5 ms·
The case for pictures next to usernames on Hacker News
I’ve been using this site for a while now, and though I do recognize some usernames, I only have a vague sense of personalities for very few of them (excluding people I’ve actually met in person). I think the problem is that when I’m reading comments I see the username and the comment, but I don’t really associate them together in order to form a bond over time between that username and those set of comments. Instead, I tend to remember a set of comments and a set of usernames, independently. Am I alone here in this behavior?
In any case, the cities and ambition thread got me thinking about what it would take to make an online community more like an offline one. I think the bulk of it comes down to conversation, of which there are two parts: content and mechanics. The content side seems OK here (for what I’m looking for at least). The mechanics side falls way behind the offline world, however.
Offline we have 3-d conversations using most of our sensory perceptions. Online, a lot of that obviously goes away. Of course there are benefits of being online too, e.g. asynchronous threads, archiving, etc. But the lack of the senses drastically takes away the emotional feel of the offline community.
Pictures next to usernames I believe would be at least a start in the other direction. We would get more of a visual sense for a person. For me at least, I think I would start associating usernames more with their set of comments. And I think that would greatly increase the sense of community gained from the site. I’m sure there are other (low-impact) things one could do as well, but I just haven’t thought of them.
I get it pg, you don’t want to spend your time working on this site (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201122), but maybe someone playing around with Arc could make the change and then it could be ported back.
- delano 18y agoI prefer text.
- prakash 18y agoYou are not alone, Gabriel. Visual association beats textual and this makes sense. One thing though, the images would increase the bandwidth to the site, and maybe even hamper performance.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoOn the user side, you could presumably turn them off. As for server performance, Y Combinator should be able it.
- huhtenberg 18y agoI assume you meant "turn them on". Adding a visually intrusive feature and enabling it by default is not the best thing to do, especially when the understated appearance is the feature of the website.
- Hates_ 18y agoPersonally, the lack of images is a plus for me. It's one of the things I love about HN. That lack of emotional feel towards posters is what keeps postings focused. Take Digg for instance, I think that it's that sense of community that leads to 99% of the comments being of no real benefit at all, because everyone is trying to crack a joke.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoDigg comments aren't bad because they have pictures. They are bad because they are from that set of commenters. If you supposed the set of Hacker News commenters didn't change, I think pictures would clearly be a win. What you seem to be suggesting is that by adding pictures, we would attract bad commenters. I just don't think that is true.
- Alex3917 18y ago"Digg comments aren't bad because they have pictures. They are bad because they are from that set of commenters." I think it's as much the social norms as the user base. For example, we have kind of an unspoken humor armistice here. Normally humor is used to demonstrate intelligence. However, it's mutually understood that everyone here is intelligent enough to make the appropriate joke, but that we should refrain because it doesn't really add anything to the conversation or make anyone else any better off.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoAgreed. Sorry to all Digg users. This just makes the point further, in my opinion. Once we have these "social norms" established, we should be able to do things with the UI to increase community without degrading the adherence to the social norms.
- ArcticCelt 18y agoI agree, I constantly refrain from cracking jokes because I don't want to see this turn into what Reddit has become lately. I think it should be told somewhere what are the goals of the community and explain that we aim for efficiency, knowledge and insightful conversations more than entertainment. Not because we don't like entertainment but because that's not why we are here.
- metatronscube 18y agoyeah no pictures...Im real ugly I have been told
- mrtron 18y agoBy a man named Ash? "Honey you got reaaaaaal ugly."
- deathbyzen 18y agoThe current layout of HN doesn't lend itself to avatars at all, IMHO. They would break up the page in awkward ways. If avatars where implemented they should only be 25x25 or something similarly tiny.
- thorax 18y agoIf we added them, I'd say make them 16x16. People could use favicons for their sites (if they so desired).
- pg 18y agoI think it's better if people make their own portraits with their ideas.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoThat's exactly the problem I am describing. They are making their own portraits, but they aren't sticking to their usernames, at least for me. A visual icon would help. It could be small, 25x25 as someone suggested.
- Alex3917 18y agoEven if you were to add pictures, the place to do it would be on the user's profile page and not next to the posts.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoI disagree, but that would certainly be a good start. I disagree because then I would have to click each time to see it, and that is an extra step. With some small icon on the page, I'd develop the history in an osmosis-like manner.
