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Tell HN: Please bring back comment scores

442 points by Maro 16y ago

I miss comment scores. Perhaps we could strike middle ground by displaying a range, eg. 1, 2-5, 5-10, 10+

ambirex 16y ago
I would like it if the comment rating was only available in an html data attribute (eg data-rating="10"). That way my old user script would still be able to sort and high light comments. You would have to go out of your way to see the score but could still be used by us hackers who like to customize our experience.
deleted 16y ago
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fr0sty 16y ago
No one on this thread has picked up on the 'range' suggestion by Maro yet, so I'll add a thought: For my purposes, displaying actual scores within the range -4 -> 10 would be sufficient. the low end is already capped, and the high end could either just have a ceiling of 10 or a score of 10+. I am occasionally a "someone is Wrong on the internet!"[1] type and my inclination to wade in is directly proportioanl to the perceived traction of the inaccuracy. Without such a heuristic the choices are: reply to all, none, or a random sample which result in "poor information", "needless pedantry", and " undefined behavior" respectively. [1] http://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/
ghotli 16y ago
I found it particularly hard to read the recent Amazon Outage thread. There was so much information to sift through. It had me missing the comment scores.
AndyNemmity 16y ago
I much prefer it without. I like it like this
sktrdie 16y ago
I'm not going to read all the comments when they're more than 50. Finding insightful comments is hard without any number next to them. But I understand that it might bring more karma to "stupid comments" instead of "really insightful comments"... but who cares, the insightful comments is still there and probably going to get more karma than it would without any number next to it.
vipivip 16y ago
+
brk 16y ago
One of the things I liked about the Slashdot comment system was that you assigned a rating "Insightful" "Funny" "Helpful", etc.
iamdave 16y ago
I found the comment scores a good motivation for thinking about what I'm typing before hitting that 'add comment' button. Good imperative to participate instead of troll. The opposite is true for others, I'm sure.
- J3L2404 16y ago
  Adding +1, since you can't tell if the parent comment has been upvoted. EDIT: this -> parent comment
  - ashleyw 16y ago
    You can see the points on your own comments.
  - carbocation 16y ago
    You can see your own comments' scores.
  - saturdayplace 16y ago
    The author of a comment can tell if it's been upvoted - no one else. I really wouldn't like to see comment threads full of posts similar to yours; it lowers the signal:noise.
    - J3L2404 16y ago
      Obviously it would be terrible if everyone posted 'I agree' comments, that's the point. Numbers show the viewers sentiment towards a comment without clogging the thread.
      - gloob 16y ago
        It is self-evidently true that removing visible comment scores mostly removes methods for trivially measuring "viewer sentiment". It is the contention of those in support of non-visible comment scores that trivial measurement of viewer sentiment harms, rather than aids, discussion. You have made no argument against that point.
iterationx 16y ago
I like the new system. It discourages winning an argument with numbers. 20 people upvoted the previous comment so that guy must be right.
- bzupnick 16y ago
  so why cant we start down voting with less karma, as opposed to now it being 500. so more people could counteract your issue. AND i think that if a comment has more upvotes, then they DID win the argument and that should be seen that they won.
  - iterationx 16y ago
    I think you're missing the point. Logic wins arguments not upvotes.
    - bzupnick 16y ago
      yeh, logic wins arguments. but people will upvote the comment that is most logical, which should also be the correct one. if a comment is illogical, then its also incorrect. so basically, the right and logical ones will get upvoted. whule the stupid, illogical, and wrong ones will get downvoted
    - alain94040 16y ago
      Yes, logic wins arguments, but to continue with metaphors, I'm sure you have heard of the halting problem. Without upvotes, the thread will go on forever. Vote counts allows for closure. So threads are shorter and I'm happy to extract more information faster.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  Do not confuse highlight quality comments with displaying scores. And while numbers shouldn't be the ultimate arbitrator, knowing that 20 people found X's arguments to be better then Y's arguments lends some weight to someone's arguments. Having been on both sides of this, I feel it's fair. It's important to understand when your view runs contrary to the community wisdom of HN. It doesn't mean you have to give in, but it's still good to know where your ideas stand.
sibsibsib 16y ago
I didn't even notice they were gone at first...
jplewicke 16y ago
The only place I really miss having them is in older articles and on searchyc.com. I feel a much greater compulsion to engage each comment on its merit when voting and when reading, and I feel like reading HN has become more intellectually stimulating. However, this is more of a problem when I'm trying to assess information in areas that I'm not already familiar with. If I'm searching for information on which DNS providers are best and I find an Ask HN from 4 months ago, I can no longer tell what the true community consensus on it is. I expect the current masking of comments will provide less biased voting, so I think displaying comment scores on stories that are more than two months old would eventually provide the best of both worlds.
