3 ms·

What you don't get is that attention is a zero sum game. There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a m

by pg 17y ago

What you don't get is that attention is a zero sum game. There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The only way to do good work is to ruthlessly blow them off and to focus only on the few things that matter most. Ironically, this thread, though a complete bike-shed waste of time in itself, is not entirely bad, because it's also causing me to spend time thinking about the kind of problem I should be thinking about. One of the big questions I've been mulling over is what to do about points on comments. I'm increasingly inclined not to display them, because an upvote or downvote is equivalent to a very inarticulate comment. And this subthread is an argument for doing so, because the only reason I felt obliged to respond to you is the number of points your comment got. If points weren't displayed I wouldn't have felt I had to respond. Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap.

jacquesm 17y ago
Found using searchyc.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 (google doesn't work well when you search for words in the UI of HN)
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Apologies for the frankness. I keep trying diplomacy but I suck at it. A less informed person might think that since you got your clock cleaned by popular vote, you seem much more inclined to discount popular vote than you did a month ago. I have lost much of my admiration for HN. But I have an awesome appreciation of what you think is important to spend your time on. I have to admit I am mostly wrong and I am still trying to learn as much as I can from you, but why the hell do you think here that Jacques is giving you a bad requirement for your site? You sound pompous and disconnected. EDIT: And am I to understand you monitor the voting records on HN? That sounded crazy, but I just heard it via email. The internet is crazy. Can't be true.
- ericd 17y ago
  Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make it worth adding to the complexity of something. Users say they want every feature under the sun, but after a lot of that, when they see something well designed like the iPad, and they're generally struck by how nice it is to be free of that grabbag design philosophy. Speaking anecdotally, I've tried to dig up a past item maybe 5 times in the past year via search, and none of them were very important. Compare that to the maybe 300 times I've been back to the site, solely for the content quality. I could do without HN searchability altogether very easily, I very rarely reread things. I would venture that this is a common usage pattern of a news site with ephemeral content. You sound like an entitled and disconnected user, asking why he's not adding something so simple that you personally want, rather than thinking about what would make this site better for everyone. Search is not going to make the site better for most, and people that respond to a vote about the subject are not going to be the apathetic majority.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    The argument PG brought was that it would take time away from the other work. But as it is it incrementally takes time away from all of us, and all the time. The spending of that one or two minutes at integrating searchyc.com or google.com would come back 1000 fold over the life time of the site, and probably much more than 1000 fold, and if he's that busy he maybe should pass the torch to people that can fully concentrate on making HN, the best site of its kind right now even better. I personally find it very hard to believe that the trade-off is as stark as is portrayed here, working on a site like this is not in 'absolutes' like that, you simply do stuff because it has to be done. If a YC funded start-up would display that attitude to their users they wouldn't stand much a chance, in fact it is exactly opposite to what Paul says in other places to how one should deal with users. It seems more like a stubborn 'I'll do this my way' kind of thing, Paul has kept the door solidly locked to others contributing to HN, but then goes and makes a big case about how he has only so much time to spend. It's hard to be arguing both of those at the same time. Anecdotally, I've used search 100's of times to find a comment or an article that I'm pretty sure I read on HN but at the time didn't have an application for so I didn't bookmark it. This happens all too often in the tech sector, after all you can't know in advance which technology will land on your plate 3 months from now.
- underover 17y ago
  "And am I to understand you monitor the voting records on HN?" As revealed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278680
  - lotharbot 17y ago
    From that post, you can't conclude that pg "monitors the voting records" as a general practice, only that he's willing to look at them when someone specifically complains about the ranking algorithm. Read the parent comment to that one -- the guy complained about what type of stories were on the front page; pg made the point that the complainer wasn't doing his part to get other stories up there.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      I don't think that Mahmuds' point was about the ranking algorithm, it was about the submissions themselves. As I pointed out in that other thread the fact that he didn't vote for those stories was his whole point, to quote his voting record back in public to chew him out is imo really below the belt and was - at least to me - totally unexpected.
brlewis 17y ago
I think the points helped you gain a more accurate idea of whether responding was worthwhile. The more people support an idea, the more response it calls for. Furthermore, an upvote or downvote is equivalent to a very concise comment.
- pg 17y ago
  The base case of concise and inarticulate are identical. The second most concise form of comment would be to say simply "yes" or "no." Do you feel such comments add to a discussion on account of their conciseness?
  - lotharbot 17y ago
    Comments like yes, no, agree, disagree, good post, and lame are concise, but also boring wastes of time which add little to a discussion. The aggregate measure of those sentiments (as expressed in a point total) is both more concise and of some value, as it serves to encourage and highlight good posts and discourage thoughtless or pointless comments. It also provides a relatively unobtrusive outlet for those who wish to voice appreciation of thoughtfulness; this is preferable to the sea of "agree"s and "disagree"s that might spring up in the absence of a point system.
  - brlewis 17y ago
    I feel such comments when presented like news.yc votes or FriendFeed likes add more value because of their conciseness. (define (value conversation-element) (- (benefit conversation-element) (cost conversation-element))) (define (cost conversation-element) (- (conciseness conversation-element))) I'll leave the definition of (benefit conversation-element) as an exercise for the reader.
trominos 17y ago
I'd be careful about messing with points on comments (and with karma more generally). You might enjoy imagining a forum where smart people anonymously engage in civilized discussion without need for the kind of lowbrow pleasure-center-stimulation that the current karma system provides, but I doubt such a thing could exist; if it did, it would probably be much less exciting than HN. Smart people who enjoy good discussion are still people, and most of what people do is seek out easy rewards. You've built something almost impossible here: a place where it's very rewarding to say interesting things and very unrewarding, generally, to say uninteresting things. Don't look this gift horse too directly in the mouth. If you kill the point display on comments I think you'll kill a lot of the content on this site. Not to mention that, though it's easy to make fun of people who get too sucked in to internet arguments, there's frankly nothing wrong with people going out of their way to correct other people and that kind of behavior is pretty fundamental to crowd conversations like HN. It's probably annoying that jacquesm's popular approval forced you to respond to him, but I (and others) enjoyed reading your comment; I think you'd be hard-pressed to show that you writing it was a net loss activity.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  LambdaTheUltimate? No points there, and it's resisted the influx of trolls better than most.
tptacek 17y ago
Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap. This absolutely squares with my experience. I wouldn't want to lose visibility into my own comment scores, but I could do without seeing everyone else's.
pieceofpeace 17y ago
> There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The search link is at least as relevant as the bookmarklet link and certainly more relevant than the webmynd and mixpanel links with images. > Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap. While i am not sure about that, I suggest that voting for comments should be delayed like the temporarily hidden reply link, that may reduce some reflexive voting.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
boredguy8 17y ago
I like the idea of getting rid of points. I dislike the idea of losing the ability to quickly scan for comments the community thinks are good. Because of the clever way new comments are briefly at/near the top of the page, something should stand in for "this is probably worth reading".

