idea on this?


Why not just "ivinkirigin, 10 points" or something. I think it's fairly obvious that the first word is a username.


"10 points by ivankirigin" is actually quite misleading. It looks like "ivankirign" gave the comment 10 points.

I don't believe I've seen a site where any user can give more than one vote, so I don't think this is misleading. But I've not thought about it before, and I do like "by ivinkirigin, points: 10" better.

Kudos on putting so much thought into your UI. Definitely bodes well for GraffitiGeo.


10 ivankirigin 4 hours ago

If the numbers are changing you get accustomed to it quickly.

By the way, my original comment has an absurdly high karma count. I think that is a direct result of hiding the count.


Somehow associate the points with the upvote/downvote icons and not with the username?


Interesting experiment. I thought I was going crazy all of a sudden.

A suggestion: Any chance the numbers could show later as the article gets older? I'd like to see how the votes resolved after some time. Or perhaps hide them only on front page articles?


"I thought I was going crazy all of a sudden."

heh! so did I . I actually asked a friend to look at it and tell me if he saw what I was seeing! (Long day, too much code, off to bed)

EDIT: I tried to vote up the comment above and got a "Can't make that vote" message. Then I tried to vote down a comment and got the same message. Bug?

EDIT2: Now I get a blank page on upvoting. I guess PG has a REPL open and is changing the site "live"

EDIT3: Blank page on voting (firefox/linux). This acts as a subtle disincentive to vote. "Oh I am going to see that blank page again and then need to click the browser back button. I'd rather continue reading(vs voting)". Is this by design? I hope not.

EDIT4: Fixed.


On a related note, I noticed that I'm just being shown a blank page after voting, rather than redirecting to the original discussion.


I'm now experimenting with changing the function used to rank comments. I'm hopeful this will both help users find the good comments on a thread, and solve the problem of good but late comments getting stuck at the bottom of the page.


The ranking changes you just made completely eliminated whatever mental model of thread dynamics I had left. It's not clear that you understand the degree to which you're playing with fire here.

A 'good but late' comment won't be seen by anyone anyway, due to your front page ranking algorithm that prevents even the most active threads from spending long enough on the front pages.


I think HN has always been an experiment. Playing with fire sounds almost like a compliment then.


One suggestion: the point ranking could be merely probabilistic -- for each comment set its "page-sort" score by selecting a random number between 1 and the comment's score. (For negative comments, between 0 and their score?) Then sort the comments by their page-sort score. I've looked at this mostly on reddit, since their threads are much more popular than on HN, but finding late wheat in the chaff of low-voted comments can be a problem when threads get large.


One PLUS of karma scores next to comments is that I know when to stop reading :)

If my personal interest + the comment score < arbitrary threshold, i quit


You know, if there's one thing programmers should appreciate, it's making it easy to see which information you don't want to read.


A simple number next to a post doesn't necessarily tell you much about whether or not you want to read it.


Sure it does. This is a community of individuals who share common interests. If the community values a particular comment, there's a high probability that I'm going to find value in it as well because of those shared interests.


And conversely, if I consistently find that the community values comments that I think are junk, I'm probably going to eventually leave the community (which is why I'm here, and not on certain other sites).


You don't have to be part of the community to sign up for an account and start voting stuff up.


I think you're implicitly part of the community once you sign up.


If you had a Likert-type scale, this wouldn't be a problem. I would rate a post 7/10 regardless of what everyone else had rated it. But we just have ups and downs. I think we've all established a sense of what the "right" score is for a given comment. For example, a thoughtful, on-topic post probably has no upper limit for how many points it deserves, while a funny but off-topic post won't get an upvote if it's already got enough points.

Won't this lead us towards a bimodal distribution? Without the crucial knowledge of where the comment's score is, the votes will tend towards extremes: we can't collectively decide when the target comment is near the range that we find appropriate.