- andreyf 18y ago25x25 is pretty big. I think it would be clever to make it 15x15 or 10x10...
- TrevorJ 18y agoI agree that as an option, pictures hold more value than is intuitively understood by most people. I view hacker news as a small community that desires the ability to maintain it's tight focus and not expand too much or too fast (all the "Please block this from showing up on hacker news" posts area good example of the sentiment) On the web, focus is a HUGE commodity and we are right to desire it. I would argue that a sense of community and a sense of focus go hand in hand, and given that I think optional images could help maintain a sense of community even as our numbers grow larger.
- khafra 18y agoI'm not certain of that. In every focused forum I've frequented, when a sense of community grows, the focus turns inward instead of staying on the stated subject. I think, for instance, that the chans' insistence on anonymous posting and ephemeral content helps keep most of their boards full of posts focused on the board's topic, rather than the poster's reputation.
- TrevorJ 18y agoGood point, however we already have a karma system so we've bought into the reputation argument already.
- jasoncartwright 18y agoYup - should use Gravatar
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoHave you seen some of these guys? Hey -- count your blessings. (Just kidding!)
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoUnderstood. They could be icons. It doesn't really matter if they are actual pictures of faces. It matters that they are unique and visual.
- Alex3917 18y agoI'm the same way, I'm usually not able to associate a username with a set of posts unless I've either met them in person or seen a picture of them online. That said, I think we'd be losing more than we'd be gaining by adding pictures.
- edw519 18y agoYou asked for it... \/\/\/\/ / \ / \ / \ /\_/ 0 0 \_/\ | | \/ \ |_| / \/ \ / \ \-----/ / \ / \_______/ | |
- mynameishere 18y agoI can't believe you still sport a late 1980s-style spiky hair cut. ...... Robert Frost suggested that he could write poem/plays in which all of the characters went unnamed, and that the reader would identify the characters based entirely on tone. This idiosyncratic idea has come true to a degree on the internet: There is an accidental feature in some blogs (I think blogspot [1]) where almost everybody winds up posting as "anonymous". Despite this, you can usually tell in a rough way who is who. At any rate, I don't think pictures ever add anything. [1] Because it's a pain, depending on the blogger's settings, to log in.
- aneesh 18y agoMaybe it's just me, but I actually do tend to associate usernames with comments, at least for the frequent commenters like edw519.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- DanHulton 18y agoA big change would even just be to make the username stand out more. I can identify several popular posters on metafilter simply because the name is right there, in a bright colour / bold font directly underneath their posts.
- geuis 18y agono avatars please. For me, HN works well. We dont need the beginnings of yet another wannabe social network. I would argue for incremental improvements to the interface: iPhone friendly version no more odd page parameters that timeout without a page refresh
- m0nty 18y ago"On the Internet, nobody know if you're a dog. So we fixed that problem." Seriously, if I included a pic, it would be of someone else. It's better for everyone like that, trust me.
- skmurphy 18y agoMy suggestion is a little different: I would like to see more history kept than the last 20 or so comments (although search.yc helps a lot here) so that when I come across a new poster I can read their other submissions and comments and get a better feel for how they think based on what else they have written.
- petercooper 18y agoMetaFilter ( http://www.metafilter.com/ http://www.metafilter.com/ ) is an amazing demonstration of a cohesive online community that doesn't use images to represent users. MetaFilter users tend to be very familiar with each other (more so than other large online communities I've been in). While I agree images can be good, they certainly don't seem to be essential. IRC is another example. People build up personalities and tie nicknames to them pretty easily without graphics.. and IRC can get very emotional at times.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoI can see real time playing a part in IRC. What do you think metafilter does differently (than here) in order to get its cohesiveness?
- petercooper 18y agoGood point and good question. I'm not entirely sure, but perhaps it's a combination of one feature and one trait. Single threading (as used by MetaFilter) forces / encourages people to take note of nicknames in order to target specific responses, so nicknames become a lot more relevant. Secondly, discussions tend to roll on and on on MetaFilter, whereas it's uncommon for two people to respond back and forth more than once on HN stories.