by pg 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

Found using searchyc.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740983 (google doesn't work well when you search for words in the UI of HN)

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

Apologies for the frankness. I keep trying diplomacy but I suck at it. A less informed person might think that since you got your clock cleaned by popular vote, you seem much more inclined to discount popular vote than you did a month ago. I have lost much of my admiration for HN. But I have an awesome appreciation of what you think is important to spend your time on. I have to admit I am mostly wrong and I am still trying to learn as much as I can from you, but why the hell do you think here that Jacques is giving you a bad requirement for your site? You sound pompous and disconnected. EDIT: And am I to understand you monitor the voting records on HN? That sounded crazy, but I just heard it via email. The internet is crazy. Can't be true.

ericd 17y ago
Comment and community quality are such hard problems to solve, and are orders of magnitude more important for a site like this than features like search. Sure, it might be easy to add search. Or rankings. Or a million other things a small minority would appreciate. But that's not how you make a good site that is optimal for the larger population. An option should be very useful for a large percentage of users to make it worth adding to the complexity of something. Users say they want every feature under the sun, but after a lot of that, when they see something well designed like the iPad, and they're generally struck by how nice it is to be free of that grabbag design philosophy. Speaking anecdotally, I've tried to dig up a past item maybe 5 times in the past year via search, and none of them were very important. Compare that to the maybe 300 times I've been back to the site, solely for the content quality. I could do without HN searchability altogether very easily, I very rarely reread things. I would venture that this is a common usage pattern of a news site with ephemeral content. You sound like an entitled and disconnected user, asking why he's not adding something so simple that you personally want, rather than thinking about what would make this site better for everyone. Search is not going to make the site better for most, and people that respond to a vote about the subject are not going to be the apathetic majority.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  The argument PG brought was that it would take time away from the other work. But as it is it incrementally takes time away from all of us, and all the time. The spending of that one or two minutes at integrating searchyc.com or google.com would come back 1000 fold over the life time of the site, and probably much more than 1000 fold, and if he's that busy he maybe should pass the torch to people that can fully concentrate on making HN, the best site of its kind right now even better. I personally find it very hard to believe that the trade-off is as stark as is portrayed here, working on a site like this is not in 'absolutes' like that, you simply do stuff because it has to be done. If a YC funded start-up would display that attitude to their users they wouldn't stand much a chance, in fact it is exactly opposite to what Paul says in other places to how one should deal with users. It seems more like a stubborn 'I'll do this my way' kind of thing, Paul has kept the door solidly locked to others contributing to HN, but then goes and makes a big case about how he has only so much time to spend. It's hard to be arguing both of those at the same time. Anecdotally, I've used search 100's of times to find a comment or an article that I'm pretty sure I read on HN but at the time didn't have an application for so I didn't bookmark it. This happens all too often in the tech sector, after all you can't know in advance which technology will land on your plate 3 months from now.
underover 17y ago
"And am I to understand you monitor the voting records on HN?" As revealed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278680
- lotharbot 17y ago
  From that post, you can't conclude that pg "monitors the voting records" as a general practice, only that he's willing to look at them when someone specifically complains about the ranking algorithm. Read the parent comment to that one -- the guy complained about what type of stories were on the front page; pg made the point that the complainer wasn't doing his part to get other stories up there.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    I don't think that Mahmuds' point was about the ranking algorithm, it was about the submissions themselves. As I pointed out in that other thread the fact that he didn't vote for those stories was his whole point, to quote his voting record back in public to chew him out is imo really below the belt and was - at least to me - totally unexpected.