The bandwagon effect (which is just ridiculous on reddit) occurs because top-rated comments stay at the top. Typical reddit comment at the top of a thread:

  reddit_user 622 points
 
  Glenn Beck is a wanker!  He sniffs arses!
Everyone agrees with this, needless to say, but they only upmod it because it's at the top of the pile. Otherwise, it's a worthless comment. I find the lack of mod points distracting to an unexpected degree. Bad quantification is better than no quantification...


That depends on how you define "bad quantification".

Bad as inaccurate quantification is worse than none.

Bad as rough, but roughly accurate is better than none.


Weird suggestion: now hide the contributor too, avoiding the "vote pg up anyway"category of upvotes.

Then there's just a list of comments and one can vote them up or down on the content of the comment. Ok I did say it was weird.

EDIT: Some great counterpoints below. I agree with them. This is a bad idea.


Knowing who wrote a comment often provides very useful context (especially when there is back-and-forth discussion going on).


pvg said -> "It would be a little difficult to have an exchange with someone if you can't tell who is who."

cperciva said "Knowing who wrote a comment often provides very useful context"

You are both completely right. My suggestion doesn't make sense.

It was just a "spur of the moment" suggestion to provoke thought (de Bono's PO mental operator). I dind't think it through at all.


You could give everyone a unique identifier per thread.


That would only solve one of the problems. Some of the users here are skilled enough that the average user doesn't know enough to keep up a disagreement. It's easier if the user names stay.

For instance, the ggp is a security professional. I give more credence to his opinions than others.


It was only intended to solve one of the problems, as the other 'problem' is exactly what removing the names would seek to address: a person's authority/history influencing the weight of their comments within a thread. It'd really benefit people who've earned a negative following, but I don't see such a mob mentality on here as opposed to certain aggregators in which biases become apparent in just a few threads.


Yes, but sometimes a person's authority is actually relevant. Consider this short exchange from the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841887

On the other hand, when somebody who is deeply respected (be it pg, or any prolific high-karma commenter) posts on something where they have no particular expertise the comment shouldn't get special consideration due to the author.

I can't think of a way to reconcile these, and there's enough people who post here that are actual authorities in relevant areas that I wouldn't want to give up the first. Being able to know that, say, a comment about security was written by tptacek matters more to me than "oh look, pg made a two-word post that got 9001 points".


It would be a little difficult to have an exchange with someone (fairly common in threaded discussion) if you can't tell who is who. Also invites abuse - I reply to your comment, someone replies to my reply, pretending to be you.


People are far enough removed from each other on the internet. Knowing who posted something tells a lot. For example, I've been browsing HN about 3 months and I already know to pay extra attention to what tptacek on security. I believe people have gotten jobs from Hacker News too based on their reputation. I think HN is a great community and implementing this would just weaken it.


"I believe people have gotten jobs from Hacker News too based on their reputation."

Whoa! Nice :-). Any concrete examples?


I remember a couple of discussions that were headed that way; then they reasonably enough shifted to email, so I don't know whether they went through.


I believe I read about one here a few months back. Sorry nothing concrete. I know if I am ever in need more help, I'd go through networks and then ask around here.


It's a community, not an attempt to promote "ideal" discussions. Removing names might help the latter, but it would hurt the former.


what about not removing name completely but making it invisible unless your pointer is at location it is hiding behind? you can still find out who has written the comment if you mean it, but your main criteria for valuing comment is it's content.


This new system saves me a lot of time by making HN less attractive.


That could be good, if it did it by removing bad attractions.

Some controversial threads with large numbers of votes were starting to feel like fights that attracted a crowd of onlookers. Those are very engaging, certainly, but it's probably better for both fighters and onlookers to have less of them.


The solution to that is to make the vote scores logarithmic.

Removing information helps nobody.


If you're trying to prevent the wrong sorts of attractions, you might also try it on a selective basis. For example, if a thread hasn't received a vote in the past hour or day, or if a user isn't logged in and can't vote, you could continue to display the votes in that thread.


It'd be interesting to see the results of the experiment - level of voting before and after, volatility of the voting before and after, rate of change of comment ordering, before and after. Are you planning on releasing some sort of aggregate data or publishing some sort of analysis?


