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Show HN: HN Demetricator – An extension that removes upvote and comment counts
- caymanjim 6y agoUpvoting this, ironically enough.
- meesterdude 6y agoi use ublock rules to hide scores and disable downvoted comment fading, but i haven't blocked comment count. HN has been much better for me since making these changes.
- unclebucknasty 6y agoInteresting. I've often thought HN would be significantly better without downvoting. Seems it would discourage groupthink and, of course, eliminate the de facto censorship it effectively allows. pg has an ongoing theme over on Twitter on the perils of groupthink. I find that ironic given that this very prominent platform that is associated with him encourages just that.
- tsegratis 6y agoAgree with the sentiment, but my first HN comment was downvoted to good learning effect for me Feel free to downvote this one :)
- meesterdude 6y agoi've found downvotes are routers of (un)clear signals sent from noisy thinkers. They are a terrible guide for influencing your approach, argument or reasoning. Conversely, having someone comment and agree/disagree provides much more meaningful signal to grow and improve from.
- unclebucknasty 6y ago>my first HN comment was downvoted to good learning effect for me Well, if that downvoting was for disagreement, then the lesson you would've learned is not to stray too far from the group's thinking. >Feel free to downvote this one You won't get a downvote from me. For some time I didn't downvote at all. If I issue an occasional downvote now it's for what I consider overt bad faith, but never for disagreement.
- bjourne 6y agoMind sharing your code?
- meesterdude 6y agothis is what i use: news.ycombinator.com##html .pagetop:style(color: rgba(0,0,0,0) !important;) news.ycombinator.com##html .score news.ycombinator.com##html .default .commtext:style(color: black !important)
- andykx 6y agoI'm curious, do others perceive undeserved upvotes as an issue? As far as communities like this go, I think HN is pretty fair about what kind of content is valuable. Sure, maybe some high-quality niche articles don't get a ton of attention, but that's the nature of writing about niche topics.
- brianyu8 6y agoFor me, the problem was more that the highly upvoted posts were obviously good, so my time and attention were spent scrolling through HN looking for posts with more than ~50 upvotes or more than 10 comments. After hiding upvote and comment counts, I've found myself reading more of those high-quality niche articles that I wouldn't have clicked on previously. I've also found myself reading post titles more thoroughly and reading articles first instead of immediately jumping into the comment section to get summary/judgement. Perhaps this extension is unnecessary if you have more self control that I do ;).
- polote 6y ago> After hiding upvote and comment counts, I've found myself reading more of those high-quality niche articles that I wouldn't have clicked on previously. That's also the reason I create a newsletter to list all the creative content of the day which didn't get visibility https://hnblogs.substack.com/ https://hnblogs.substack.com/
- ardy42 6y ago> I'm curious, do others perceive undeserved upvotes as an issue? As far as communities like this go, I think HN is pretty fair about what kind of content is valuable. I've used a similar extension on another forum, and the issue it addressed for me was that 1) upvotes aren't worth reacting to (for several different reasons) 2) it's hard to not react to them in some way if you see them. If you believe the first point, hiding them completely is simply the best solution. As for why they're not worth reacting to. People have already mentioned they cause people to focus on what's already popular. They can also create feelings of inclusion/exclusion that lead to hive-minds, and mildly addictive slot-machine-like reinforcement (which people have extensively discussed in relation to Facebook likes).
- aaanotherhnfolk 6y agoI've worked on some rules for this in my similarly motivated extension Disengaged[0]. Another thing it does which I think helps a lot is automatically collapses subreplies. [0] https://github.com/a13o/disengaged https://github.com/a13o/disengaged
- Mekantis 6y agoThis looks incredibly interesting. Going to give it a try.
- jgilias 6y agoEverything that's on the front page is massively upvoted already anyway. I'd suggest checking the 'new' tab from time to time instead.
- saagarjha 6y agoYou can get on the front page with a handful (~5) upvotes, as long as they come in fast enough.
- jgilias 6y agoSure, I'm not arguing the front page is useless or anything. In general I find it very useful for getting a quick overview of what's up. However, it's still a tiny fraction of all posts on HN. It's a bit like hiding the relative wealth among the 30 richest people worldwide in order to not let the information about their wealth affect what you think about each of them.
- scott113341 6y agoI have a similar script, except that it removes posts that link to domains that I've found to frequently be non-interesting or low-quality. https://gist.github.com/scott113341/56c03bc7f285eefbea0a6146bcb59134 https://gist.github.com/scott113341/56c03bc7f285eefbea0a6146...
- nerfhammer 6y agoI actually kind of miss being able to see comment vote counts. Now you can only see that a comment is voted higher or lower than its siblings, if any. The vote count could show you that HN thought a comment was 50 times better than a sibling, or whatever. Of course it's subjected to biases, but rank-order voting is as well in basically the same ways, but the absolute count just gives you more information. (re: a bias towards first-mover advantage specifically, we should obviously have an exponentially weighted moving average of the votes over time decayed to the current timestamp rather than an absolute vote count, of course.)
