12 ms·

Notice: Experimenting with HN

412 points by pg 16y ago

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be experimenting with some of the ideas discussed here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 so don't freak out of the site changes in some way. It will probably change back.

rooshdi 16y ago
Along with hiding comment vote counts, maybe you could try experimenting with hiding story vote counts as well. It may encourage readers to comment on stories they are genuinely interested in rather than the top voted stories of the day.
mkramlich 16y ago
Sometimes we accidentally upvote or downvote something. Would be nice if user could Undo/Change his vote.
mkramlich 16y ago
Would be nice if all URL's were clickable.
retree 16y ago
I like the no comment scores, orange dot idea (which has made a comeback). I hope it leads to less of the mob voting mentality which seems to take hold every so often in some of the more popular threads and less of the "Sorry I downvoted you" comments that appear every so often. On the other hand, comment scores are a very quick and easy way to see what's popular, which is still normally an informative comment. Having to wade through a lot of highly voted comments may take a bit more effort but will expose people to a greater variety of opinions.
Timothee 16y ago
I was just about to ask you just that. I've noticed in this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2433424 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2433424) that some comments don't show their points and that a few comments have an orange dot. Intriguing. But I'm glad you're working on keeping the quality of HN up. Also, clickable link for the discussion you mention: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 edit: some comments still have points. Is that just a transition period?
Vivtek 16y ago
Well, consider me happy (though weirded out a little) with the lack of points on comments - in retrospect, I think a lot of my downvoting behavior has to do with what I think a post should have earned, not what I personally think about it, and that's probably bad. OTOH, I'm in the habit of scanning for double-digit comments when I want to save a little time, so I miss that.
- ElliotH 16y ago
  Can no longer see even my own points. Don't think that's positive - I like the feedback over what comments I make that people like and which are less well received.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Yeah, I totally agree with that - I've gained 45 points in the last hour, but I don't know why. That's a big turnoff for me.
    - lwat 16y ago
      Solution: Hide your karma score :P
      - Vivtek 16y ago
        Problem: joy gone from life.
  - rflrob 16y ago
    I would be okay if there were some way to tell roughly how many points a post was getting, even if it wasn't precise. For example, some sort of color coding that moved to warmer colors on a roughly logarithmic scale.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  However, upvoting appears to be broken just at the moment.
Xk 16y ago
It seems that you can still see how many points a comment has when it's nonpositive. Edit: And there are other comments with negative points where the number doesn't show. And still other comments with positive score that are showing up. Consider me confused.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  You can see points on your own posts (which is a good idea!) but not others, it appears.
  - tjr 16y ago
    I see that your post here currently has 1 point.
    - Xk 16y ago
      Maybe it's just switching around randomly for now? Because now I can see the points of both of your comments.
      - nbpoole 16y ago
        Like pg said: "so don't freak out of the site changes in some way. It will probably change back." The orange dots / hidden points change has probably been temporarily reverted, that's all.
        Xk 16y ago
        We're not freaking out -- we're just curious why things are working the way they are.
        nbpoole 16y ago
        Didn't mean to imply you were: I was suggesting that the change might have been temporarily reverted. Looks like it's back now.
nbpoole 16y ago
I'm seeing green usernames for submissions and comments by new users (not sure exactly what the threshold for "newness" is, the person I saw created their account in the past hour)
- Natsu 16y ago
  Did they stop doing that already, or are we being A/B tested?
  - ElliotH 16y ago
    Still happening as far as I can see. Try /newest - there's more green showing there.
- Sandman 16y ago
  As I can see, every user with a submission on /noobstories is green, so that's probably the threshold. Edit: On further inspection, it appears I'm wrong, there are users there who are not green. The newest users I could find that are not green created their accounts 6 days ago. Users who created their accounts 4 days ago are green. I haven't had any luck in finding users who created their accounts exactly 5 days ago. So the threshold is either 5 or 6 days.
- arondeparon 16y ago
  I think using green usernames for 'noobstories' is wrong. Green is usually linked to positive behaviour, earned reputation/karma or a special (empowered) user status; not for indicating that a user is new.
  - brudgers 16y ago
    Green is also used to connotate inexperience or lack of maturity, e.g. greenhorn, green lumber.
bravura 16y ago
Okay, I'll come clean. I've been experimenting with HN for over three years. At first, I would try out HN and the effect on me was quite mild. I simply didn't see what the fuss was about. But the most I experimented with HN, the more I realized how powerful it is. Nowadays, I use HN daily, sometimes more than once daily. Sure my relationships with people who don't use HN have suffered. But who cares? They don't understand. That's why they don't use HN.
- jhuckestein 16y ago
  This intrigues me. I don't get your comment. I thought it was going to be a joke about drugs or some church or something. Is this in response to the title 'Experimenting with HN'?
- memset 16y ago
  Neat - even though we can't see votes, downvoted comments are gray. Maybe all of a thread's comment's color will be normalized between Black and Invisible, depending on a comment's relative number of upvotes (or negative score).
deleted 16y ago
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jjcm 16y ago
Is there a way we can see the current list of changes that are in production? While things like new users being colored green are obvious, other things such as a change in the decay function on the front page may be less obvious. Just curious to see what's going on at any given time.
deleted 16y ago
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- BoppreH 16y ago
  Maybe using the "top color" from the user's settings?
deleted 16y ago
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andywood 16y ago
FWIW, my immediate gut reaction to the lack of comment scores was extremely positive.
- ximeng 16y ago
  My gut reaction was also positive, but then I realised I miss being able to see what comments the community finds valuable. Ordering within a thread as a measure of value only works if there are multiple child comments for a particular comment. Sometimes people post long, multi-paragraph comments. Seeing a comment like that at 2 points makes me less inclined to read it than if it were at 30 points. Not being able to see points will make skimming comments slower.
- huhtenberg 16y ago
  So here's a problem -- I think we all know that up/downvotes are routinely used to agree/disagree with the comments. With one notable exception, which is when the comment sits at 1, in which case it is not likely to be downvoted in disagreement. Take parent comment for example. I disagree with it and if it had a score of 2+ I would've downvoted it, because my gut reaction was not "extremely positive". Now however I look at it and do not know if it's 1 or 2+, and so I cannot cast my disagreement vote without potentially pushing the comment into non-positive range. (edit) Actually... what if there was separate agree/disagree indicator for each comment. As in "I was going to say something, but this comment is exactly that -> agreed". This will turn up/downvoting back to its original role of interesting/junk quantifier.
  - lazugod 16y ago
    This is the intent, isn't it? Force people to disagree by replying.
    - hugh3 16y ago
      On the other hand, "disagree by replying" isn't always a good thing. For instance, deliberate trolling is far better downvoted and ignored than engaged with directly. If a troll gets twelve replies going "Actually I disagree with your Hitler-was-great comment and here's a few reasons why..." then the troll has won. Alternatively, a truly stupid opinion, even if honestly held rather than trollishly put forth, can derail a conversation. If every time the moon landing is mentioned it results in a big long conversation about whether it was faked or not (with the "yes" side argued by one random idiot) then that's not enhancing the discussion, it's just derailing it. There are many issues on which sensible people may disagree, and many issues on which they may not. Sensible people should be able to figure out which are which, and downvote or reply accordingly. PS. I think this comment is great, and I'm sad that I have no way of seeing whether anyone upvotes it or not.
silentbicycle 16y ago
Have you considered adding a slight cost for submitting articles? (perhaps 2-5 points of karma?) There's a reward for submitting anything first that other people are likely to submit, but no cost, so the new page is often clogged with industry buzz that drowns out more substantial submissions. Many excellent article fall off within an hour, and then they can't get reposted. Having more articles on the front page that aren't based on a scramble for duplicate-submission karma would probably improve the overall discussion threads, too; those posts tend to draw a lot of shallow comments. It would also help with spam. Win win win. I also wonder what percentage of upvotes for submissions comes just from duplicate submissions - maybe those should be counted differently (or not at all)? If the front page is already full of threads about some news about Apple (or whatever), being first to submit a redundant (but distinct) post is disproportionately rewarded, yet reduces the signal/noise ratio even further.
- bfe 16y ago
  There's a reverse problem too with complaining about karma farming eroding the SNR. I care about learning interesting things and couldn't care less about my karma on a website. I've only ever submitted two articles, and those were only after I read something that I found profoundly interesting that had just been posted (I read them right after getting an email alert that they were posted). For both, I also took the time to search HN to make sure they hadn't been submitted yet, before I hit the button. But the second one still drew complaints of being a duplicate based on prior submissions of a related previous Techchrunch post that hadn't shown up in my search and that I'd never noticed despite hitting HN several times a day, because they hadn't been upvoted at all and had quickly plummeted off the first few pages. I hope a solution can be found that cuts down on both redundant submissions and occupying comment space with annoying complaints about redundant submissions (and that obviates the need for annoying complaints about the annoying complaints). I'd suggest trying just eliminating awarding karma to users, at least for submissions - just use the submissions' points for the ordering on the page. It takes way more effort to write a valuable comment than to hit submit for a link, so let comments become the sole determinant of users' karma. I think users would still submit pages they find particularly interesting for HN out of desire to share interesting things.
