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Ask PG: Can we see the response to the HN changes?

• pg 16y ago
  From a visual inspection things look the same as always.
  • vessenes 16y ago
    Do you have thoughts on some automated algorithms enterprising folk could implement?
  • mixmax 16y ago
    from this users inspection things don't. - I spend substantially more time wading through comments because I can't pick out the good ones. This is particularly true of nested threads. - I often vote based on the current score. If the score is as the comment deserves (in my opinion) I leave it, otherwise I upvote. I rarely downvote. - I can't pick out whether a comment is valid (based on scores, and thus the opinion of other users). For instance if a user writes in a comment that joshua schachter never invests in B2B startups I don't know how valid it is. - When someone responds to a comment I like to see the votes. This is particularly useful when someone disagres with me - if the response gets a lot of upvotes I can be fairly certain I'm wrong. If I don't see the votes I won't know. Besides, if we don't see scores they're not much good to users. My bet is that over time people will vote less, since they don't immediately see their impact anyway.
    • mixmax 16y ago
      This comment thread is a pretty good example of what I'm talking about: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438577 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438577 Do people here think this is a forum for entrepreneurs? Do people think it's OK to link to the HN thread and not the post? Without the votes I simply don't know.
  • dangrossman 16y ago
    I'm wasting a lot more time figuring out the comments than before. The points would guide you to the really important ones (factual corrections, context, valid rebuttals), now I have to skim everything and can't tell whether there's a consensus or not.
  • klochner 16y ago
    What about average time spent on site?
  • soamv 16y ago
    Is the average number of comment upvotes per day the same? Would that prove that people don't care about how many upvotes a comment has when they vote? Or how about the distribution of upvotes over comments under one post -- are upvotes more uniformly distributed? Do the comments on the bestcomments list have greater or fewer upvotes on an average?
• spitfire 16y ago
  Question, what does the orange dot mean? and why are some users green now?
  • pdelgallego 16y ago
    I think green users are those that has been recently created.
  • raganwald 16y ago
    I see an orange astrix next to my own contributions. I hope it means "Your contributions" and not "Stuff that has been flagged as dreck."
  • zcksjdn 16y ago
    The orange dot: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846591 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846591, the orange asterisk marks your own comments and the green user names mean recently created users/accounts.
• mirkules 16y ago
  I really like it. It actually makes me participate more. It's always interesting though to see how many points someone got that commented on your comment, so perhaps after a certain "sleep" period we could be able to see the score?
  • scott_s 16y ago
    There's already a timer that determines when a thread gets locked. Perhaps after it's locked, display scores.
• scott_s 16y ago
  I think we need to let it go on for at least a week before drawing any conclusions. People need to integrate this way of displaying posts into their mental model for the site, and that takes time. Before that happens, none of the data will be meaningful.
  • dhimes 16y ago
    I agree. I feel like I need to get used to it first before I can decide whether or not I like it. Besides- maybe more change trials are coming? I'm actually curious as to how pg (and others?) is /are going to evaluate the changes. Monitor chatter? Randomly distributed survey? I'm curious because I'm not sure how much thought/effort it's really worth, and I wonder how much pg &co think it's worth.
    • ZackOfAllTrades 16y ago
      Way too early to tell, but I figured I might as well get the idea out there early. And pg & friends probably have some different goals than what some hn users are used to a online forum having. HN doesn't need to be monetized or have huge page views for it to be a success. All pg needs hn to do is attract the right people and scare off the wrong people. And I imagine that creates some metrics that are more quality based than what most hn users are user to.
• Terretta 16y ago
  I'd still like to see an experiment where the up and down arrows (generally interpreted to mean "agree/disagree") are replaced with "| interesting | spam" before the present "|link" in the comment header. Or any two words that intellectually interrupt the "vote up / vote down" reflex to vote down unpopular or dissenting points of view no matter how well thought out.
• simonsquiff 16y ago
  Personally I'm really missing seeing the karma on comments. Fundamentally, removing them has changed the balance of what karma is all about. Karma previously had a function for the reader. It highlighted and bubbled up the good. It showed where there were good counter points. Now...well it's just for the account owner. It feels just like it's there for your own rpg-levelling style dopamine hit. It feels pointless. I really feel this is a mistake. Comment karma had a function for readers, not just for account owner's inner satisfaction. This role has now been lost. It's making browsing comments - especially for very popular topics with lots of comments - much harder. I'm skimming a lot more or actually skipping the comments altogether because I don't want to read them all to find the goodness. It also means people can't learn from others what is or is not a valued contribution. So I really hope this will be reversed or at the least make a better way (more than just what is the top comment) to make karma benefit the community not just the individual.
  • euroclydon 16y ago
    For me, I missed karma scores most in indented threads, because good comments didn't naturally sort to the top the way they do at the root level. Also, I was reading the nginx 1.0 post where I saw some short but technical observations, and I had no idea if the community deemed them valid or informational. At first I though this was bad, but upon further reflection, and after reading some technical comments with more beef, I'm now on the fence. The beefier comments brought along their own credence, so if removing karma scores prompts folks to write longer more explanatory comments, that might be better.
  • angrycoder 16y ago
    I don't miss the karma at all. If you don't have time to read the comments and evaluate for yourself which ones are good or bad, why are you even here?
    • taphangum 16y ago
      What are you even talking about? The point of sites like HN is curation.
