7 ms·

I think that not having points has some nice qualities, but it also feels like I'm being denied information that I find useful in reading/skimming a thread. I'v

by samdk 15y ago

I think that not having points has some nice qualities, but it also feels like I'm being denied information that I find useful in reading/skimming a thread. I've noticed I find reading HN a lot harder while this has been in effect. (I've also noticed that I tend to unconsciously give numbers in usernames some weight when reading a comment. The same applies for the time it was posted.) One possible compromise would be to display either a number or simple graphic that approximates point totals instead of displaying them explicitly. Also, I've been planning to write a longer blog post on the following, but given that I've had no time lately and am not likely to have any soon, I'll just float the idea here. One idea I've had that I think might be interesting is dealing with upvotes or points in terms of logarithmic scales. That is, it takes one upvote/point to get a comment from 1-10, 2 upvotes/point to get from 11-20, etc. (Exact numbers would have to be scaled, of course.) I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going to make sure very few people ever read what I've written. An appropriately scaled log-scale system might make it so that really really good comments still get really really high scores, but so that others (which might have simply come too late in the discussion to be competitive on a raw-point scale) still get a chance at being seen. (One related idea would be to make the point-approximating graphic log-scale even though the points themselves remain the same underneath.)

rflrob 15y ago
> I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going to make sure very few people ever read what I've written. I hadn't thought about this, but you're absolutely right. I think having the numbers on other people's posts does facilitate gaming the system quite a bit more. I'd be curious to see what the actual distribution is on points/comment, which might inform efforts to implement a logarithmic scaling on the effectiveness of upvotes. No matter what happens with having other people's scores, please keep the option to have our own scores displayed. Having feedback on what the community finds upvote-worthy is definitely helpful.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- sirclueless 15y ago
  On the other hand, are disincentives towards commenting in threads with a lot of high-ranked comments such a bad thing? Keeping high-value comments stratified and rare probably helps to avoid reddit-style circlejerks.
starwed 15y ago
"One idea I've had that I think might be interesting is dealing with upvotes or points in terms of logarithmic scales. " Ah, came here to say exactly this! The difference between 100 points and 120 points just isn't as interesting as the difference between 1 and 10. Displaying something like floor(ln(points)) instead of points would be the way to go.
- wtallis 15y ago
  I think ceil(sqrt(points)) would be a better choice.
boredguy8 15y ago
I also want to suggest that it might be interesting to have some non-numeric display that still allows for the 'quick scan' that you mention. I also dislike the lack of points because I find myself voting things down more than I would before. In the past, if something were at 0 or -1 points, usually I'd think, "They probably get the point." Now I find myself downvoting things that probably don't need one more down vote.
- quan 15y ago
  >>I also want to suggest that it might be interesting to have some non-numeric display that still allows for the 'quick scan' that you mention. I agree with this, may be displaying a color coded dot in place of the comment score. The color can be computed from a log function of the score, and we only need a few colors to indicate the different types of comments without giving too much information away.
TheEzEzz 15y ago
Perhaps we could have a mix: top level comments have karma shown, but child comments do not. This way when quickly scanning for a good top level comment to read you have something to guide you, but for nested discussions karma is hidden to prevent contention.
- russell_h 15y ago
  I'm not sure how much I like this idea, but instead of just arbitrarily cutting things off at top level comments, maybe comment scores could be shown as long as their parent's score is shown and they have more points than their parent. The idea would be to highlight any path through the comment tree where comments are strictly increasingly valuable. So, for example if someone asks a question and gets a really good answer, the scores on both comments will be shown. The score could even be shown on an even better reply to the answer. But if someone trolls the really good answer, neither the score of the troll or that of responses to it would be shown. A further improvement on this might be to use a time weighted value (where newer comments have more weight) similar to that already used in comment sorting so that comments have a chance to gain value instead of being pitted directly against an already popular comment.
abeppu 15y ago
I don't care about total points per se, I care about the probability that I'll appreciate having read something. What'd be a good proxy for this is the upvote rate, roughly upvotes divided by views (or rather, a MAP estimate of the upvote rate as the parameter of a binomial distribution, drawn from a beta prior...). The upvote count system, and the logged upvote count system both have the problem that if comment A has been seen 500 times and has 20 upvotes, and comment B has been seen 1000 times and has 30 upvotes, A is probably actually a bit better than B. An upvote rate fixes that problem, and still gives you a useful indicator about which comments are worth your attention. The issue with upvote rates is that they're likely to be relatively low, and arithmetic differences between low probabilities aren't useful, so we should really use the log upvote rate -- but people aren't good at dealing with negative numbers, so it should be mapped to color or size or opacity of some indicator symbol or something. Suppose you had just a little dot next to each comment, the opacity of which is 100 + k * <log upvote rate>. Suppose k=8; exp(-12) is like 6 upvotes per million views, so almost no comment's dot would totally vanish, but if you had a 5% upvote rate your dot would be at ~75% opacity.