maukdaddy 16y ago
Overall I think eliminating the point display on comments works very well! I'm no longer tempted to pile on, either positive or negative, on comments.
DarkShikari 16y ago
The "green user names" might be nicer if it was a continuum -- that is, "newest possible" would be bright green, and it would fade to gray over the course of days or weeks.
jchonphoenix 16y ago
You might just consider making the flagging ability more apparent, and give it to some of the more senior members of HN. I only recently discovered it, but it has been useful in removing posts that belong on Reddit.
triviatise 16y ago
8% of men are red-green colorblind.
jacoblyles 16y ago
I contributed late to the last thread - but having a monthly "Erlang Day" (not necessarily about Erlang) would help establish a baseline for the kind of culture we want while relying completely on informal methods, i.e. no changes to code or rules of the community.
kmfrk 16y ago
Crossing my fingers that it will be easier to tell users apart soon. That's currently my biggest gripe. EDIT: Aaand negative karma. I like the changes already.
- ComputerGuru 16y ago
  I think it's good that the usernames don't show. Other HN members have expressed a similar opinion over the years... it prevents voting for/against the person keeping your impression of the comment (at least the first impression) based on the content and not the author.
  - kmfrk 16y ago
    Grudges are what Ignore features are for. (And the opposite for Buddy systems.) I recently wounded up criticizing a start-up pitch in a thread, and it turned out that the person I had the conversation with was one of the founders. At least the OP - and preferably the coworkers - should be highlighted. The latter could be achieved by letting the OP include user names, when s/he creates a thread.
  - ericd 16y ago
    I strongly disagree. It's very useful to be able to qualify comments with what I know of that user, especially when I don't know much about the field being talked about. I'm much more likely to take tptacek's advice on security more seriously than someone else's. Likewise with grellas's legal analysis, Patio11's small business/SEO advice, etc. That their names along might cause high karma for them isn't a bad thing. Quite the opposite, it causes their comments to be pushed to the top, which is almost always a good thing, as they're consistently the best comments in those threads. It gives some measure of ability to gauge trustworthiness.
    - ComputerGuru 16y ago
      I'm not disagreeing. In fact, I upvoted you. But I'm saying that the first impulse impression/reaction for a comment should be based on what it says, not who's doing the saying. After you read it, you can qualify it by its author. It's not like I'm suggesting we hide the author or anything - it's right there, when you need to find out who wrote what. But don't make it stick out any more than it already does. Put the content front and center, and make it the focus of attention. After you've read the comment and judged it for what it says and how its written, then reflect on who wrote it and what kind of weight that will give it.
famousactress 16y ago
The red dot helps quickly identify comment threads that might be compelling (something I used score for before).. but the lack of scores on the comments view (using the 'comments' header link) makes that view almost useless to me.. I don't use it all that often, but occasionally peruse it to identify threads that may be more interesting than their titles led me to believe.
Dobbs 16y ago
I really like having the flag button on the main page. My only suggestion would be to move it to the left of the comments button. Either: points by user time ago | flag | 32 comments flag | points by user time ago | 32 comments Otherwise it is too close to a commonly pressed button. Particularly on a touch screen.
vessenes 16y ago
I'm coming late to this conversation, as I was mostly internet free last week, but a) Thanks for doing all this work b) I imagine you generally feel this way, but I would love to have changes err on the side of keeping the community small UNTIL it proves it can scale in culture and quality. I say this having lived through the following community site's initial quality and esprit-de-corp rise and fall: Kuro5hin, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit Probably the only truly excellent community I was part of which did not have this problem was the Plato Network, but I expect it died before it could grow into many of the growth/quality problems HN or any of these popular sites face. To my mind, the idea that one is required to grow beyond one's quality and community goals need not be true. Another way to say this is that if we graphed the ability of community websites to attract new members against their ability to maintain / improve quality and culture, so far that graph is significantly below the 1:1 line. Creating technology to change that slope above 45 degrees would be a totally huge gift to the world, seriously. On the other hand, the best sites out there might be at less than 25 degrees right now, so even a little would be a big improvement. All that to say, I'm all for experimenting, and I know for sure that you don't really want to start HN(^2); you'd rather keep using and feeding HN in the right way -- I always find a big goal / framework to be helpful, and I haven't heard you say much about what your longterm goals are here; since talk is cheap, take mine!
- vessenes 16y ago
  One additional thought I had here; based on this graph idea, it seems to me a useful thing to do would be to create some sort of way to get a handle on community on quality using metrics. They would probably be terribly inaccurate metrics at first, but they would also provide a means for people to decide how to assess. As a start, you could use people, for instance paying people on Mechanical Turk to evaluate a post and its comments for specified HN guidelines; these could be used as a first attempt to get a feel for how well a given day / week goes.
  - phreeza 16y ago
    I was thinking the same thing, but maybe also using sentiment analysis or other NLP techniques. Even simple word count trends might yield some insight. If we could get a dump of all the comments tagged with submission time that would be a nice starting point for people to throw their algorithms at.
drivebyacct2 16y ago
Please fix downvoting. Even right now, there's a thread that I can my post be downvoted, and then my reply later that sets the record straight be upvoted. Apparently people here vote before informing themselves or reading the rest of the thread. Regardless, not being able to change a vote, especially if a simple misclick is made, is very, very frustrating.
rms 16y ago
Should I start flagging stories that I just don't like rather than only ones that strictly violate the rules?
matthias 16y ago
Suggestion: the Rerun button allows veteran users to signal that an article has reached the front page before. Far from flagging the links for removal, the rerun button signifies that the content has a timeless quality.. it definitely isn’t news, but it is still worthwhile. A link that is getting both sufficient upvotes and rerun clicks is moved to the Reruns page, which would feature all manner of old chestnuts and stop them clogging up the front page.
- ugh 16y ago
  I really don't think that duplicate content was ever a problem for HN. It's just not an issue. The community has done a very good job of providing links to earlier discussions and has generally accepted that occasional repeats of old content are nothing to get worked up about and may even be desirable.
  - latch 16y ago
    I agree. Though I'd like something to address duplicate submissions within a small window. Like the double front-page stories of bing's 30% market share...or the double ask-page entries on the new karma-less comments.
ComputerGuru 16y ago
Can you please consider reversing the "xx comments" and "flag" links? I think everyone here is used to clicking the last link under a submission to go to the comments!
- threepointone 16y ago
  +1, please. I very nearly flagged some submissions; on a slower day, I wouldn't have even noticed.
- Hoff 16y ago
  Either reversed, or can we get the comment link up to the right end of the top line of the submission, so that I'm not forced into scanning over and navigating over the "flag" button on the way to reading the comments?
hanifvirani 16y ago
What I am looking forward to is submission downvoting. I hope it's one of the features that gets experimented.
mcantor 16y ago
One risk behind hiding comment scores is that people will lose a cue for when they accidentally downvote.
- random42 16y ago
  While I agree to it (I was gonna point it out myself), it is a (separate) problem already before the change. Showing the comment score change, is after the fact of (down)voting, after which not much can be done. A better placed/sized voting buttons, should solve this issue to a large extent.
noahc 16y ago
Pg, Is it possible that building on a 'broken' system isn't enough to fix the problem(s)? The reason I point this out is that I think its possible that as a community grows the assumptions about the community become a part of the code and they aren't necessarily true anymore. When a community is small by definition it has shared values. As the community grows it starts to fragment those shared values, but the code assumes that they still have shared values. I am indifferent to the idea of down voting stories, but the code doesn't allow it because the assumption being made is that the stories being posted are being checked against the common community values, when in fact newer members (perhaps my self included on the newer point) see hacker news as the next technology/startup based Digg/Reddit/Slashdot, etc.
- riffraff 16y ago
  it would be cool if the score of an object in the system was a vector-like thingy in which every value is the result of operations created by people in your same account-demographic (e.g. accounts older than 3,6,9,12,15,18 months). You would be able to filter for stuff that has the most total votes, the most votes among people in your age class, and the most people across all age classes at vote time (people who are now one year old but voted for it one year ago) This way you could still select between stuff that is useful/interesting to everyone, such as a new $X by $Y and stuff that was interesting for people when they first read it but it's now boring since it's the tenth submission ("harry potter and the methods of rationality" comes to mind).
adw 16y ago
As we all know we get what we measure, right? The problem here fundamentally is that there's not a clear metric which correlates with "good", because there's no clear definition of what "good" is. (This is my utility function. There are many utility functions like it, but this one is mine.) It's a social problem, and as such I'm intensely suspicious that any technology can fix it. In particular, I suspect that any technological solution which "works" for some people is going to amount to a dictatorship of that sort of people - which is OK! It's a big internet! Everyone else can go somewhere else! - but doesn't hit our geek pleasure centres like an elegant algorithmic solution is. In other words: if I were trying to fix this, I'd cut straight to the chase – find and engage some people who shared my understanding of what a good HN looks like, and empower them to moderate aggressively and wield the banhammer.