• noonespecial 16y ago
  I've made one important change in how I vote as a result of the hidden score change. I'm now more afraid to downvote. My usual downvote algorithm was: If offtopic/noise and score >-4 then downvote. Now I don't downvote for fear that it already has 100s of downvotes and I'd just be dogpiling.
  • chrisduesing 16y ago
    Maybe I am misinterpreting it, but comments seem to vary in color from black to nearly white. I am not sure how many levels of gradation there are, but it seems that ones that have been down voted are lighter than those that haven't?
    • noonespecial 16y ago
      They do, but I don't know at what levels this happens. I'm kind of hoping not to need a pantone swatch to vote in the future.
  • fluidcruft 16y ago
    I'm not understanding the downside? If the post is offtopic/noise why is -4 a magic threshold? If that threshold can be justified why not incorporate it into HN as policy? If it's just to protect egoes, then HN can just secretly use something like a log scale or some other relationship when displaying karma to users. If voting patterns are more independent of a post's current karma, the measurement should be less biased. The same is true for positive karma--I often don't bother vote up comments that already have relatively "high" karma.
    • noonespecial 16y ago
      Its the functional equivalent of "someone should tell him that his comment is just a little off", and the score: "oh, good, someone has | I guess no ones done it yet, I guess I will".
      • fluidcruft 16y ago
• davidw 16y ago
  Where I could see things changing is higher highs and lower lows: previously I wouldn't downvote a well-intentioned but wrong comment below 0 or -1, but now I might because I don't know. Also, previously, I stopped voting up the first comment on an article if it already had a ton of votes, now I'm not so sure, so I might vote for it.
  • allwein 16y ago
    I don't think you should be downvoting well-intentioned but wrong comments anyway. I think a much better action is to reply with a comment that corrects the individual in a well intentioned way. Besides, for a lot of things, what constitutes "wrong"?
  • Yzupnick 16y ago
    Why would you downvote a well-intentioned but wrong comment? If something is wrong, explain why it is wrong. Downvotes, I think, should be reserved for comments that are 1) pointless ex:"agree" or "great post" 2) mean ex: "How could you be so ignorant!" 3) Way off topic. Everything else should get ignored or warrants further discussion. In some cases it is even important to upvote "wrong" comments.
    • davidw 16y ago
      If someone states that it is their firm belief that the Earth does indeed sit at the center of the universe, with the sun revolving around it, I just can't agree with it, and think it should not be a highly rated comment. Same sort of deal when people are factually wrong, but aren't being a jerk about it: I don't think they should rate that highly, but I wouldn't likely vote them into negative territory either. And yeah, I might leave a comment too.
      • 3am 16y ago
        Then don't upvote then, it's simple! Remember http://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/ I always thought that the saving grace of /. was the metamoderation. People here downvote based on personal bias here frequently enough, and it would be nice to have the bad actors dinged for it. I'm not saying you do this, but it is done. Far better to have a highly upvoted correction.
• eande 16y ago
  One more person really missing the karma numbers. My algorithm was to read the first several high rated karma comments than the article if interesting. I usually got the picture from the peoples perspective quickly and it also eliminated lot of the repetition and noise. Too bad, my hope and wish is that the karma on comments is coming back.
• geuis 16y ago
  I'm liking the introduction of the flag link and coloring newbies green. I'm 50/50 on the comment points. I like seeing the points, but at the same time I no longer feel they're necessary. To me, the flag and coloring are more important changes that I hope stick around.
• abcd_f 16y ago
  The downvoting needs one simple change. It should not drop comment's score below zero until it has been effectively voted down to -10 or thereabouts, in which case it can be safely assumed the comment is a true junk and grayed out. I personally used to use downvoting to sink comments that are of no particular interest to me, and to promote other branches of the thread that I'd like more people to look at and comment on. So there's gotta be a mechanism that would allow for rearranging comments in a more popular order, but without punishing their authors unnecessarily.
  • bogomips 16y ago
    I personally used to use downvoting to sink comments that are of no particular interest to me, and to promote other branches of the thread that I'd like more people to look at and comment on. This is exactly what is wrong with HN. It is essentially a (rather desperate) attempt to create reality through votes. The math is difficult, but honestly I would like good statistical correlations to happen, such that people like you are excluded from the vote counts (or the impact of the same) that I see. If there are circles of people who want to manufacture a delusion of a particular blend of crazy, the correlation engine should see their common ambitions and reflect that for just them. I don't want those potentially useful comments hidden, or trite sophistry at the top, simply because some subset of users wants to impose that will.
• kristofferR 16y ago
  I'm really missing it. It also breaks the user experience completely on other HN-interfaces like the iPhone apps.
• raganwald 16y ago
  I'm delighted to see the end of comment scores, and if they are restored, I think i will hack HN for myself to remove them when I read comments. I like having the community filter articles, but when it comes to a discussion, I like reading the arguments and deciding for myself. Scores do influence my expectations around what's important and what isn't. Besides, there is already a filter in place for really bad comments. If something isn't at -5 or so, I really ought to give it the benefit of the doubts and read it.
• 3am 16y ago
  For what it's worth, I _really like_ the change. The almost unconscious thought of "does this comment deserve more karma than it already has" was useless, it's much better to decide whether it's a good or bad comment just on its own merits.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• gluejar 16y ago
  On the iPad, the up and down arrows are close together. when I upvoted a comment, I couldnt be sure I hit the correct arrow.