- 6ren 15y ago
  The ordering of comments approximates this. It would be nice if there was some way to re-nest comments, based on scores, while retaining their logical relationship (as replies). e.g. It could be done with lines or labels, but it sounds too messy.
  - pygy_ 15y ago
    The ordering is influenced by other factors, I guess either the post length or the average karma of the poster... I've had several comments both older and with less points than others at the same level, but that were still above the rest.
    - Mz 15y ago
      The ordering is influenced by other factors, I guess either the post length or the average karma of the poster... My understanding is that average karma of the poster influences it. I used to be more impressed but my average karma score has been as high as about 6 but most of the time sits somewhere around 2, give or take. One good debate where multiple comments of mine got substantially upvoted raised it that high and then it steadily slid (ie regularly changed if you checked it) until it was back down to around 2. Maybe other people have high averages that are more stable than mine but this experience has changed my view of average karma and made me somewhat less impressed. From what I gather, it's a moving, weighted average. It isn't the average across all comments for all of your history. I can understand the logic of that -- if average for all comments were used and you have been here forever and your comment quality has gone up, a million old comments that were never voted up could prevent you from ever seeing any substantial improvements in that area. But, like all such things, it's a bit of a game in some sense.
joeguilmette 15y ago
I really, REALLY would like some way to distinguish 'excellent' comments from comments that are just rising to the top with higher point values. a star, orange dot, bold title, anything. that said I like HN without points.
- possibilistic 15y ago
  Perhaps the length of the comment text can be factored into this heuristic. I mentally correlate lengthy posts as tending to be well thought out and coming from people with experience in the given area. While a lot of insight can indeed fit into a sentence or two, it still figures to me that those who take the time to write long comments are probably contributing more to the thread than those who leave short replies. Anyhow, it's just a heuristic that springs to mind.
  - halfasleep 15y ago
    With lengthier posts, I tend use the score to judge the value of the time to read them. Half a page with a high score may have more value that the linked article, whereas a low score may just be little information presented verbosely.
- barrkel 15y ago
  Yes; there needs to be some highlighting of comments that are a few standard deviations above the average, otherwise they'll get lost in the noise, particularly if they are in child threads. As it is, I find myself commenting less to replies on my own comments, because I'm not invested in furthering my argument - I can't see how many votes those replies got, so I don't know if I need to keep arguing my case. (That could be a good thing or a bad thing; a good thing if I'm wrong, a bad thing if I just didn't express myself well to start with.)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
emil0r 15y ago
I'd just rather have colour codes. Threshholds of 5, 10, 25, 45, 75+ or something along those lines. Points trigger a certain response among some people. The ones that get sucked into WoW for example simply because they have this impulse of getting all the best gear. Works with points as well.
- pstack 15y ago
  Relative Scoring In that case, you might as well just have numbers, since you can correlate numbers with colors, at that point. I would rather see colors indicating the "heat" of a comment. That is, its numbers, in relation to other numbers in the thread. In other words, you wouldn't have the following: Blue == 5+ Yellow == 10+ Orange == 20+ Red == 50+ Instead, you would have: Blue == average score in this thread/topic Yellow == 5% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic Orange == 10% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic Red == 20% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic This would help provide a more meaningful context for what posts are rising to the top in that particular conversation and the highest would always rise to the top. The top 20% of comments would always be the top 20% of comments, even if the lowest scored comment in the entire discussion is +10 points.
  - emil0r 15y ago
    To a certain degree you're correct. But it's not exactly the same. With colours you would get larger spans, whereas with numbers you get the immediate feedback. The difference in time is significant for addictive personalities. A second difference is that you don't know the spans, only that they exist, meaning that as the site grows the spans can be upped to keep up with the growing number of users. Anyway... really like your idea :). Was going to write something about colouring entire threads or sub-threads as interesting based on the total sum of points or something else compared to everyone else. Would certainly help finding interesting stuff to read in 200+ comment threads. But not too sure how it would work without being invasive.
waterlesscloud 15y ago
Isn't the ideal outcome of all this a site where the comment threads are worth reading in full instead of skimming? If there are so many skimmable comments in a thread that not having points gets to be annoying because you have to sift...well, then the experiment has failed. But if on the other hand there are just plain fewer comments, which does seem like a possible outcome in the mid-range, and those comments are of higher quality...well, experiment has succeeded!
- india 15y ago
  Skimming allows me to draw my own signal to noise line in the sand which is important irrespective of however good the default signal is. I will never be interested in reading 204 comments about this topic however good they may be. I am definitely interested in reading the top 12 or so. This experiment is horrible.
rubergly 15y ago
Your example of a logarithmic upvote/point scale is wrong (it's currently a simple scale of multiplying by 10), and you might want to update it for clarity. I believe you meant it would take 1 upvote/point to get from 0 to 1, 10 upvotes/points to get from 1 to 2, etc.