shii 16y ago
I'd love if you tried the shipped idea suggested by ericb[1]. A simple input-form in the profile page that someone could put a link to and that would light up a 1x1 pixel next to their username if they've shipped a startup yet. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918772 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918772
antirez 16y ago
no points in comments: very interesting, a lot less bias. Unfortunately fast scanning of the best things is compromised. Probably it's still a good idea to avoid points, at least for a few days. When the comment is old enough there is no reason to don't show points again.
- calibraxis 16y ago
  Thoughts on skimming: * Very high-rated posts could be distinguished subtly. (Maybe a small element is bolded or italicized.) * Skimming might actually be a symptom of something wrong. Like too many low-signal posts in a thread. Also, maybe skimming even correlates with people posting too fast, or the point system leads to worse posts. * There are other skim-markers. For example, post length and author. * Maybe skimming using points isn't actually faster. Could people be wasting time judging whether the post's worth the points?
- kunley 16y ago
  Interesting idea with the time T1 when comment wuld be so old that the score could be shown. But there's also existing timestamp T2 when the comment is too old to vote. How you'd suggest to relate T1 & T2?
count 16y ago
On the front page, can you switch the order of 'flag' and 'N comments' - I think it's a 'Fits Law' type thing. I click into the comments for basically every story, but having to get between the time stamp and the "| flag" indicator ads a second of hesitation to make sure I'm not accidentally flagging something that I want to read.
- count 16y ago
  That was fast, and much nicer, thank you!
imajes 16y ago
This might be worth experimenting with. One of the problems of such communities is the echo chamber nature of hearing the same voices. I'd be interested to see what happens if you made it so that the more karma points you had, the harder it is for your comment to rise to the top. If a post by a leaderboard member is really interesting, then it'll get upvoted a lot- but because of the group think aspect leaderboard members tend to get upvoted a lot because they're in the leaderboard. nb: This problem may be mitigated by not having scores visible.
imajes 16y ago
Also while you are hacking on it pg, can you implement the bookmarklet hack to collapse/expand comment trees? often it's fun to be able to just see each conversation starter and dive into one that's interesting, rather than the expanded list view which is hard to parse what are the interesting conversations. this is the code, i don't recall where it came from: https://gist.github.com/914520 https://gist.github.com/914520
shawnee_ 16y ago
Individual comments sans karma-per-comment is superbly smart. Seems like it will encourage higher quality comment quality across the board, as a function of less-biased individual comments in aggregate. Another + side-effect: decreasing the number of attack down-votes. It is annoying to see scores < 0 due to another person (coward) who uses downvote to "disagree" w/a valid point, and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon. It is possible to disagree without downvoting; just takes a little more thought / energy.
maxharris 16y ago
I hope you don't turn the points display back on. Hiding points makes it more likely that users will actually read a comment before voting it up or down.
ary 16y ago
Please experiment with not showing comment or story scores. Just show a user's total karma on the profile page.
lazugod 16y ago
You'd think that text posts (like the parent) that have links within them would make their links clickable once they pass some karma threshold.
tvon 16y ago
I love the lack of points showing when it comes to Apple discussions.
pedalpete 16y ago
One thing I've noticed about the way I use HN, is that I find I keep going to my page, then my comments/posts to see if there are any responses, so that I can decide to respond or not. I think it would be nice to have a number next to my score, showing me that their are responses, and maybe link that right to my comments/posts page. Would save me wasting time looking at those pages when there hasn't been any activity. Thanks, keep up the GREAT work.
greencircle 16y ago
The other thread states one problem is mean comments. A good solution for this is to require the use of real names.
- MartinCron 16y ago
  Is your real name really "Green Circle"?
vessenes 16y ago
I'm really enjoying the no points on comments; it's making me think about the content more. Nice!
- known 16y ago
  I think it is better to disclose the total points after I vote the comment.
j_baker 16y ago
Hasn't the "no scores by comments" idea already been tried? I recall it not working out well for some reason...
teyc 16y ago
pg, First up, this is nice. The absence of comment scores throw people around a bit, and people are generally more careful since it is difficult to directly receive feedback. Secondly, the madness associated with karma is gone. Can you imagine in post-earthquake Japan where for a brief few days, it didn't matter whether you are a CEO or have a million dollars. It is a brief moment where we are reduced to who we already are: humans. Beyond the profit motive. I wonder if this is sustainable in the long run. It'd be like Communism (?) gulp. Perhaps there could be karma-free days as an experiment where for those days, you couldn't earn karma even if you tried. Kind of like Sabbath. It forces a different perspective.
DiabloD3 16y ago
I don't want to attention whore, but I brought this up earlier http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427163 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427163
citricsquid 16y ago
I... I feel quite pushed away now I can't see if people are liking my contributions. I feel as if maybe people aren't liking my comments, and I can't tell so I can't adapt. I post comments similar to those I know users like, in the hope that I provide value to others, without knowing how well a comment is being received how do I provide what users want? I would like to see point display re-enabled for the owner of the comment. Edit: hey looks like this happened, thanks pg :-)
- random42 16y ago
  > I would like to see point display re-enabled for the owner of the comment. I second that. Now, that up-votes are not visible, I have to write it out. Something that makes me wonder, Will this change increase the "me-too" comments count to show agreement, which in-turn would increase the noise in comments even more?
- MichaelApproved 16y ago
  I think the point is not to write for what users want. You should write based on what your personal opinions are. That way we get more new and interesting opinions.
  - jarek 16y ago
    I'm not sure I care to spend half an hour writing out a new and interesting opinion if no one ends up reading it. With no points visible, obvious feedback of people actually reading it is limited to reply comments.
- techiferous 16y ago
  "I can't see if people are liking my contributions. I can't tell so I can't adapt." On the one hand it's nice to see feedback so that you know to adapt to the social norms of the site. On the other hand, I think it's great to not care so much about what others think and just focus on making your comments accurate, informative, helpful, kind and enlightened.
ptn 16y ago
FWIW, I'm already liking not seeing the score of comments. I can see how it really contributes to the discussion. Maybe do a poll later to vote for which changes should stick around?
grandalf 16y ago
Comments with <1 points should be ignored, and an adjusted score should be calculated thus: adjusted_score = ln(square(upvotes - downvotes + 1)) This way, all comments/posts that generate some goodwill are rewarded, and the incentive not to post for fear of hurting the average is removed. And the log will frustrate karma whores b/c they won't be able to separate themselves from the pack as easily. Also I think some measure of how controversial a comment/post is would be useful, since it would help find interesting areas where the community is in disagreement.
MrMan 16y ago
Here is an idea. Individual karma scores, no matter how they are scored, will create certain kinds of incentives. What if you create a global karma score for the entire site, which is an aggregate of all user activity? Posting, commenting, voting, would all not only be scored for each user individually, but for the site overall, or perhaps in the future topic categories could either be teased out by hand, or assigned using some NLP technique like LDA, and each topic could have a score. It would at least be interesting to see the health of hacker news on a 0-1 scale somewhere on the top menu bar, and maybe some little stats behind the score to help illustrate the thought process behind the score. You could use cosine distance for each posting from the n highest scoring posts, and take the inverse of the sum of the distances to score a potential for each post. The sum of all the potentials of all postings within a certain time period, taken as a ratio over a trailing average potential over a longer period would a an interesting way to possibly get a view into how diverse and how high quality each posting tends to be. A sitewide score would also allow you to make each user's score be a weighted combination of individual score and their contribution to the whole. Consider it a form of shared fitness.
- MrMan 16y ago
  maybe you could argue a different point of view instead of downvoting my idea? or is that the recommended way of doing things?
6ren 16y ago
Without seeing comment scores, it's hard to find the ones worth reading - or are they ranked by score now (instead of by hotness)?
- barrkel 16y ago
  Trouble is, I often (used to) read highly-voted comments that were children of poorly-voted branches. I don't have the time to read every comment, so I find I'm reading a lot fewer comments now. On the other hand, I'm now less emotionally invested in replying to comments to my own comments. Before, if replies to my comments got more votes than my own comment, I might be inclined to argue my case further. I'm less likely to do that now.
alanh 16y ago
Not showing scores is curious. For one — and this isn’t a criticism — it makes voting feel slightly idempotent. For another, given the way both arrows always disappear after a vote, it makes it tougher to see if you clicked the “correct” arrow (always been an issue given their size and proximity).
dgallagher 16y ago