Does anyone else find their eyes constantly scanning to try and find the score for each comment? I wonder if this means that I rely too heavily on the comment score? It's amazing how such a subtle change can reveal something more profound.


I'd try out rounded percentage scores.

Out of the total comment Karma alloted to all comments for an item, what proportion of this amount is contained within each comment?

The issue here is that upon voting, you couldn't change all displayed comment percentages at once, it'd have to change on page reload.

Also, it could be a rounded 1-10 scale.

-- edit: would be good to reveal any comment score upon voting: gives an incentive to vote and remain critical. It's also like a marker as to what comments interest you for future recall -- that's something new.


also - to make the score pertinent:

- either cap underlying comment scores at 50 points

OR

- instead of giving a percentage score for a comment's proportion of total comment points, rank comments in terms of lowest positive score to highest positive score: then give each comment a score between 1-10 by segmenting the long tail into 10 even parts. (the initial ranking may not even need to be used)

having no visible scores seems surreal.


This will definitely be interesting. While I think not having comment scores will have a somewhat limiting effect on groupthink voting, it will also probably have a counter-effect on pithy/silly one-liner comments by preventing people from noticing that no matter how humorous or witty the comment might have been it has already gathered as many votes as it deserves. The great karnak predicts a lot more early comments at the first level of two of comment threads being short witticisms that attempts to predict the herd and thereby gather a lot of early upvotes.


How about having the scores show up after a week (or X amount of time). Practically nobody votes on week-old posts, but I often use -- for example -- searchyc.com's average points per post to get a feel for a user's contributions.

That would balance the elimination of mob voting with being able to ascertain (historical) credibility.


Interesting. I still see some comments a light gray.

Also, like some others , I like know if something I've posted was particularly liked (or not).

And I've been skimming pages looking for the high-karma comments to try to dig out what are likely to be the most worthwhile comments. I suppose there's some feedback effect in place there, as popular comments simply get more attention (and so likely garner more up-votes votes), but there's pragmatic value in having a metric to selectively peruse a post with so much to read. (And, no, ZapRead isn't the answer :) )


I love this idea, but it should really be initially implemented as a kind of A/B test.

Simply choose half of the UIDs at random and always show them the comment score, and don't show it to the other half. Track which comments are upvoted most when their score is visible versus when not (there are many other metrics to use as well). It should be pretty easy to determine how much groupthink plays into voting.

I suspect that most people only read (and therefore only vote on) already popular comments, so I suspect groupthink is fairly high here.


On the one hand, I completely agree with the scientific merit of your suggestion.

On the other hand, showing different HNs to different people doesn't exactly strike me as community-building behavior. I think it would make the site feel even more like Temple Grandin's barnyard, with us in the role of the cows. Will my species behave better if we design the floor like this? Will that tweak to the algorithm prevent us from starting fights among ourselves? Oh, no, a gathering of more than twelve people -- we'd better build a robot to break those up.


I think only showing votes for comments and links once you've voted would be a better solution. It's what I'm trying with a side-project of mine.


I was going to suggest the same thing. Most polls do not show you the results before you vote, this could work the same way.


I actually expect that posts may become more extremely negative than they used to. At some point, you become sorry for a person with a highly negative comment; or at least I do. Sometimes I upvote comments that are negative because I think that the downvotes are unreasonable. Now there's no way for others to provide a check on the immoral downvoting behavior of others.


It seems that negative-scored comments still start to gray out, so you'll be able to upvote something you think has been unjustly penalized.

What you won't be able to do is aim things toward a desired positive score, such as downvoting a one-liner joke with 100+ points that you wouldn't downvote if it were at 20 points or less.


It'll be curious to see, then, if those one-liners get even more massively upvoted, or if the reaction towards them becomes something negative.


My guess would be: More groupthink, less bandwagon.

That is, comments that (intentionally or not) pander to the audience will get more upvotes, but good comments that happen to get several early upvotes won't get the same pile-on effect. That's just a WAG, though.


One thing I do notice: I'm already much less frustrated at comments I'm reading here. If somebody says something I disagree with, I can't see if half the site has voted them up, to me it's just a typical comment that I can either ignore or respond to.