by samdk 15y ago

rflrob 15y ago

> I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going to make sure very few people ever read what I've written. I hadn't thought about this, but you're absolutely right. I think having the numbers on other people's posts does facilitate gaming the system quite a bit more. I'd be curious to see what the actual distribution is on points/comment, which might inform efforts to implement a logarithmic scaling on the effectiveness of upvotes. No matter what happens with having other people's scores, please keep the option to have our own scores displayed. Having feedback on what the community finds upvote-worthy is definitely helpful.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sirclueless 15y ago
On the other hand, are disincentives towards commenting in threads with a lot of high-ranked comments such a bad thing? Keeping high-value comments stratified and rare probably helps to avoid reddit-style circlejerks.

starwed 15y ago

"One idea I've had that I think might be interesting is dealing with upvotes or points in terms of logarithmic scales. " Ah, came here to say exactly this! The difference between 100 points and 120 points just isn't as interesting as the difference between 1 and 10. Displaying something like floor(ln(points)) instead of points would be the way to go.

wtallis 15y ago
I think ceil(sqrt(points)) would be a better choice.

boredguy8 15y ago

I also want to suggest that it might be interesting to have some non-numeric display that still allows for the 'quick scan' that you mention. I also dislike the lack of points because I find myself voting things down more than I would before. In the past, if something were at 0 or -1 points, usually I'd think, "They probably get the point." Now I find myself downvoting things that probably don't need one more down vote.

quan 15y ago
>>I also want to suggest that it might be interesting to have some non-numeric display that still allows for the 'quick scan' that you mention. I agree with this, may be displaying a color coded dot in place of the comment score. The color can be computed from a log function of the score, and we only need a few colors to indicate the different types of comments without giving too much information away.

TheEzEzz 15y ago

Perhaps we could have a mix: top level comments have karma shown, but child comments do not. This way when quickly scanning for a good top level comment to read you have something to guide you, but for nested discussions karma is hidden to prevent contention.

russell_h 15y ago
I'm not sure how much I like this idea, but instead of just arbitrarily cutting things off at top level comments, maybe comment scores could be shown as long as their parent's score is shown and they have more points than their parent. The idea would be to highlight any path through the comment tree where comments are strictly increasingly valuable. So, for example if someone asks a question and gets a really good answer, the scores on both comments will be shown. The score could even be shown on an even better reply to the answer. But if someone trolls the really good answer, neither the score of the troll or that of responses to it would be shown. A further improvement on this might be to use a time weighted value (where newer comments have more weight) similar to that already used in comment sorting so that comments have a chance to gain value instead of being pitted directly against an already popular comment.

abeppu 15y ago

I don't care about total points per se, I care about the probability that I'll appreciate having read something. What'd be a good proxy for this is the upvote rate, roughly upvotes divided by views (or rather, a MAP estimate of the upvote rate as the parameter of a binomial distribution, drawn from a beta prior...). The upvote count system, and the logged upvote count system both have the problem that if comment A has been seen 500 times and has 20 upvotes, and comment B has been seen 1000 times and has 30 upvotes, A is probably actually a bit better than B. An upvote rate fixes that problem, and still gives you a useful indicator about which comments are worth your attention. The issue with upvote rates is that they're likely to be relatively low, and arithmetic differences between low probabilities aren't useful, so we should really use the log upvote rate -- but people aren't good at dealing with negative numbers, so it should be mapped to color or size or opacity of some indicator symbol or something. Suppose you had just a little dot next to each comment, the opacity of which is 100 + k * <log upvote rate>. Suppose k=8; exp(-12) is like 6 upvotes per million views, so almost no comment's dot would totally vanish, but if you had a 5% upvote rate your dot would be at ~75% opacity.