- raganwald 16y ago
  ABSOLUTELY. Comment scores in the midst of an active discussion narrow thinking. Comment scores on historical artifacts are useful for research.
  - cyanbane 16y ago
    I think if people in general see a comment that has been upvoted heavily they are less likely to contribute their opinion to it if they agree with it. I like not being able to see its weight as I feel like more readers will comment with their opinions rather than just upvote, which creates more discussion, etc (I have no numbers to back this up, just what I believe).
    - rb01usa 16y ago
      This is true for me--I have felt more encouraged to contribute to discussions now that the votes are hidden as opposed to before; As long as the higher voted comments bubble up to the top I don't see a reason to see the votes count with a comment.
    - jaxn 16y ago
      That sound like it worsens the signal/noise ratio. If a comment is definitive (and ratified by up votes) then there would be fewer comments reiterating the point. Are we going for more informative or more participatory?
deleted 16y ago
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elbenshira 16y ago
I wonder how Hacker Monthly (http://hackermonthly.com/ http://hackermonthly.com/) will pick out the "best" comments.
- woodson 16y ago
  Supposedly via http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments I don't think that upvote count alone determines which are to be picked, but I could be mistaken.
uptown 16y ago
I'd prefer a system that reveals the score of comments you've already either replied to, or voted on. Gives you some kind of feedback on where the rest of the community's mind is with regard to that comment.
RuadhanMc 16y ago
Without the comment scores we're confronted with a wall of text that is hard to filter. Should I have to read every single comment just to find the gems? Comments scores have their downsides but they make filtering out noise much easier. Unfortunately I don't think everyone has time to judge each comment on its own merits -- there are simply too many comments -- so we need a little crowd-sourced ranking. It does lead to some group think at times but that's a (relatively) small price to pay.
- Terretta 16y ago
  In my experience, "wall of text" and "TL;DR" began as terms used by those generally uncomfortable with literacy or focused attention. Skimming is a valuable skill, becoming even more important as the world generates information ever faster.
  - RuadhanMc 16y ago
    How about just having a finite amount of time in which to read the news? I'd prefer to focus on attention on filtered comments rather than waste time skimming hundreds of comments.
    - Terretta 16y ago
      Focus on "filtered" comments is a completely different discussion, and offering users an unnumbered slider to set personal threshold for where the grey vs black text divider falls on a percentile line between top and bottom scored remarks of the given thread, would accomplish 90% of what the TL;DR crowd want w/o all the problems of showing scores.
      - RuadhanMc 16y ago
        It's not really a different discussions if you viewed scored comments as filtered comments.
hooande 16y ago
The most important aspect of the comment scores was that they let me know what the HN community thought of a particular point or argument. I'm capable of making up my own mind about any topic. I find it interesting and useful to see what other people think. As a geek I miss being able to see that "people agreed with this side of the argument at +20 as opposed to that side at +10". If some people want to treat it as a "who can get more points" game, then so be it. I find that I can learn a lot from looking at which way public opinion is leaning.
- lotusleaf1987 16y ago
  |The most important aspect of the comment scores was that they let me know what the HN community thought of a particular point or argument. I'm capable of making up my own mind about any topic. I find it interesting and useful to see what other people think That seems like cognitive dissonance to me and a rationalization. If you truly make up your own mind about something then why would you care so granularly about how much/little HN likes a comment. The ordering of the comments allows you to know where the comments all compare, so I don't see what you're really missing other than the exactness.
  - jaxn 16y ago
    Why care? Because up votes are also coming from the community and I believe we are all here because we respect the opinions of the people here. Also, comments sort within threads. Sometimes the best reply is to a no-so-great parent comment.
    - lotusleaf1987 16y ago
      |I believe we are all here because we respect the opinions of the people here. What does that even mean? That by not showing the comments we're somehow disrespecting those opinions? |Sometimes the best reply is to a no-so-great parent comment. And even then those replies are sorted again... what is your concern? Time? If you were saying hey, I only have so much time, I could maybe understand. But... I think it would be better for HN as a community to train people for more thought out discussions, fewer flame wars, and more of a focus on actually reading the comments and evaluating them based on their own content and not just on what others have said. As someone in this thread also pointed out, it also ends the perception that an argument can be won by popularity or upvotes-- I believe this has been especially beneficial at preventing/reducing typical fan-boy flaming. I think HN has already begun to benefit for the changes. Also, I would rather read fewer threads with better comments, than more threads with worse comments. Note: Better subjectively being defined as more thought out, less antagonistic, more discussion based, more logic, and more citations/sources.
lotusleaf1987 16y ago
I disagree. It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit. Often times the highest voted comment seemed to be highest voted comment simply because it was the first comment and kept being upvoted for being upvoted by others. Also, the ordering of the comments does the same thing as having the comment scores! I do wish there was a way to still search for the highest rated comments on searchyc.com, but I still think it's a small sacrifice for an overall better community/environment. I have definitely seen less iOS/Android/Windows flaming, so I think the site is already benefitting from the changes.