- Tichy 18y agoHow about a Twitter group that actually follows back? It would be nice to see what HN readers are up to at a glance, and Twitter has pics. If nobody else wants to do it, and there is interest, I could set it up. I have no autofollow script yet, but I would ask Twitter support to enable it. Edit: I already follow @newsycombinator, so if that would add autofollow it would be great ;-)
- tumpak 18y agoi disagree on a pure simplicity view. I like the fact i can concentrate on the article than on the author or picture or his/her CV (logical trend when you start adding a lot of info about users) but frankly its the simplicity equation.
- tarkin2 18y agoIf we start to link personalities to comments then we add bias to this site. If we try to refrain from introducing personalities the users must then focus on ideas, far better for the development of them.
- maxklein 18y agoIn my opinion, after the ycombinator rejection letters go out there will be a bunch of people that look very much like goatse commenting on this site.
- alaskamiller 18y agoEventually this will just turn back into a message board software.
- rtf 18y agoThere are two extremes, neither one better than the other: The proposed extreme is to encourage community via personalization. I personally disagree with this: web sites are typically too big to be communities in a natural sense. What you will get is increased visibility for a small elite of spam-heavy commentators. The other extreme is 2ch-style anonymity. This is open to mob abuse, but it also discourages powergaming. The core issue is how to continue scaling the system to match interests when they reach hundreds or thousands for every front-page story. news.yc is getting there already....
- rewind 18y agoPersonally, the whole site works better for me without images. I, like most people, make a conscious effort to ignore things like gender and age when I'm reading someone's opinion (here or on any other site). But the fact that I sometimes have to make a CONSCIOUS effort means that there is at least a bit of a pre-existing bias or stereotype based on different demographics. Things like "young people don't have enough experience" or "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" can creep into your interpretation of someone else's opinion without even realizing it. I'd rather know as little as possible about the person behind the comment and just focus on the comment itself. Think of some of the more memorable opinions from the past. Would your opinion of those comments be different if you knew before reading them that the poster was a 15-year-old girl, a 23-year-old transgender, a 55-year-old male? For a very small few of us, the answer is no. For the large majority of us -- myself included -- the answer is yes. The less information I have about the person, the more I can stick to what is being said. I can certainly appreciate the arguments for having the image. I just don't think they outweigh the reasons against. I'm not listing all the reasons here, either. I'm just bringing up the main point for me specifically.
- SwellJoe 18y agoNo. Please, no.
- xtat 18y agoSURELY WE HAVE SOMETHING BETTER TO CHAT ABOUT THX!
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- pkaler 18y agoThere is one reason I can think of for adding profile pictures: reducing anonymity. People say a lot of things online that they wouldn't say face-to-face because of anonymity. I'm not sure if profile pictures would be a step towards anonymity, but I think it would be a good experiment. For example, comments written on a wall on Facebook are much less hostile than comments at YouTube or MySpace. I don't recall seeing the words gay or faggot used at all on Facebook, ever. Even adding more text info may be a good idea. Eg: pkaler. Vancouver, BC. Smartful Studios Inc.
- schtog 18y ago"For me at least, I think I would start associating usernames more with their set of comments. And I think that would greatly increase the sense of community gained from the site. I’m sure there are other (low-impact) things one could do as well, but I just haven’t thought of them." if that si true its obv great but: "Think of some of the more memorable opinions from the past. Would your opinion of those comments be different if you knew before reading them that the poster was a 15-year-old girl, a 23-year-old transgender, a 55-year-old male? For a very small few of us, the answer is no. For the large majority of us -- myself included -- the answer is yes. The less information I have about the person, the more I can stick to what is being said." is a very good point made by rewind. i personally dont feel a need for it, i like the simplicity of hacker news.
- neenster 18y agoReally interesting!! yep images are super important. it's the best way to associate people to comments. there's this site I just discovered this week: dipity.com it looks like the best way to share lots of information on the web right now. surely, wiht sites like this one, the internet could become a very intense social place, for dating and even work, teaming up with peers. when you see time lines that people made themselves, I think you can see their personnality, interests, but also culture and ideology very fast. Maybe the web will provide us with even better social interfaces than what nature gave us: talking, body langage, clothes and fashion, and talking about your musical preferences etc. all this and much more could take place on the web I think! let's make it happen :DD well for now dipity.com looks pretty exciting add me there I'm "smoothboom" and I just made a time line about memetics.