23 ms·

I thought the point of removing the scores was to de-incentivize (??) people from posting for karma. Or, put another way, to improve the quality of comments. I

by latch 16y ago

I thought the point of removing the scores was to de-incentivize (??) people from posting for karma. Or, put another way, to improve the quality of comments. I didn't think the goal was to remove the social benefits that come from crowd sourcing. Now, unless a comment has a negative score, we need to waste time to filter something that others could have already filtered for us.

fleitz 16y ago
I think it's more to avoid groupthink, posting for karma would only make sense if you couldn't see your own scores, and also, it would probably involve removing the karma leaderboard.
gnosis 16y ago
"I thought the point of removing the scores was to de-incentivize (??) people from posting for karma." How does it do that? People who post comments are still going to get karma for upvotes. "I didn't think the goal was to remove the social benefits that come from crowd sourcing." Comments which get more upvotes still tend to drift to the top of the screen over time. So there is still some indication of which comments probably got more upvotes (they're the ones near the top of the screen). Whether that's really much of a benefit or not to revealing a given comment's upvotes is debatable. Apart from some really trollish or contentless comments, I don't think the number of votes on comments is particularly indicative of their quality. As pg stated in the original thread which motivated the change to hiding the upvotes for comments: "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 Hiding the upvotes that comments get reduces the tendency of people to vote with the herd. It also gets people to read more comments and read them more carefully. I think overall this is an improvement, but not an unqualified one (for reasons discussed elsewhere in this thread and others). As I've stated elsewhere, it might be further improved by revealing the number of votes a given comment has gotten to each user who votes on that comment only after they've voted on it. That will encourage voting and still discourage voting with the herd.

by latch 16y ago

fleitz 16y ago

I think it's more to avoid groupthink, posting for karma would only make sense if you couldn't see your own scores, and also, it would probably involve removing the karma leaderboard.

gnosis 16y ago

"I thought the point of removing the scores was to de-incentivize (??) people from posting for karma." How does it do that? People who post comments are still going to get karma for upvotes. "I didn't think the goal was to remove the social benefits that come from crowd sourcing." Comments which get more upvotes still tend to drift to the top of the screen over time. So there is still some indication of which comments probably got more upvotes (they're the ones near the top of the screen). Whether that's really much of a benefit or not to revealing a given comment's upvotes is debatable. Apart from some really trollish or contentless comments, I don't think the number of votes on comments is particularly indicative of their quality. As pg stated in the original thread which motivated the change to hiding the upvotes for comments: "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 Hiding the upvotes that comments get reduces the tendency of people to vote with the herd. It also gets people to read more comments and read them more carefully. I think overall this is an improvement, but not an unqualified one (for reasons discussed elsewhere in this thread and others). As I've stated elsewhere, it might be further improved by revealing the number of votes a given comment has gotten to each user who votes on that comment only after they've voted on it. That will encourage voting and still discourage voting with the herd.