Similarly, now dcurtis and I are arguing upthread, and I'm not anxiously wondering if he's been voted up more than me. We're just in a normal argument where neither of us will be proved by the community to be "more" right than the other. That's good.


Interesting idea, but now old threads like this, where people voted by modding up, don't make sense:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527681


How about putting comment scores back in for people who have been here for at least X days / weeks / months or who have a comment score total greater than Y? I've been here since the beginning and value having the ability to pay more attention to higher rated comments when I'm skimming discussions.


If you gave me the option to switch karma on/off for submissions and comments, I would likely leave both off.

Leaving karma off somehow gives me confidence to contribute more.

Another idea is to remove the (time 'ago). Good comments are timeless :) and old comments seem like nobody is watching anymore, so the dialog seems over.

Thank you Paul


I don't need karma either, but the time of submission is important to know whether the poster is likely to read a reply.


Why not hide the usernames as well then and let the comments be judged purely based on their content ?


I bet that would lead a lot of people to start using signatures. No thanks.


Perhaps we could assign IDs to posters? The first commenter in a thread is A, the second commenter is B, so that each new thread gives users a new identity.

The problem with that is that anonymity leads to trolling.


Troll posts will be modded down and deleted. That's not really a problem.


It's difficult to have a dialog if you don't know who is the same person and who is someone else. You could do it by assigning a random per thread ID to each participant in a thread.


That would be potentially neat if you were only interested in raw argument. But HN is a place for people to meet as well.

Also, credibility matters. Some people are known for their expertise in certain areas, like Matt Maroon and poker.


That would be a good feature to be able to turn off/on in your site preferences. I would likely leave 'view usernames for comments' off.

Good idea.


Will comments still change tone til they fade to nothing as they are down voted?


I see a lot of comments here that basically say the same thing: "don't change anything, I was used to the old situation, now I'm lost".

Give it a couple of days worth of trying before casting your 'vote' on the changes, it's a pretty disruptive change because it breaks the routine, but I really think this sort of experimenting is what will bring out the best in HN, if hackers are starting to be conservatives then we really are in trouble.

Give it the benefit of the doubt and an honest chance.


About a year ago, I mentioned the problem of "bandwagon upvoting"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217822

So I'm really glad to see this and hopeful it works out. I think hiding the votes is better than a hard upper vote limit, as it is more organic. I'm really curious to know after the experiment how this affects the voting behavior (more votes, less votes, more for lead, less, etc)


This is good -- I really want to read threads without scores. If the experiment ends at some point, I would like to see it as an option checkbox.

I often read comments with highest scores first while often there are good comments forgotten and sandwiched between a few übercomments. Or the übercomment is so conclusive that there's nowhere to take the discussion to. Hiding scores allows me to approach the discussion more objectively.


Actually everyone should just try it out for a little while instead of instantly judging the change.

I agree with PG, HN started to have mob feel in the comments section.


Interestingly enough, comments voted below zero still show up as gray. Helps to decide whether to upvote an "unjustly downvoted" comment.


Ah, I love change! Though a smart hacker can make a model that takes into time and position of a comment to predict the comment score?


As far as comment-scores are used to filter one's reading, there is an inherent contradiction in the system:

* the reader wants some filtering, so they can just read the good stuff

* the filtering is done by the readers, which requires they read more than just the good stuff

So the filtering can never be extremely effective, i.e. showing everyone only the good stuff, because then the filtering would not get done at all. I suppose it is a weakness in all public-contribution-based systems.

The work has to be done by someone. Perhaps there are other, better ways of allocating that work. A first thought: lower scored items appear stochastically -- lower score, less frequent random appearance. That might help by making it seem like there is less 'work' to do . . .

It seems the whole subject would warrant a fair amount of pondering and experiment (although it looks basically economic) . . .


(Really sorry if this is already discussed, but I don't have time to read 300+ comments in depth)

How about allowing users to set two thresholds for themselves: (1) show only comments above X; (2) begin greying out below Y

What precisely X and Y are or could be I'll leave to the experts.