I had an interesting first experience with the hidden vote count. I was reading through comments in a thread, scanning for those with high vote counts, skipping everything else. Subconsciously I saw a "1" next to every post, ignored them, and skimmed along. Eventually I started reading some of the comments in detail, thought one was pretty good, but subconsciously still saw a "1" next to it. I didn't vote and moved on. By the third or fourth time I did this, I asked "Why isn't anything good getting votes?" After a closer look, seeing that there was no "1", it was obvious my subconscious was fooling me. Expectedly, I'm more inclined to read a comment with a high score since it's filtered. Not surprising. But this was striking; I'm more inclined to "vote" for something if it already has a high score, regardless of its content. It's a popularity-based multiplier effect. It would be interesting to see what happens to the "bell-curve" of vote distribution as vote count remains hidden (mean/median/mode/standard deviation). I'd predict that highly-voted comments won't be as common, and maybe lesser-voted comments might get more votes. Has anyone else noticed or experienced this? Or maybe something else entirely?
- GFischer 16y ago
  I usually skim the threads for high vote-count comments as well (and feel safe in upvoting them even higher). So yes, I'm biased by the vote count as well, but I'm not sure if it's negative (I want/need a way to filter when I only want to read some comments!)
wh-uws 16y ago
Just putting my 2 cents in for what they are worth. Its hard for me to keep track of what the community thinks of comments without their karma score beside them.
- kristofferR 16y ago
  Yeah, usually I don't have time to read all the comments, so I just jump to the most popular ones and read those. Now I can't see what the most popular comments are.
dan335 16y ago
I wish there was a section where people could only submit things they wrote, created or had a hand in creating. I can get news somewhere else.
mathgenius 16y ago
What about something like "netflix for comments?" Ie. your votes would endow you with a profile (a sparse vector) that then tailors HN so that you see more of what other similar users also upvote. This would also encourage people to vote more. I originally thought in terms of one uber-editor that fed (votes to) a machine learning algorithm, but then why not allow everyone to be their own editor.
- gnosis 16y ago
  That sounds similar to something I suggested in a previous discussion on this topic here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266
tgriesser 16y ago
An observation about the disappearance of karma on comments, is that in searching older threads (I'm currently looking at a more technical thread ~1000 days old) is an inability to distinguish between the utility of comments. E.g. if there is a solution set of A,B, or C to a particular problem or question, it's impossible to tell if 20 people thought A was a good idea while B and C were both 1 point answers. Maybe threads past a certain date threshold could display these vote counts?
nod 16y ago
I love not seeing karma on comments. I've realized that I've made three comments today, where I rarely comment normally (once a week or less). I don't know why, but it takes away the "you'd better write two paragraphs and predict the group-think" feeling that stops me from contributing more.
solipsist 16y ago
How about removing the total number of karma points from user's profiles now? Excluding our own profiles, what are the advantages of seeing other's karma? If we're going to remove the presence of karma from comments, why not with the user profiles as well?
- dfox 16y ago
  And what is the advantage of seeing our own karma? It seems to me that it is (marginally) more useful to see karma of other users than one's own.
  - solipsist 16y ago
    I think the concept of seeing your own karma total goes hand in hand with seeing karma scores on your own comments. People will want to track and monitor their karma if they are able to.
BrianAnderson 16y ago
Way to issue a challenge that all large communities struggle to solve! So I have two thoughts that I think are in a different vein than many comments below (tried to read them all but may have missed some. Apologize for repeats) 1. Similar to other suggestions, but with a slight twist, modify the up/down votes to utilize the Net Promoter Score methodology. It has its issues but it reduces a really difficult problem to a simple question that provides a broader spectrum than y/s. Could limit the "would highly recommend" super-vote to one story per day so users would save those votes for those articles they find extremely valuable. Actually, thinking about it. Would be cool to get a view of only stories that people have "spent" their one super-vote as that is signaling extreme importance. I think many people find many stories interesting, but would only find a few EXTREMELY interesting enough to spend their super-vote on. 2. One challenge is that HN has grown in size so much that there is no set of top stories to satisfy the entire group. Would be interesting to provide a view that matches your personal preferences. Reddit does this by subreddit, stackoverflow by tags. My personal background is personalization in the context of eCommerce, which looks more at user segments. So users who find hard-core tech knowledge interesting vs. VC news vs. geographic location. In some ways this is already being done via segmentation in the classic view: http://news.ycombinator.com/classic http://news.ycombinator.com/classic Are there some other obvious segments on HN?
gnosis 16y ago
I'd like to suggest a simple improvement: Hide the number of votes a given comment has received until after you've voted on it. After a given user has voted on a given comment, the number of votes that comment has received can be revealed to the user who voted on it. I don't see much downside to this. It would discourage voting with the herd, and at the same time encourage people to vote.
- dominostars 16y ago
  This might encourage people to vote only to see the vote total.
  - nikcub 16y ago
    I hope your comment got more votes than the suggestion If only there were a way to find out
    - dominostars 16y ago
      You can just upvote it and see. Trust me.. Anyway, it makes no difference, unless an abundance of karma will make my comment the parent one.
nikcub 16y ago
I don't think you should do anything This is supposed to be hacker news, if you don't like the comment counts, hide them yourself. Hack it into something that you do find easier to manage. I started writing my own chrome plugin a year ago and add to it as needed (voting ppl I like up, others down, etc.) for me HN is perfect - you will never make it perfect for tens of thousands of people by changing it on the server. If you start accepting user submitted tweaks now it will probably never end
bgalbraith 16y ago
Apologies if this has been suggested before. I'm curious if something like the BCS ranking system in college football could work for online communities. The specifics don't translate, but the general idea is that you use a weighted combination of human and machine generated rankings. This can be seen as maintaining the user-driven voting system but tempered with an impartial community spirit moderator in the form of a machine learning algorithm. How could this be applied to HN? Let's leave the standard karma/voting system as it exists, as that seems to generally work. Next, determine the general distribution of votes per comment. This will allow for things like z-scores to be determined that can notice if a particular comment has received significantly more votes than usual. Next, perform a machine learning algorithm on a corpus of comments. Something as straightforward as Bayesian filters can work, though self-organizing maps also have potential. This is effectively doing the same thing as spam filtering, but instead of simply flagging something as spam, it would provide its own +/- vote. The initial training would start with a baseline of existing comments, and then periodically, say once a night, be updated with recently added comments and votes. Additional information, such as the karma of the commenter, can also be incorporated. The final ranking then, which here would be how high up on the page it appears, would be a weighted combination of user votes, z-score scaling, and machine votes.
Super_Jambo 16y ago
My solution to the voting problem is to separate out good posting behaviour and good voting behaviour. Weight votes by reputation, calculate reputation by judging each vote for difficulty (did you vote before it had obviously won / lost) and success. So you get reputation for voting up at -10 when it ends up at 1000. You lose reputation for voting up at 1000 when it ends at -10. Since judgement is subjective you need a bunch of moderators to seed the site with good judgement. Then so long as they over-ride votes on the most obvious examples it should be a self correcting reputation system. I don't understand why in HN's current system voting power comes from karma which comes from occasional good posting. You could spend most of your time flaming, getting into arguments and down voting everyone you disagree with but so long as you're quick on posting PG's articles or write the occasional good comment HN views you as a model citizen. Be interested in any critique of this as it's how ISDaily my news start-up works. (http://www.isdaily.com http://www.isdaily.com)
bambax 16y ago
"Upvoted" and "saved" should be two different things; today they are the same. The only stories I want to "save" are those with practical content that I may use later (some new utility or library, for example). Stories I find interesting but that I fear may clutter my "save history" don't get an upvote although they would deserve one. Would it not help to have two separate actions, "save" and "upvote"? (Or did I miss something obvious?)
- joshuacc 16y ago
  I just use http://pinboard.in http://pinboard.in for bookmarking stories.
earnubs 16y ago
My experience: I just read the comment thread on an HN post and without the points beside each comment my brain acted like a crutch had been removed. I approve :)
Groxx 16y ago
Thoughts re: zero karma display currently in place: I'm getting a lot more up-votes for what I consider to be relatively mediocre comments. Some display is useful, as it helps prevent such artificial inflation. It is interesting in that it does mask whether the top comment is high-rated or merely new - I've gotten used to it with my Flattehn extension and I sort of like it, it helps spread the votes around a bit more. Not sure what all needs to be done to counter-act everything. Keep up the experimenting! And may I request tool-tips on color / display differences, like the green names had a little while ago? Or a current-version legend somewhere?
aspir 16y ago
I support the decision to downplay karma within comments; I would even experiment with removing that data from the article listings view. This is a data driven group of people who are simultaneously very competitive. It's likely that the majority of readers aren't maliciously competitive regarding karma, but this competitive, data driven nature likely has a contributing factor to some of the referenced issues. If you notice, many of the comments themselves are about the external of the karma system, such as justification for downvotes, using karma as a currency, etc. The current iteration, using karma on the back end for page ranking purposes, will likely be the best long term solution. I will know the community's response to my own comments, but I won't be able to notice that a HN "super member" received 20+ votes and try to emulate their content. Over time, comment and article rank, the original idea behind a voting article/comment system, will become the goal, rather than earning 2 upvotes. To put this in perspective, do a Ctrl+F for "karma" and "vote", then do the same for "quality."
shawndumas 16y ago
clickable link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

