4 ms·

Well, it already has a leaderboard and some other sorts of rankings, http://news.ycombinator.com/lists http://news.ycombinator.com/lists which I find very usefu

by yef 16y ago

Well, it already has a leaderboard and some other sorts of rankings, http://news.ycombinator.com/lists http://news.ycombinator.com/lists which I find very useful. Not sure why the link to it is buried at the bottom of the page.

cynicalkane 16y ago
The reason they're buried is because they exist to satisfy peoples' curiosity, not to serve as a leaderboard. PG doesn't want HN to turn into a karma race (and I agree).
- jgrahamc 16y ago
  I would be happy if HN didn't have karma at all. I don't think it adds anything to my use of the site.
  - sorbus 16y ago
    There are some things it makes sense for; flagging submissions, downvotes, and perhaps a few other things being karma-restricted removes some issues associated with people trolling. It's also useful for identifying comments which lots of people find useful - or ones which are useless. It's basically a community-powered spamfilter and measure of relevance. That said, I would be entirely in favor of hiding or obscuring karma, outside of comment sorting (and even that could be obscured while still being useful). Of course, hiding/obscuring karma could remove some of the motivation to upvote comments. It would be interesting to see how usage patterns changed if it was hidden/obscured ... An option to hide karma would be useful as well, for people who aren't interested (like you). I wonder if there's an extension for some browser which does that; if not, it probably wouldn't be too hard to write one [stripping out everything in the form of "# points" and the (#) next to the username in the bar at the top of a page ... adding display:none to all the score_# classes and applying a bit of filtering to pagetop would do that.] I'm also in favor of getting rid of downvotes, mostly because I see them abused too much (people being downvoted for expressing unpopular opinions, especially anti-apple), but that's neither here nor there.
  - cynicalkane 16y ago
    One thing I like a lot about it is that you don't get the "first post" effect, where the first few people to say something get page top and all the attention. That's how it is on Slashdot.
jokermatt999 16y ago
I agree that the lists page is useful, but I don't use it for finding out about posters. It's a good filter for content, as it can help me find the most upvoted posts, the ones with the most discussion, and insightful comments on stories I may not have seen.

by yef 16y ago

cynicalkane 16y ago

The reason they're buried is because they exist to satisfy peoples' curiosity, not to serve as a leaderboard. PG doesn't want HN to turn into a karma race (and I agree).

jgrahamc 16y ago
I would be happy if HN didn't have karma at all. I don't think it adds anything to my use of the site.
- sorbus 16y ago
  There are some things it makes sense for; flagging submissions, downvotes, and perhaps a few other things being karma-restricted removes some issues associated with people trolling. It's also useful for identifying comments which lots of people find useful - or ones which are useless. It's basically a community-powered spamfilter and measure of relevance. That said, I would be entirely in favor of hiding or obscuring karma, outside of comment sorting (and even that could be obscured while still being useful). Of course, hiding/obscuring karma could remove some of the motivation to upvote comments. It would be interesting to see how usage patterns changed if it was hidden/obscured ... An option to hide karma would be useful as well, for people who aren't interested (like you). I wonder if there's an extension for some browser which does that; if not, it probably wouldn't be too hard to write one [stripping out everything in the form of "# points" and the (#) next to the username in the bar at the top of a page ... adding display:none to all the score_# classes and applying a bit of filtering to pagetop would do that.] I'm also in favor of getting rid of downvotes, mostly because I see them abused too much (people being downvoted for expressing unpopular opinions, especially anti-apple), but that's neither here nor there.
- cynicalkane 16y ago
  One thing I like a lot about it is that you don't get the "first post" effect, where the first few people to say something get page top and all the attention. That's how it is on Slashdot.

jokermatt999 16y ago

I agree that the lists page is useful, but I don't use it for finding out about posters. It's a good filter for content, as it can help me find the most upvoted posts, the ones with the most discussion, and insightful comments on stories I may not have seen.