But this would let everyone decide their own absolute or relative threshold of comments they want to see. Those of you with plenty of time to spend on HN can have fairly low X and Y, whereas those of us that only want to spend a little time on HN each day can have just the popular presented to us. Voluntary herd membership (or rejection), if you will.

Variant along the same lines: An absolute number account setting indicating "I want to see only the N highest-scoring comments/parents".


I'm sure HN is not too proud to steal one of /.'s features. :)


And here I was, thinking firefox was screwing up the JS. I guess this should improve the quality of discussions a lot, since a lot of people tend to just skim the few comments at the top. Not displaying the comment scores might make them read more.


I don't think this'll stop people from just skimming the top.

But, it will stop them from finding those highly rated comments hidden by a low rated parent comment.


Which brings us to an interesting point: Shouldn't comment threads be sorted by the total votes for all comments in that thread???


That might make sense but it could still mean that a long, pointless, off-topic discussion would rise to the top, above other shorter, succinct comments that might end up buried at the bottom.


I believe the shorter on-topic comment would be voted up more than the off-topic thread (unless ofcourse, the off-topic thread involves a sparky issue like Micheal Arrington).


I kind of miss the lack of comment scores. I do think they allow me to be more selective about the comments I read, based on the wisdom of crowds.

Is there any chance we could have two style sheets, one in which they are hidden and the other where they are visible?


If this improves the site, should it be applied to submission scores too? Showing submission scores can create the same sort of mob mentality in voting. The only potential downside that I see is people voting less often.


I anticipate that one effect of this will be that there will be more threads simply saying "I agree" or "Good comment" since this will no longer be so visibly reflected by the voting.


I think that those threads will be downvoted same as always, and when they grey out it'll give other users the impression that those comments are less interesting/worthwhile than other comments.

And, to rant a teeny bit, that's what downvoting is used for. You don't downvote people that disagree with you or that say something you don't like. Downvoting is for removing comments that aren't relevant to the discussion. That's why they go grey. When I saw your comment, you'd been downvoted and greyed out, and you made a comment with a relevant or interesting point. You should not have been downvoted.


It looks like pg is still in the middle of changing things. A moment ago I could see other people's comments' scores in the replies on my "threads" page; now I can't.


I have noticed things changing around too.

I hear there is this thing called a "dev server"...


I usually do development on my local machine, but for small things like this I use the server's repl.


Nice. I wondered why things were changing quickly but there were never any page load errors.

I don't trust myself not to kill my app with a live REPL :)


I do it in a live production environment and it can often give you a nice adrenaline flush. I do occasionally fat-finger things, so I try to avoid it.


The lack of a dev server is what separates a "hacker" from a "software engineer". Besides, who hasn't gotten a thrill from tinkering with a live site?


If I try and vote on a comment now, the ersatz AJAX trick no longer works. I'm actually taken to /vote?for=12345 etc.. so I get a blank page every time I vote. Bug?


I think this is very nice because karma isn't really worth anything and comments that are popular still get to be seen without the mob mentality to vote them up


I think karma was an incentive for people to contribute comments. You might not be getting sex or money, but you are getting that feeling of creating something other people like.

Now you don't really know if people like your work or not, so why bother contributing?

(I know why: "because someone is wrong on the Internet!" But it is nice to get some karma too, :)


I love it. Keeps comment voting honest it seems.


I like the hidden comment scores. You can still see negative comments at a glance, and the comments are still ordered by the scores so you can read the high score comments first since they are on top.

If they are turned back on, I'd suggest making it an option, and possibly hidden by default.


I'd be interested in seeing this happening for posts in addition to comments, so that there's more of an incentive to vote based on one's own opinion of the post than to fall for "scorebait" and voting on the heat of the moment because it seems everyone else is doing the same


Just as an alternative idea - why not colour the score to the background colour - that way it is effectively invisible, yet can still be seen by highlighting the heading.

Although that being said, I tend to gloss over the scores anyway for the most part...