412 points by pg 16y ago

rooshdi 16y ago

Along with hiding comment vote counts, maybe you could try experimenting with hiding story vote counts as well. It may encourage readers to comment on stories they are genuinely interested in rather than the top voted stories of the day.

mkramlich 16y ago

Sometimes we accidentally upvote or downvote something. Would be nice if user could Undo/Change his vote.

mkramlich 16y ago

Would be nice if all URL's were clickable.

retree 16y ago

I like the no comment scores, orange dot idea (which has made a comeback). I hope it leads to less of the mob voting mentality which seems to take hold every so often in some of the more popular threads and less of the "Sorry I downvoted you" comments that appear every so often. On the other hand, comment scores are a very quick and easy way to see what's popular, which is still normally an informative comment. Having to wade through a lot of highly voted comments may take a bit more effort but will expose people to a greater variety of opinions.

Timothee 16y ago

I was just about to ask you just that. I've noticed in this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2433424 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2433424) that some comments don't show their points and that a few comments have an orange dot. Intriguing. But I'm glad you're working on keeping the quality of HN up. Also, clickable link for the discussion you mention: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 edit: some comments still have points. Is that just a transition period?

Vivtek 16y ago

Well, consider me happy (though weirded out a little) with the lack of points on comments - in retrospect, I think a lot of my downvoting behavior has to do with what I think a post should have earned, not what I personally think about it, and that's probably bad. OTOH, I'm in the habit of scanning for double-digit comments when I want to save a little time, so I miss that.

ElliotH 16y ago
Can no longer see even my own points. Don't think that's positive - I like the feedback over what comments I make that people like and which are less well received.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Yeah, I totally agree with that - I've gained 45 points in the last hour, but I don't know why. That's a big turnoff for me.
  - lwat 16y ago
    Solution: Hide your karma score :P
    - Vivtek 16y ago
      Problem: joy gone from life.
- rflrob 16y ago
  I would be okay if there were some way to tell roughly how many points a post was getting, even if it wasn't precise. For example, some sort of color coding that moved to warmer colors on a roughly logarithmic scale.
Vivtek 16y ago
However, upvoting appears to be broken just at the moment.

Xk 16y ago

It seems that you can still see how many points a comment has when it's nonpositive. Edit: And there are other comments with negative points where the number doesn't show. And still other comments with positive score that are showing up. Consider me confused.

Vivtek 16y ago
You can see points on your own posts (which is a good idea!) but not others, it appears.
- tjr 16y ago
  I see that your post here currently has 1 point.
  - Xk 16y ago
    Maybe it's just switching around randomly for now? Because now I can see the points of both of your comments.
    - nbpoole 16y ago
      Like pg said: "so don't freak out of the site changes in some way. It will probably change back." The orange dots / hidden points change has probably been temporarily reverted, that's all.
      - Xk 16y ago
        We're not freaking out -- we're just curious why things are working the way they are.
        nbpoole 16y ago
        Didn't mean to imply you were: I was suggesting that the change might have been temporarily reverted. Looks like it's back now.

nbpoole 16y ago

I'm seeing green usernames for submissions and comments by new users (not sure exactly what the threshold for "newness" is, the person I saw created their account in the past hour)

Natsu 16y ago
Did they stop doing that already, or are we being A/B tested?
- ElliotH 16y ago
  Still happening as far as I can see. Try /newest - there's more green showing there.
Sandman 16y ago
As I can see, every user with a submission on /noobstories is green, so that's probably the threshold. Edit: On further inspection, it appears I'm wrong, there are users there who are not green. The newest users I could find that are not green created their accounts 6 days ago. Users who created their accounts 4 days ago are green. I haven't had any luck in finding users who created their accounts exactly 5 days ago. So the threshold is either 5 or 6 days.
arondeparon 16y ago
I think using green usernames for 'noobstories' is wrong. Green is usually linked to positive behaviour, earned reputation/karma or a special (empowered) user status; not for indicating that a user is new.
- brudgers 16y ago
  Green is also used to connotate inexperience or lack of maturity, e.g. greenhorn, green lumber.

bravura 16y ago

Okay, I'll come clean. I've been experimenting with HN for over three years. At first, I would try out HN and the effect on me was quite mild. I simply didn't see what the fuss was about. But the most I experimented with HN, the more I realized how powerful it is. Nowadays, I use HN daily, sometimes more than once daily. Sure my relationships with people who don't use HN have suffered. But who cares? They don't understand. That's why they don't use HN.

jhuckestein 16y ago
This intrigues me. I don't get your comment. I thought it was going to be a joke about drugs or some church or something. Is this in response to the title 'Experimenting with HN'?
memset 16y ago
Neat - even though we can't see votes, downvoted comments are gray. Maybe all of a thread's comment's color will be normalized between Black and Invisible, depending on a comment's relative number of upvotes (or negative score).

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jjcm 16y ago

Is there a way we can see the current list of changes that are in production? While things like new users being colored green are obvious, other things such as a change in the decay function on the front page may be less obvious. Just curious to see what's going on at any given time.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

BoppreH 16y ago
Maybe using the "top color" from the user's settings?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

andywood 16y ago

FWIW, my immediate gut reaction to the lack of comment scores was extremely positive.

ximeng 16y ago
My gut reaction was also positive, but then I realised I miss being able to see what comments the community finds valuable. Ordering within a thread as a measure of value only works if there are multiple child comments for a particular comment. Sometimes people post long, multi-paragraph comments. Seeing a comment like that at 2 points makes me less inclined to read it than if it were at 30 points. Not being able to see points will make skimming comments slower.
huhtenberg 16y ago
So here's a problem -- I think we all know that up/downvotes are routinely used to agree/disagree with the comments. With one notable exception, which is when the comment sits at 1, in which case it is not likely to be downvoted in disagreement. Take parent comment for example. I disagree with it and if it had a score of 2+ I would've downvoted it, because my gut reaction was not "extremely positive". Now however I look at it and do not know if it's 1 or 2+, and so I cannot cast my disagreement vote without potentially pushing the comment into non-positive range. (edit) Actually... what if there was separate agree/disagree indicator for each comment. As in "I was going to say something, but this comment is exactly that -> agreed". This will turn up/downvoting back to its original role of interesting/junk quantifier.
- lazugod 16y ago
  This is the intent, isn't it? Force people to disagree by replying.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    On the other hand, "disagree by replying" isn't always a good thing. For instance, deliberate trolling is far better downvoted and ignored than engaged with directly. If a troll gets twelve replies going "Actually I disagree with your Hitler-was-great comment and here's a few reasons why..." then the troll has won. Alternatively, a truly stupid opinion, even if honestly held rather than trollishly put forth, can derail a conversation. If every time the moon landing is mentioned it results in a big long conversation about whether it was faked or not (with the "yes" side argued by one random idiot) then that's not enhancing the discussion, it's just derailing it. There are many issues on which sensible people may disagree, and many issues on which they may not. Sensible people should be able to figure out which are which, and downvote or reply accordingly. PS. I think this comment is great, and I'm sad that I have no way of seeing whether anyone upvotes it or not.

silentbicycle 16y ago

Have you considered adding a slight cost for submitting articles? (perhaps 2-5 points of karma?) There's a reward for submitting anything first that other people are likely to submit, but no cost, so the new page is often clogged with industry buzz that drowns out more substantial submissions. Many excellent article fall off within an hour, and then they can't get reposted. Having more articles on the front page that aren't based on a scramble for duplicate-submission karma would probably improve the overall discussion threads, too; those posts tend to draw a lot of shallow comments. It would also help with spam. Win win win. I also wonder what percentage of upvotes for submissions comes just from duplicate submissions - maybe those should be counted differently (or not at all)? If the front page is already full of threads about some news about Apple (or whatever), being first to submit a redundant (but distinct) post is disproportionately rewarded, yet reduces the signal/noise ratio even further.

bfe 16y ago
There's a reverse problem too with complaining about karma farming eroding the SNR. I care about learning interesting things and couldn't care less about my karma on a website. I've only ever submitted two articles, and those were only after I read something that I found profoundly interesting that had just been posted (I read them right after getting an email alert that they were posted). For both, I also took the time to search HN to make sure they hadn't been submitted yet, before I hit the button. But the second one still drew complaints of being a duplicate based on prior submissions of a related previous Techchrunch post that hadn't shown up in my search and that I'd never noticed despite hitting HN several times a day, because they hadn't been upvoted at all and had quickly plummeted off the first few pages. I hope a solution can be found that cuts down on both redundant submissions and occupying comment space with annoying complaints about redundant submissions (and that obviates the need for annoying complaints about the annoying complaints). I'd suggest trying just eliminating awarding karma to users, at least for submissions - just use the submissions' points for the ordering on the page. It takes way more effort to write a valuable comment than to hit submit for a link, so let comments become the sole determinant of users' karma. I think users would still submit pages they find particularly interesting for HN out of desire to share interesting things.

maukdaddy 16y ago

Overall I think eliminating the point display on comments works very well! I'm no longer tempted to pile on, either positive or negative, on comments.