- alain94040 16y ago
  It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit I understand your argument. Just keep in mind that there are multiple ways that HN is useful. Some of us want to go deep into a topic, will read all the comments. And some of us are in a hurry and want to a quick feel and extract a summary. In the first case (I call it "researcher mode"), not having votes is a good thing. But it prevents me from browsing in the second mode (the "quick update mode"). I wish you could set this in my preferences, but it wouldn't fulfill pg's original goal of staving the decline of HN (that I don't see - but that's another discussion).
known 16y ago
Previously, I used to read the comments first and then the article. Now I'm reading the article first and ignoring the comments/vote.
jashmenn 16y ago
I really miss comment points on book recommendations. I can't tell you how many books ive purchased over the years based on a highly rated HN comment. I second what others have mentioned that it would be good to re-display comment scores on older posts. This way we could at least see the community consensus after some time has passed.
blhack 16y ago
People can be wrong about things, and comment scores are useful information that helps us know if they are. "that is not how mysql works" with 2 Points And "that is not how mysql works" with 102 points Are not the same piece of info. I don't see any benefit to hiding this from people. It also helps newbies understand the customs here (they can get feedback on other people's comments) edit now that I'm not on my phone: When you google things, you probably skip over results like daniweb, about.com, or expertsexchange.com, and hope for a stackexchange page. The little URL at the bottom of the description tells you "hey, this is from $foo source" and you're a smart human being that can put this information to good use. Of course, you could make a case that this is bad, because you should read each one of the results and judge it based on its merits. Maybe we should even strip all of the identifying information away from the page, and just let it stand on its own (this would be a neat experiment, actually [and that's the experiment that I think we're performing here]). The point counts on the comments act just like the URL does on google results. It's not saying "this is definitely 100% accurate", but it is useful piece of information that we can put to good use. Depriving us of this information doesn't break the comments, but I have certainly found myself reading comments a bit less lately as a result of it (instead of actually reading comments, I'm usually just skimming them now). With comment scores, things seem to have a bit of order to them, without, it just feels like a lot of people shouting at one another. (Maybe this was the point?) Naturally, I'm never going to stop reading HN; it is by far my favorite website on the internet. Complaining about the lack of comment points here is like complaining that my favorite bar switched to a new, very slightly different glass. I can see the difference, but it's not really going to change my habits.
- deleted 16y ago
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- lwhi 16y ago
  You can see how agreeable a comment is by how far up the page it is. I think having the scores hidden is a good decision. It means that we concentrate on content rather than a 'karma game'. ""that is not how mysql works" with 2 Points And "that is not how mysql works" with 102 points Are not the same piece of info." In my opinion, both of those comments are bad comments unless they further qualify the statement. I don't think karma should be used to infer whether a statement is correct.
iworkforthem 16y ago
By removing comment scores, does it increase/decrease traffic to HN? My gut is telling me that traffic is likely to be lower. Reality might be different of course.
citricsquid 16y ago
http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2477527 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2477527 My comment here explaining it has made me comment less has 40 points. I think a lot of people agree.
- alanfalcon 16y ago
  It's interesting because (although I can't explain why) it actually freed me to post more comments, and I have far lower karma (and avg/post). So the system could lead to more posts by undesirables (me) and fewer posts by those with more knowledge (you).
awakeasleep 16y ago
I really like the lack of comment scores. Things are still sorted, so the cream floats to the top, and it made me realize I felt group-impulses based on the score. Now, there is little to no incentive to one-up someone, and I don't consider people refuted based on their score, but rather based on what I think of their comment. That last part has nurtured my curiosity, I find myself exploring thoughts I didn't on the 'old' HN
- hernan7 16y ago
  Sorting works well enough for me too. I would even add a bit (10% or so) of randomness to the sorting, to give the less popular comments a bit of time in the spotlight.
- grandalf 16y ago
  Very well put. I have experienced the same thing. Yes, at times I'm curious what a comment's score is, but that's my lizard brain talking.