This is going to work wonders. imho, it will atleast 'confuse' people who upvote friends without reading the context, specially for all the 'voters' who upvote 'i love/hate my country' kind of comments.

This feature will be interesting.


I like this already. How long will you let the test run?


i have to admit that i would equally like to see this happen for content submissions.


Has this been reverted? I can see the comment scores again.


Great idea.

(This one is going to go down, but that's all I have to say.)


Ahhh.. And I thought my browser was acting up again.


this is weird and surprising to me, but it's causing me to look at news.yc in a refreshing new way. so i guess that has to be a good thing.


Odd sort of "improvement"

Hacker News -- now with less information?

I would imagine that the more readers become engaged with the site the more information about the site they would want to consume, no?


What matters is the quality of the information, not the amount. One of my goals has always been to decrease the amount of stupid information flowing through the system. That's why there are no downvotes on submissions: my observations of Reddit suggested that downvotes were more often reflexive than upvotes.


I'm with you on your motives, and it'll be interesting to see how the site reacts.

It just clashes with the idea that sites should be very simple to use, but engaging in detail over time -- that as users spend more time on a site they become interested in more details, whatever those details are. I think you see this in the number of HN mining apps posted. People who are engaged want more stuff from what they're engaged in.

I'm definitely not for information for information's sake, just find your tweaking counter-intuitive. Seems like shooting all of the animals to prevent them from escaping the barn.

I look forward to somebody telling us how the experiment went.


Hacker News -- now with less information?

I'd say, "Hacker News -- now with less data"

Less data could = less information.

Less data could also = more information.

We've all dealt with users who become more empowered to do their jobs once we "adjust their view". Now we're the guinea pigs.


"Odd sort of "improvement" "

I don't see this as odd at all.

Greater amounts of Information widely dispersed == "good/better" and less/restricted information == "bad/worse" is a very dominant underlying assumption - sometimes so embedded in our intuition that we see restricting information as counter-intuitive.

If this experiment succeeds, then it might show that in some situations, the opposite is true?

As a thought experiment, suppose you could know the exact moment of your death. This is more information than you have today. Is this good or bad? (I can see arguments for both sides)

Suppose everyone knew. Would this be good or bad? (I can see arguments for both sides here too)


If this experiment succeeds, then it might show that in some situations, the opposite is true?

Yes -- it's a very interesting experiment and I'm really curious as to how it will play out. There's obviously a bit of mob rule mentality on HN and something should be done about it. Perhaps this is it?

I've always thought that in making a web site you make it completely intuitive and engaging -- then you incrementally add more detail and complexity to satisfy power users. Sort of like the qualities of a good game where it's easy to learn but hard to master.

But I'm probably off-base. As you said, there are a lot of underlying assumptions here -- on both sides. The beauty of experimenting is that you can move from talking about things to actually seeing what works.


Please, don't think HN is big enough to justify this change (I wish I could downvote you! :).


How about an API?


It's a really good idea, but it kinda feels awkward.


I see nothing awkward about it. It just makes you upvote and reply to the most thought provoking and insightful posts rather than the ones with the highest counts.


turn off voting at 50 points.


Interesting psychological side effect I just noticed: I wasn't previously aware of my tendency to scan a long thread for comments that stand out because of their high comment scores but I just did it when I opened this thread and felt like I didn't have my usual bearings. In one sense it levels the playing field. In another sense, though, it removes some key information that helps us to prioritize where we direct our attention.


This decision is very good for improving quality of content of comments.

Maybe it is good idea to display author's karma instead.

People love to see magic numbers. =)


And they said K5 was dead...


WTF ?? <script>alert(/XSS/)</script>


The Hacker News community should decide if this featured is enabled (maybe a poll post).

Having you just take this away on a whim because you felt it "might" be better is pretty poor taste in my opinion.

It all most feels like papa Apple just rejected an iPhone app because they didn't like the "feel" of it.

Please bring back the comment scores ASAP. I can't envision myself staying round here without them ;-)

At a minimum, give me the option to turn it on for my own viewing pleasure.




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