DarkShikari 16y ago

The "green user names" might be nicer if it was a continuum -- that is, "newest possible" would be bright green, and it would fade to gray over the course of days or weeks.

jchonphoenix 16y ago

You might just consider making the flagging ability more apparent, and give it to some of the more senior members of HN. I only recently discovered it, but it has been useful in removing posts that belong on Reddit.

triviatise 16y ago

8% of men are red-green colorblind.

jacoblyles 16y ago

I contributed late to the last thread - but having a monthly "Erlang Day" (not necessarily about Erlang) would help establish a baseline for the kind of culture we want while relying completely on informal methods, i.e. no changes to code or rules of the community.

kmfrk 16y ago

Crossing my fingers that it will be easier to tell users apart soon. That's currently my biggest gripe. EDIT: Aaand negative karma. I like the changes already.

ComputerGuru 16y ago
I think it's good that the usernames don't show. Other HN members have expressed a similar opinion over the years... it prevents voting for/against the person keeping your impression of the comment (at least the first impression) based on the content and not the author.
- kmfrk 16y ago
  Grudges are what Ignore features are for. (And the opposite for Buddy systems.) I recently wounded up criticizing a start-up pitch in a thread, and it turned out that the person I had the conversation with was one of the founders. At least the OP - and preferably the coworkers - should be highlighted. The latter could be achieved by letting the OP include user names, when s/he creates a thread.
- ericd 16y ago
  I strongly disagree. It's very useful to be able to qualify comments with what I know of that user, especially when I don't know much about the field being talked about. I'm much more likely to take tptacek's advice on security more seriously than someone else's. Likewise with grellas's legal analysis, Patio11's small business/SEO advice, etc. That their names along might cause high karma for them isn't a bad thing. Quite the opposite, it causes their comments to be pushed to the top, which is almost always a good thing, as they're consistently the best comments in those threads. It gives some measure of ability to gauge trustworthiness.
  - ComputerGuru 16y ago
    I'm not disagreeing. In fact, I upvoted you. But I'm saying that the first impulse impression/reaction for a comment should be based on what it says, not who's doing the saying. After you read it, you can qualify it by its author. It's not like I'm suggesting we hide the author or anything - it's right there, when you need to find out who wrote what. But don't make it stick out any more than it already does. Put the content front and center, and make it the focus of attention. After you've read the comment and judged it for what it says and how its written, then reflect on who wrote it and what kind of weight that will give it.

famousactress 16y ago

The red dot helps quickly identify comment threads that might be compelling (something I used score for before).. but the lack of scores on the comments view (using the 'comments' header link) makes that view almost useless to me.. I don't use it all that often, but occasionally peruse it to identify threads that may be more interesting than their titles led me to believe.

Dobbs 16y ago

I really like having the flag button on the main page. My only suggestion would be to move it to the left of the comments button. Either: points by user time ago | flag | 32 comments flag | points by user time ago | 32 comments Otherwise it is too close to a commonly pressed button. Particularly on a touch screen.

vessenes 16y ago

I'm coming late to this conversation, as I was mostly internet free last week, but a) Thanks for doing all this work b) I imagine you generally feel this way, but I would love to have changes err on the side of keeping the community small UNTIL it proves it can scale in culture and quality. I say this having lived through the following community site's initial quality and esprit-de-corp rise and fall: Kuro5hin, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit Probably the only truly excellent community I was part of which did not have this problem was the Plato Network, but I expect it died before it could grow into many of the growth/quality problems HN or any of these popular sites face. To my mind, the idea that one is required to grow beyond one's quality and community goals need not be true. Another way to say this is that if we graphed the ability of community websites to attract new members against their ability to maintain / improve quality and culture, so far that graph is significantly below the 1:1 line. Creating technology to change that slope above 45 degrees would be a totally huge gift to the world, seriously. On the other hand, the best sites out there might be at less than 25 degrees right now, so even a little would be a big improvement. All that to say, I'm all for experimenting, and I know for sure that you don't really want to start HN(^2); you'd rather keep using and feeding HN in the right way -- I always find a big goal / framework to be helpful, and I haven't heard you say much about what your longterm goals are here; since talk is cheap, take mine!

vessenes 16y ago
One additional thought I had here; based on this graph idea, it seems to me a useful thing to do would be to create some sort of way to get a handle on community on quality using metrics. They would probably be terribly inaccurate metrics at first, but they would also provide a means for people to decide how to assess. As a start, you could use people, for instance paying people on Mechanical Turk to evaluate a post and its comments for specified HN guidelines; these could be used as a first attempt to get a feel for how well a given day / week goes.
- phreeza 16y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, but maybe also using sentiment analysis or other NLP techniques. Even simple word count trends might yield some insight. If we could get a dump of all the comments tagged with submission time that would be a nice starting point for people to throw their algorithms at.

drivebyacct2 16y ago

Please fix downvoting. Even right now, there's a thread that I can my post be downvoted, and then my reply later that sets the record straight be upvoted. Apparently people here vote before informing themselves or reading the rest of the thread. Regardless, not being able to change a vote, especially if a simple misclick is made, is very, very frustrating.

rms 16y ago

Should I start flagging stories that I just don't like rather than only ones that strictly violate the rules?

matthias 16y ago

Suggestion: the Rerun button allows veteran users to signal that an article has reached the front page before. Far from flagging the links for removal, the rerun button signifies that the content has a timeless quality.. it definitely isn’t news, but it is still worthwhile. A link that is getting both sufficient upvotes and rerun clicks is moved to the Reruns page, which would feature all manner of old chestnuts and stop them clogging up the front page.

ugh 16y ago
I really don't think that duplicate content was ever a problem for HN. It's just not an issue. The community has done a very good job of providing links to earlier discussions and has generally accepted that occasional repeats of old content are nothing to get worked up about and may even be desirable.
- latch 16y ago
  I agree. Though I'd like something to address duplicate submissions within a small window. Like the double front-page stories of bing's 30% market share...or the double ask-page entries on the new karma-less comments.

ComputerGuru 16y ago

Can you please consider reversing the "xx comments" and "flag" links? I think everyone here is used to clicking the last link under a submission to go to the comments!

threepointone 16y ago
+1, please. I very nearly flagged some submissions; on a slower day, I wouldn't have even noticed.
Hoff 16y ago
Either reversed, or can we get the comment link up to the right end of the top line of the submission, so that I'm not forced into scanning over and navigating over the "flag" button on the way to reading the comments?

hanifvirani 16y ago

What I am looking forward to is submission downvoting. I hope it's one of the features that gets experimented.

mcantor 16y ago

One risk behind hiding comment scores is that people will lose a cue for when they accidentally downvote.

random42 16y ago
While I agree to it (I was gonna point it out myself), it is a (separate) problem already before the change. Showing the comment score change, is after the fact of (down)voting, after which not much can be done. A better placed/sized voting buttons, should solve this issue to a large extent.

noahc 16y ago

Pg, Is it possible that building on a 'broken' system isn't enough to fix the problem(s)? The reason I point this out is that I think its possible that as a community grows the assumptions about the community become a part of the code and they aren't necessarily true anymore. When a community is small by definition it has shared values. As the community grows it starts to fragment those shared values, but the code assumes that they still have shared values. I am indifferent to the idea of down voting stories, but the code doesn't allow it because the assumption being made is that the stories being posted are being checked against the common community values, when in fact newer members (perhaps my self included on the newer point) see hacker news as the next technology/startup based Digg/Reddit/Slashdot, etc.

riffraff 16y ago
it would be cool if the score of an object in the system was a vector-like thingy in which every value is the result of operations created by people in your same account-demographic (e.g. accounts older than 3,6,9,12,15,18 months). You would be able to filter for stuff that has the most total votes, the most votes among people in your age class, and the most people across all age classes at vote time (people who are now one year old but voted for it one year ago) This way you could still select between stuff that is useful/interesting to everyone, such as a new $X by $Y and stuff that was interesting for people when they first read it but it's now boring since it's the tenth submission ("harry potter and the methods of rationality" comes to mind).

adw 16y ago

As we all know we get what we measure, right? The problem here fundamentally is that there's not a clear metric which correlates with "good", because there's no clear definition of what "good" is. (This is my utility function. There are many utility functions like it, but this one is mine.) It's a social problem, and as such I'm intensely suspicious that any technology can fix it. In particular, I suspect that any technological solution which "works" for some people is going to amount to a dictatorship of that sort of people - which is OK! It's a big internet! Everyone else can go somewhere else! - but doesn't hit our geek pleasure centres like an elegant algorithmic solution is. In other words: if I were trying to fix this, I'd cut straight to the chase – find and engage some people who shared my understanding of what a good HN looks like, and empower them to moderate aggressively and wield the banhammer.