6ren 15y ago
The ordering of comments approximates this. It would be nice if there was some way to re-nest comments, based on scores, while retaining their logical relationship (as replies). e.g. It could be done with lines or labels, but it sounds too messy.
- pygy_ 15y ago
  The ordering is influenced by other factors, I guess either the post length or the average karma of the poster... I've had several comments both older and with less points than others at the same level, but that were still above the rest.
  - Mz 15y ago
    The ordering is influenced by other factors, I guess either the post length or the average karma of the poster... My understanding is that average karma of the poster influences it. I used to be more impressed but my average karma score has been as high as about 6 but most of the time sits somewhere around 2, give or take. One good debate where multiple comments of mine got substantially upvoted raised it that high and then it steadily slid (ie regularly changed if you checked it) until it was back down to around 2. Maybe other people have high averages that are more stable than mine but this experience has changed my view of average karma and made me somewhat less impressed. From what I gather, it's a moving, weighted average. It isn't the average across all comments for all of your history. I can understand the logic of that -- if average for all comments were used and you have been here forever and your comment quality has gone up, a million old comments that were never voted up could prevent you from ever seeing any substantial improvements in that area. But, like all such things, it's a bit of a game in some sense.

joeguilmette 15y ago

I really, REALLY would like some way to distinguish 'excellent' comments from comments that are just rising to the top with higher point values. a star, orange dot, bold title, anything. that said I like HN without points.

possibilistic 15y ago
Perhaps the length of the comment text can be factored into this heuristic. I mentally correlate lengthy posts as tending to be well thought out and coming from people with experience in the given area. While a lot of insight can indeed fit into a sentence or two, it still figures to me that those who take the time to write long comments are probably contributing more to the thread than those who leave short replies. Anyhow, it's just a heuristic that springs to mind.
- halfasleep 15y ago
  With lengthier posts, I tend use the score to judge the value of the time to read them. Half a page with a high score may have more value that the linked article, whereas a low score may just be little information presented verbosely.
barrkel 15y ago
Yes; there needs to be some highlighting of comments that are a few standard deviations above the average, otherwise they'll get lost in the noise, particularly if they are in child threads. As it is, I find myself commenting less to replies on my own comments, because I'm not invested in furthering my argument - I can't see how many votes those replies got, so I don't know if I need to keep arguing my case. (That could be a good thing or a bad thing; a good thing if I'm wrong, a bad thing if I just didn't express myself well to start with.)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

emil0r 15y ago

I'd just rather have colour codes. Threshholds of 5, 10, 25, 45, 75+ or something along those lines. Points trigger a certain response among some people. The ones that get sucked into WoW for example simply because they have this impulse of getting all the best gear. Works with points as well.

pstack 15y ago
Relative Scoring In that case, you might as well just have numbers, since you can correlate numbers with colors, at that point. I would rather see colors indicating the "heat" of a comment. That is, its numbers, in relation to other numbers in the thread. In other words, you wouldn't have the following: Blue == 5+ Yellow == 10+ Orange == 20+ Red == 50+ Instead, you would have: Blue == average score in this thread/topic Yellow == 5% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic Orange == 10% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic Red == 20% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic This would help provide a more meaningful context for what posts are rising to the top in that particular conversation and the highest would always rise to the top. The top 20% of comments would always be the top 20% of comments, even if the lowest scored comment in the entire discussion is +10 points.
- emil0r 15y ago
  To a certain degree you're correct. But it's not exactly the same. With colours you would get larger spans, whereas with numbers you get the immediate feedback. The difference in time is significant for addictive personalities. A second difference is that you don't know the spans, only that they exist, meaning that as the site grows the spans can be upped to keep up with the growing number of users. Anyway... really like your idea :). Was going to write something about colouring entire threads or sub-threads as interesting based on the total sum of points or something else compared to everyone else. Would certainly help finding interesting stuff to read in 200+ comment threads. But not too sure how it would work without being invasive.

waterlesscloud 15y ago

Isn't the ideal outcome of all this a site where the comment threads are worth reading in full instead of skimming? If there are so many skimmable comments in a thread that not having points gets to be annoying because you have to sift...well, then the experiment has failed. But if on the other hand there are just plain fewer comments, which does seem like a possible outcome in the mid-range, and those comments are of higher quality...well, experiment has succeeded!

india 15y ago
Skimming allows me to draw my own signal to noise line in the sand which is important irrespective of however good the default signal is. I will never be interested in reading 204 comments about this topic however good they may be. I am definitely interested in reading the top 12 or so. This experiment is horrible.

rubergly 15y ago

Your example of a logarithmic upvote/point scale is wrong (it's currently a simple scale of multiplying by 10), and you might want to update it for clarity. I believe you meant it would take 1 upvote/point to get from 0 to 1, 10 upvotes/points to get from 1 to 2, etc.