brlewis 17y ago

I think the points helped you gain a more accurate idea of whether responding was worthwhile. The more people support an idea, the more response it calls for. Furthermore, an upvote or downvote is equivalent to a very concise comment.

pg 17y ago
The base case of concise and inarticulate are identical. The second most concise form of comment would be to say simply "yes" or "no." Do you feel such comments add to a discussion on account of their conciseness?
- lotharbot 17y ago
  Comments like yes, no, agree, disagree, good post, and lame are concise, but also boring wastes of time which add little to a discussion. The aggregate measure of those sentiments (as expressed in a point total) is both more concise and of some value, as it serves to encourage and highlight good posts and discourage thoughtless or pointless comments. It also provides a relatively unobtrusive outlet for those who wish to voice appreciation of thoughtfulness; this is preferable to the sea of "agree"s and "disagree"s that might spring up in the absence of a point system.
- brlewis 17y ago
  I feel such comments when presented like news.yc votes or FriendFeed likes add more value because of their conciseness. (define (value conversation-element) (- (benefit conversation-element) (cost conversation-element))) (define (cost conversation-element) (- (conciseness conversation-element))) I'll leave the definition of (benefit conversation-element) as an exercise for the reader.

trominos 17y ago

I'd be careful about messing with points on comments (and with karma more generally). You might enjoy imagining a forum where smart people anonymously engage in civilized discussion without need for the kind of lowbrow pleasure-center-stimulation that the current karma system provides, but I doubt such a thing could exist; if it did, it would probably be much less exciting than HN. Smart people who enjoy good discussion are still people, and most of what people do is seek out easy rewards. You've built something almost impossible here: a place where it's very rewarding to say interesting things and very unrewarding, generally, to say uninteresting things. Don't look this gift horse too directly in the mouth. If you kill the point display on comments I think you'll kill a lot of the content on this site. Not to mention that, though it's easy to make fun of people who get too sucked in to internet arguments, there's frankly nothing wrong with people going out of their way to correct other people and that kind of behavior is pretty fundamental to crowd conversations like HN. It's probably annoying that jacquesm's popular approval forced you to respond to him, but I (and others) enjoyed reading your comment; I think you'd be hard-pressed to show that you writing it was a net loss activity.

nostrademons 17y ago
LambdaTheUltimate? No points there, and it's resisted the influx of trolls better than most.

tptacek 17y ago

Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap. This absolutely squares with my experience. I wouldn't want to lose visibility into my own comment scores, but I could do without seeing everyone else's.

pieceofpeace 17y ago

> There are an infinite number of minor things that would be pretty good to do that would "just take a minute." The search link is at least as relevant as the bookmarklet link and certainly more relevant than the webmynd and mixpanel links with images. > Basically, points exacerbate the "someone is wrong on the Internet" trap. While i am not sure about that, I suggest that voting for comments should be delayed like the temporarily hidden reply link, that may reduce some reflexive voting.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

boredguy8 17y ago

I like the idea of getting rid of points. I dislike the idea of losing the ability to quickly scan for comments the community thinks are good. Because of the clever way new comments are briefly at/near the top of the page, something should stand in for "this is probably worth reading".