shii 16y ago

I'd love if you tried the shipped idea suggested by ericb[1]. A simple input-form in the profile page that someone could put a link to and that would light up a 1x1 pixel next to their username if they've shipped a startup yet. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918772 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918772

antirez 16y ago

no points in comments: very interesting, a lot less bias. Unfortunately fast scanning of the best things is compromised. Probably it's still a good idea to avoid points, at least for a few days. When the comment is old enough there is no reason to don't show points again.

calibraxis 16y ago
Thoughts on skimming: * Very high-rated posts could be distinguished subtly. (Maybe a small element is bolded or italicized.) * Skimming might actually be a symptom of something wrong. Like too many low-signal posts in a thread. Also, maybe skimming even correlates with people posting too fast, or the point system leads to worse posts. * There are other skim-markers. For example, post length and author. * Maybe skimming using points isn't actually faster. Could people be wasting time judging whether the post's worth the points?
kunley 16y ago
Interesting idea with the time T1 when comment wuld be so old that the score could be shown. But there's also existing timestamp T2 when the comment is too old to vote. How you'd suggest to relate T1 & T2?

count 16y ago

On the front page, can you switch the order of 'flag' and 'N comments' - I think it's a 'Fits Law' type thing. I click into the comments for basically every story, but having to get between the time stamp and the "| flag" indicator ads a second of hesitation to make sure I'm not accidentally flagging something that I want to read.

count 16y ago
That was fast, and much nicer, thank you!

imajes 16y ago

This might be worth experimenting with. One of the problems of such communities is the echo chamber nature of hearing the same voices. I'd be interested to see what happens if you made it so that the more karma points you had, the harder it is for your comment to rise to the top. If a post by a leaderboard member is really interesting, then it'll get upvoted a lot- but because of the group think aspect leaderboard members tend to get upvoted a lot because they're in the leaderboard. nb: This problem may be mitigated by not having scores visible.

imajes 16y ago

Also while you are hacking on it pg, can you implement the bookmarklet hack to collapse/expand comment trees? often it's fun to be able to just see each conversation starter and dive into one that's interesting, rather than the expanded list view which is hard to parse what are the interesting conversations. this is the code, i don't recall where it came from: https://gist.github.com/914520 https://gist.github.com/914520

shawnee_ 16y ago

Individual comments sans karma-per-comment is superbly smart. Seems like it will encourage higher quality comment quality across the board, as a function of less-biased individual comments in aggregate. Another + side-effect: decreasing the number of attack down-votes. It is annoying to see scores < 0 due to another person (coward) who uses downvote to "disagree" w/a valid point, and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon. It is possible to disagree without downvoting; just takes a little more thought / energy.

maxharris 16y ago

I hope you don't turn the points display back on. Hiding points makes it more likely that users will actually read a comment before voting it up or down.

ary 16y ago

Please experiment with not showing comment or story scores. Just show a user's total karma on the profile page.

lazugod 16y ago

You'd think that text posts (like the parent) that have links within them would make their links clickable once they pass some karma threshold.

tvon 16y ago

I love the lack of points showing when it comes to Apple discussions.

pedalpete 16y ago

One thing I've noticed about the way I use HN, is that I find I keep going to my page, then my comments/posts to see if there are any responses, so that I can decide to respond or not. I think it would be nice to have a number next to my score, showing me that their are responses, and maybe link that right to my comments/posts page. Would save me wasting time looking at those pages when there hasn't been any activity. Thanks, keep up the GREAT work.

greencircle 16y ago

The other thread states one problem is mean comments. A good solution for this is to require the use of real names.

MartinCron 16y ago
Is your real name really "Green Circle"?

vessenes 16y ago

I'm really enjoying the no points on comments; it's making me think about the content more. Nice!

known 16y ago
I think it is better to disclose the total points after I vote the comment.

j_baker 16y ago

Hasn't the "no scores by comments" idea already been tried? I recall it not working out well for some reason...

teyc 16y ago

pg, First up, this is nice. The absence of comment scores throw people around a bit, and people are generally more careful since it is difficult to directly receive feedback. Secondly, the madness associated with karma is gone. Can you imagine in post-earthquake Japan where for a brief few days, it didn't matter whether you are a CEO or have a million dollars. It is a brief moment where we are reduced to who we already are: humans. Beyond the profit motive. I wonder if this is sustainable in the long run. It'd be like Communism (?) gulp. Perhaps there could be karma-free days as an experiment where for those days, you couldn't earn karma even if you tried. Kind of like Sabbath. It forces a different perspective.

DiabloD3 16y ago

I don't want to attention whore, but I brought this up earlier http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427163 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2427163

citricsquid 16y ago

I... I feel quite pushed away now I can't see if people are liking my contributions. I feel as if maybe people aren't liking my comments, and I can't tell so I can't adapt. I post comments similar to those I know users like, in the hope that I provide value to others, without knowing how well a comment is being received how do I provide what users want? I would like to see point display re-enabled for the owner of the comment. Edit: hey looks like this happened, thanks pg :-)

random42 16y ago
> I would like to see point display re-enabled for the owner of the comment. I second that. Now, that up-votes are not visible, I have to write it out. Something that makes me wonder, Will this change increase the "me-too" comments count to show agreement, which in-turn would increase the noise in comments even more?
MichaelApproved 16y ago
I think the point is not to write for what users want. You should write based on what your personal opinions are. That way we get more new and interesting opinions.
- jarek 16y ago
  I'm not sure I care to spend half an hour writing out a new and interesting opinion if no one ends up reading it. With no points visible, obvious feedback of people actually reading it is limited to reply comments.
techiferous 16y ago
"I can't see if people are liking my contributions. I can't tell so I can't adapt." On the one hand it's nice to see feedback so that you know to adapt to the social norms of the site. On the other hand, I think it's great to not care so much about what others think and just focus on making your comments accurate, informative, helpful, kind and enlightened.

ptn 16y ago

FWIW, I'm already liking not seeing the score of comments. I can see how it really contributes to the discussion. Maybe do a poll later to vote for which changes should stick around?

grandalf 16y ago

Comments with <1 points should be ignored, and an adjusted score should be calculated thus: adjusted_score = ln(square(upvotes - downvotes + 1)) This way, all comments/posts that generate some goodwill are rewarded, and the incentive not to post for fear of hurting the average is removed. And the log will frustrate karma whores b/c they won't be able to separate themselves from the pack as easily. Also I think some measure of how controversial a comment/post is would be useful, since it would help find interesting areas where the community is in disagreement.

MrMan 16y ago

Here is an idea. Individual karma scores, no matter how they are scored, will create certain kinds of incentives. What if you create a global karma score for the entire site, which is an aggregate of all user activity? Posting, commenting, voting, would all not only be scored for each user individually, but for the site overall, or perhaps in the future topic categories could either be teased out by hand, or assigned using some NLP technique like LDA, and each topic could have a score. It would at least be interesting to see the health of hacker news on a 0-1 scale somewhere on the top menu bar, and maybe some little stats behind the score to help illustrate the thought process behind the score. You could use cosine distance for each posting from the n highest scoring posts, and take the inverse of the sum of the distances to score a potential for each post. The sum of all the potentials of all postings within a certain time period, taken as a ratio over a trailing average potential over a longer period would a an interesting way to possibly get a view into how diverse and how high quality each posting tends to be. A sitewide score would also allow you to make each user's score be a weighted combination of individual score and their contribution to the whole. Consider it a form of shared fitness.

MrMan 16y ago
maybe you could argue a different point of view instead of downvoting my idea? or is that the recommended way of doing things?

6ren 16y ago

Without seeing comment scores, it's hard to find the ones worth reading - or are they ranked by score now (instead of by hotness)?

barrkel 16y ago
Trouble is, I often (used to) read highly-voted comments that were children of poorly-voted branches. I don't have the time to read every comment, so I find I'm reading a lot fewer comments now. On the other hand, I'm now less emotionally invested in replying to comments to my own comments. Before, if replies to my comments got more votes than my own comment, I might be inclined to argue my case further. I'm less likely to do that now.

alanh 16y ago

Not showing scores is curious. For one — and this isn’t a criticism — it makes voting feel slightly idempotent. For another, given the way both arrows always disappear after a vote, it makes it tougher to see if you clicked the “correct” arrow (always been an issue given their size and proximity).

dgallagher 16y ago

I had an interesting first experience with the hidden vote count. I was reading through comments in a thread, scanning for those with high vote counts, skipping everything else. Subconsciously I saw a "1" next to every post, ignored them, and skimmed along. Eventually I started reading some of the comments in detail, thought one was pretty good, but subconsciously still saw a "1" next to it. I didn't vote and moved on. By the third or fourth time I did this, I asked "Why isn't anything good getting votes?" After a closer look, seeing that there was no "1", it was obvious my subconscious was fooling me. Expectedly, I'm more inclined to read a comment with a high score since it's filtered. Not surprising. But this was striking; I'm more inclined to "vote" for something if it already has a high score, regardless of its content. It's a popularity-based multiplier effect. It would be interesting to see what happens to the "bell-curve" of vote distribution as vote count remains hidden (mean/median/mode/standard deviation). I'd predict that highly-voted comments won't be as common, and maybe lesser-voted comments might get more votes. Has anyone else noticed or experienced this? Or maybe something else entirely?