- thih9 6y agoTo offer a different perspective, I find upvote counts useful. Part of why I’m on HN is to follow the community and understand what the community finds important. In practice I read submissions that look interesting to me and I also read those that received an unusually high number of votes, even if I find them uninteresting or disagree with them.
- k__ 6y agoI'd really like a bigger hide button.
- treve 6y agoI tried to build a similar extension for Stack Overflow that would remove the downvote button and close button, but it got rejected by the Chrome Web Store :(
- cheez 6y agodo it as a greasemonkey script
- oltdaniel 6y agoI wouldn't see a good point for this. HN is focused on these counts, because only they allow you to identify the "importance" and "discussion size". Would be like twitter without a like and retweet counter. How do I know its important? Is it something I support and give a like, to boost its rank? Something like [1] is more useful than hiding information. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23804469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23804469
- brianyu8 6y agoIt's true that upvote count and comment counts are the best way we have to quantify the quality of a submission. That's why I still browse the top posts page and will still upvote a post that I think is high quality. But for me, upvote and comment counts bias my perception of a post. I'm choosing to hide these counts so I can read articles uninfluenced by the number of points they have relative to other posts on the front page.
- oltdaniel 6y agoThats why I read the title first, decide whether it is important or relevant to me, if so I check it out. If I like it, I upvote it and if I have something to throw into the discussion I add a comment. Personally, I use the numbers to indentify "quality" and "valid facts". Invalid posts have a large number of comments and less upvotes.
- holler 6y ago> how do I know it’s important? This is an interesting topic. I’m working on a new discussion site (sqwok.im) and I explicitly opted to exclude voting. Instead to determine importance I’m using a combination of signals like live activity, publish date, etc, with plans to include further ones at a later time. I echo the sentiments from other commenters and even pg himself in regards to groupthink, and I feel that there’s room for exploration on other alternatives.
- brianyu8 6y agoThat's a really interesting premise! I'm going to keep an eye on sqwok.
- neiman 6y agoGreat. I think that social media concept is awesome. I want to follow people in my feed, I want to create discussions with them. But how those main social networks did it, with likes or other shallow simplifications of human response, with not showing stuff from those I follow in a linear order, instead pushing "engaging" content to my face, is just terrible.
- 627467 6y agoI personally rely on frontpage and comment count as an indicator as to weather I should spend anymore time to read that article/comments. I do read all titles though so metrics are not the only factor. I do realize that in using HN in this way I'm "leeching" off of hn curators work rather than contributing to curating new things myself...
- ranger207 6y agoPersonally, I place more weight on comment count than vote count. If I'm here for interesting articles, people discussing a topic is more interesting than votes. The only use votes have is for seeing how controversial a submission is.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y agoGreat idea. I have been having this idea for years of doing a little stream editing to change the color of the grey text to match the other comments. But I use a text-only browser so I cannot see text colors anyway. I think what happens is we learn to "play to the crowd" when posting comments, knowing certain "inside the box" ruminations will garner support. This seems almost like a form of self-censorship that we are doing, sometimes without even realising it. Is there really any definition of a "vote"? It is ambiguous. Better that we ask commenters "Is this what you mean?" Many times voters are probably misinterpreting comments. It is quite challenging to write comments where every single reader gleans the same meaning. Another idea is you could pull new comments from the Firebase endpoint and insert them into their respective threads, randomising the order, or maybe just have chronological order. It would be an interesting experiment, if nothing else. The web today has seemingly become a series of filtered, ordered "lists" where the top spots are the only content that is deemed to matter (and, for the vast majority, the only content that is seen). Not saying this is necessarily ill-advised, but one has to consider the effects, which are becoming more difficult to understand as we lose the ability to choose non-opinionated ordering (alpha, chronological, etc.).
- dvtrn 6y agoBetter that we ask commenters "Is this what you mean?" Many times voters are probably misinterpreting comments. I’ve observed two interesting outcomes from this, even as someone who has challenged himself to seek clarity and understanding by asking more questions: - People who ask for clarification are downvoted heavily for reasons that I can’t assume (this happened a few weeks ago, it was a positive interaction with the person who inquired of me, and I enjoyed the back and forth: their questions were relevant, they sought clarity and they were polite and deferential, I told them as much-yet all of their posts in our conversational bivouac were heavily downvoted by parties never revealed themselves or what their problems with the questions were) - People who are asked for clarification take it as a sneaky and underhanded attack (this happened two days ago, I asked someone if they could expand on a one-line comment because I was having trouble understanding the intention of the comment, someone else came along and called me a troll). Both of these are anecdotes, but not isolated ones, if you’ll permit the examples as far as pleasant conversation here will allow. I don’t have solutions, it’s just...there’s an awful lot of assuming going on even when people ask questions is my observation.