7 ms·

Ask PG: have you seen a change in the cumulative comment karma?

• staunch 15y ago
  My guesses: Voting was used to set a comment to the "correct" level. Now no one can see where they're at, so good comments probably get more than they used to (depth). Overall people don't think about points as much, so overall commenting is down (breadth).
  • nandemo 15y ago
    I doubt that good commands get more upvoted than before. Visible, high points serve as a signal that the comment is worth a read. Also, I believe that other things being equal people tend to upvote high-point comments more. In other words, if you did an A/B test that would (resp.) add/subtract 20 points to the displayed points of an already well upvoted comment, people seeing the high-point version would upvote it more.
  • jamesbritt 15y ago
    Voting was used to set a comment to the "correct" level. Now no one can see where they're at, so good comments probably get more than they used to (depth). That sums up my behavior. While I might up or down vote a comment simply based on its intrinsic value I tended to also consider "correcting" vote tallies. For example, if it looks like a comment is getting high up votes simply because of "me-too-ism" rather than because it is offering a striking observation I might down-vote (since I want to discourage generally trite but popular opinion comments). The lack of feedback, the inability to see the results of my voting, and the inability to see how others are appraising comments detracts from the site and make me less inclined to vote at all.
• anonymous246 15y ago
  I'm finding that I miss the comment points, but I didn't think I would. PG should do another experiment where he hides the submitter and commenter names while showing the comment points for N hours (N tbd) after the comment goes live.
  • icey 15y ago
    The only thing I miss is an indicator that I actually did hit the upvote button and didn't accidentally downvote someone. I use HN from an iPad about half the time, and I don't really trust my ability to accurately hit the correct arrow.
• pg 15y ago
  Comments with high scores seem to have slightly higher scores than they would have, but comments with low scores seem to have about the same. Probably because the -4 limit on displayed comment scores was already concealing the actual score.
  • pathik 15y ago
    Please bring back the comment scores. It helps a lot in parsing the comments and assigning a proportional weight to each when reading them.
    • latch 15y ago
      or something else that helps rate a comments importance beyond the near-meaningless ordering. Should work within a thread and at the top level equally well.
    • thaumaturgy 15y ago
      I had to think about this a bit, and I disagree so far. I'm finding that I'm not pre-judging comments as much. It's nice to be able to read someone's comment without knowing first that 70 or 80 or 3 other people thought it was worthwhile.
      • jasonlotito 15y ago
        However, it also eliminate the ability for me to reference a comment with a high score with the understanding it's probably more correct. After all, once I read a comment, I want to know if what others think. Comment scores help that. Granted, it's not the only solution. Having some other visual indicator that suggests a comment is of high quality would be good without needing to resort to simply displaying points.
        • mitjak 15y ago
          Replies to comments solve the "I want to know what others think" problem. I agree with the previous commenter: having the comment ratings hidden was unusual at first but I definitely do acknowledge that I used to mentally pre-judge a comment based purely on others' responses to it, despite having dealt multiple times with comments that I disagreed with which had higher upvote counts than the ones I felt were better answers.
• chalst 15y ago
  The more important question is: are populist comments getting fewer upvotes? The reason they might is that voting has become for many voters more the individual task of judging the worth of the comment and less the group task of deciding what is popular. Looking at the distribution of comment karma before and after the change might give some clue as to that. Analysing two popular threads might be better, if we get the methodology right.
• deleted 15y ago
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