GFischer 16y ago
I usually skim the threads for high vote-count comments as well (and feel safe in upvoting them even higher). So yes, I'm biased by the vote count as well, but I'm not sure if it's negative (I want/need a way to filter when I only want to read some comments!)

wh-uws 16y ago

Just putting my 2 cents in for what they are worth. Its hard for me to keep track of what the community thinks of comments without their karma score beside them.

kristofferR 16y ago
Yeah, usually I don't have time to read all the comments, so I just jump to the most popular ones and read those. Now I can't see what the most popular comments are.

dan335 16y ago

I wish there was a section where people could only submit things they wrote, created or had a hand in creating. I can get news somewhere else.

mathgenius 16y ago

What about something like "netflix for comments?" Ie. your votes would endow you with a profile (a sparse vector) that then tailors HN so that you see more of what other similar users also upvote. This would also encourage people to vote more. I originally thought in terms of one uber-editor that fed (votes to) a machine learning algorithm, but then why not allow everyone to be their own editor.

gnosis 16y ago
That sounds similar to something I suggested in a previous discussion on this topic here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266

tgriesser 16y ago

An observation about the disappearance of karma on comments, is that in searching older threads (I'm currently looking at a more technical thread ~1000 days old) is an inability to distinguish between the utility of comments. E.g. if there is a solution set of A,B, or C to a particular problem or question, it's impossible to tell if 20 people thought A was a good idea while B and C were both 1 point answers. Maybe threads past a certain date threshold could display these vote counts?

nod 16y ago

I love not seeing karma on comments. I've realized that I've made three comments today, where I rarely comment normally (once a week or less). I don't know why, but it takes away the "you'd better write two paragraphs and predict the group-think" feeling that stops me from contributing more.

solipsist 16y ago

How about removing the total number of karma points from user's profiles now? Excluding our own profiles, what are the advantages of seeing other's karma? If we're going to remove the presence of karma from comments, why not with the user profiles as well?

dfox 16y ago
And what is the advantage of seeing our own karma? It seems to me that it is (marginally) more useful to see karma of other users than one's own.
- solipsist 16y ago
  I think the concept of seeing your own karma total goes hand in hand with seeing karma scores on your own comments. People will want to track and monitor their karma if they are able to.

BrianAnderson 16y ago

Way to issue a challenge that all large communities struggle to solve! So I have two thoughts that I think are in a different vein than many comments below (tried to read them all but may have missed some. Apologize for repeats) 1. Similar to other suggestions, but with a slight twist, modify the up/down votes to utilize the Net Promoter Score methodology. It has its issues but it reduces a really difficult problem to a simple question that provides a broader spectrum than y/s. Could limit the "would highly recommend" super-vote to one story per day so users would save those votes for those articles they find extremely valuable. Actually, thinking about it. Would be cool to get a view of only stories that people have "spent" their one super-vote as that is signaling extreme importance. I think many people find many stories interesting, but would only find a few EXTREMELY interesting enough to spend their super-vote on. 2. One challenge is that HN has grown in size so much that there is no set of top stories to satisfy the entire group. Would be interesting to provide a view that matches your personal preferences. Reddit does this by subreddit, stackoverflow by tags. My personal background is personalization in the context of eCommerce, which looks more at user segments. So users who find hard-core tech knowledge interesting vs. VC news vs. geographic location. In some ways this is already being done via segmentation in the classic view: http://news.ycombinator.com/classic http://news.ycombinator.com/classic Are there some other obvious segments on HN?

gnosis 16y ago

I'd like to suggest a simple improvement: Hide the number of votes a given comment has received until after you've voted on it. After a given user has voted on a given comment, the number of votes that comment has received can be revealed to the user who voted on it. I don't see much downside to this. It would discourage voting with the herd, and at the same time encourage people to vote.

dominostars 16y ago
This might encourage people to vote only to see the vote total.
- nikcub 16y ago
  I hope your comment got more votes than the suggestion If only there were a way to find out
  - dominostars 16y ago
    You can just upvote it and see. Trust me.. Anyway, it makes no difference, unless an abundance of karma will make my comment the parent one.

nikcub 16y ago

I don't think you should do anything This is supposed to be hacker news, if you don't like the comment counts, hide them yourself. Hack it into something that you do find easier to manage. I started writing my own chrome plugin a year ago and add to it as needed (voting ppl I like up, others down, etc.) for me HN is perfect - you will never make it perfect for tens of thousands of people by changing it on the server. If you start accepting user submitted tweaks now it will probably never end

bgalbraith 16y ago

Apologies if this has been suggested before. I'm curious if something like the BCS ranking system in college football could work for online communities. The specifics don't translate, but the general idea is that you use a weighted combination of human and machine generated rankings. This can be seen as maintaining the user-driven voting system but tempered with an impartial community spirit moderator in the form of a machine learning algorithm. How could this be applied to HN? Let's leave the standard karma/voting system as it exists, as that seems to generally work. Next, determine the general distribution of votes per comment. This will allow for things like z-scores to be determined that can notice if a particular comment has received significantly more votes than usual. Next, perform a machine learning algorithm on a corpus of comments. Something as straightforward as Bayesian filters can work, though self-organizing maps also have potential. This is effectively doing the same thing as spam filtering, but instead of simply flagging something as spam, it would provide its own +/- vote. The initial training would start with a baseline of existing comments, and then periodically, say once a night, be updated with recently added comments and votes. Additional information, such as the karma of the commenter, can also be incorporated. The final ranking then, which here would be how high up on the page it appears, would be a weighted combination of user votes, z-score scaling, and machine votes.

Super_Jambo 16y ago

My solution to the voting problem is to separate out good posting behaviour and good voting behaviour. Weight votes by reputation, calculate reputation by judging each vote for difficulty (did you vote before it had obviously won / lost) and success. So you get reputation for voting up at -10 when it ends up at 1000. You lose reputation for voting up at 1000 when it ends at -10. Since judgement is subjective you need a bunch of moderators to seed the site with good judgement. Then so long as they over-ride votes on the most obvious examples it should be a self correcting reputation system. I don't understand why in HN's current system voting power comes from karma which comes from occasional good posting. You could spend most of your time flaming, getting into arguments and down voting everyone you disagree with but so long as you're quick on posting PG's articles or write the occasional good comment HN views you as a model citizen. Be interested in any critique of this as it's how ISDaily my news start-up works. (http://www.isdaily.com http://www.isdaily.com)

bambax 16y ago

"Upvoted" and "saved" should be two different things; today they are the same. The only stories I want to "save" are those with practical content that I may use later (some new utility or library, for example). Stories I find interesting but that I fear may clutter my "save history" don't get an upvote although they would deserve one. Would it not help to have two separate actions, "save" and "upvote"? (Or did I miss something obvious?)

joshuacc 16y ago
I just use http://pinboard.in http://pinboard.in for bookmarking stories.

earnubs 16y ago

My experience: I just read the comment thread on an HN post and without the points beside each comment my brain acted like a crutch had been removed. I approve :)

Groxx 16y ago

Thoughts re: zero karma display currently in place: I'm getting a lot more up-votes for what I consider to be relatively mediocre comments. Some display is useful, as it helps prevent such artificial inflation. It is interesting in that it does mask whether the top comment is high-rated or merely new - I've gotten used to it with my Flattehn extension and I sort of like it, it helps spread the votes around a bit more. Not sure what all needs to be done to counter-act everything. Keep up the experimenting! And may I request tool-tips on color / display differences, like the green names had a little while ago? Or a current-version legend somewhere?

aspir 16y ago

I support the decision to downplay karma within comments; I would even experiment with removing that data from the article listings view. This is a data driven group of people who are simultaneously very competitive. It's likely that the majority of readers aren't maliciously competitive regarding karma, but this competitive, data driven nature likely has a contributing factor to some of the referenced issues. If you notice, many of the comments themselves are about the external of the karma system, such as justification for downvotes, using karma as a currency, etc. The current iteration, using karma on the back end for page ranking purposes, will likely be the best long term solution. I will know the community's response to my own comments, but I won't be able to notice that a HN "super member" received 20+ votes and try to emulate their content. Over time, comment and article rank, the original idea behind a voting article/comment system, will become the goal, rather than earning 2 upvotes. To put this in perspective, do a Ctrl+F for "karma" and "vote", then do the same for "quality."

shawndumas 16y ago

clickable link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696