- JacobAldridge 16y ago
  This is my dilemma, and based on pg's recent poll may be part of why that vote was split. Basically, I feel that I'm interacting more intelligently but receiving less value from the conversation. I feeling that I am contributing differently, assessing comments more on merit and adding my own thoughts less. I'm certainly voting on comments less (both up and down). But I find I lack context in many of those discussions - when there are two different views on technical matters, I can't tell the difference in the group's opinion (especially if one is a reply to the other, so not comparable by which is 'higher' in the tree). Group think is bad, by blhack's mysql example is positive group interaction. I also notice a similar lack of feedback on what is and isn't acceptable by the group. If a snide one-liner sits at the same level as a well-reasoned response, there's nothing to tell us all that one has 15pts in support and one has 1pt (an extreme example - other, more subtle ones, are now only noticeable if someone is greyed out for a negative score). There's no opportunity for us to learn from other's experience. All in all, I want them back.
  - 16y ago
jbail 16y ago
Seeing comment scores helps me to quickly scan comments to find the ones of most interest. It's not about "who's right" or "who's wrong" --- but what comments are more insightful and interesting. This is what the community of HN provides in voting people's comments up and down. This concept is missing now. All in all, not showing comment points is a step backwards in helping people get the most out of the site in the most efficient way possible.
jsherry 16y ago
Hidden comment scores help us avoid groupthink.
- Maro 16y ago
  But make it harder to filter information. I feel safe from groupthink, hence the post.
  - jsherry 16y ago
    Definitely agree on that as well - it's a pros and cons argument. Frankly I miss the scoring for the reason you mention, but I think this method promotes merit. Of course, now we are all subjected to whatever secret algorithm pushes comments to the top of the page, but I'll naively trust that it's doing its job properly ;-)
joshfinnie 16y ago
The only issue I see with not being able to see the scores of comments is that joke or off-the-cuff comments are probably getting a lot more points. If there was a comment that made me laugh (while sticking to the point) I will be more likely to upvote it, but if it already had 10+ upvotes a laugh on my part probably didn't justify another upvote.
siddhant 16y ago
Cant we have a "showcommentscores" option for displaying comment scores? Personally, I really (really) miss seeing comment scores, but its apparent that there are a lot of people who like HN the other way.
- mooism2 16y ago
  No, because the point of not displaying comment scores is to invite different commenting behaviour from us. If we make it an option, then we don't get the different behaviour from the whole userbase.
- joshuacc 16y ago
  The problem is that part of what we like about not displaying the comment scores is the effect it has on other people's behavior. Letting others opt in to seeing the scores would defeat a large part of the purpose.
  - fr0sty 16y ago
    > The problem is that part of what you like about not displaying the comment scores is the apparent effect it has on other people's behavior. That, I believe is more correct. I miss the scores, personally, and found them rather useful.
thekevan 16y ago
I don't usually want to post, "me too" posts but... I really miss the comment scores. Sometimes I am not totally familiar with whatever the original post is talking about, often the top rated couple of comments give me some good insight or jumping off points to look into it further. I respect the HN community and have learned a lot here. I generally trust their judgement and I have found if a comment is rated highly, it most likely adds a lot of value to the discussion. Sometimes I disagree with the highest rated comment(s). I then see my opinion is in a minority and maybe I re-examine it or stand firm and make a comment to the contrary.
pclark 16y ago
I have been quite surprised at how my enthusiasm for contributing to Hacker News has diminished at the removal of comment scores. Not necessarily a bad thing for anyone.
patrickk 16y ago
My initial reaction was also "just bring em back". With reflection, I think a good idea might be to show the score after you vote. This way you get the feeling of making some difference i.e. immediate feedback, but also the knowledge that your vote wasn't subconsciously affected by a visible score beforehand. The main downside of this would be people voting out of curiosity to see what a comments current score is. Perhaps displaying the score of a comment once it reaches a certain age (maybe three or four days old) would mitigate against this.
- shasta 16y ago
  [...people voting out of curiosity...] If voting reveals the score, then there would need to be a new way to abstain and reveal the score.
  - fragmede 16y ago
    Why? If you feel positively or negatively towards a comment, then vote thusly. Abstaining to reveal the score is far too easily gamed with a secondary account.
losvedir 16y ago
Nah, I like not seeing the comment scores. But today I did think of a different improvement I'd like to see, which for lack of better place to put it, will say here: When I click on "reply" to a comment, it takes you to a page with just that comment and a text box. I'd like to see that comment's parents all the way to the OP, to give me some more context as I frame my reply. I think it would improve discussion as you'll see the context in which the person you're replying to replied, and might interpret their words a little differently.
deleted 16y ago
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jsdalton 16y ago
How about we make it an option to just not show comment scores? Those of us (like myself) who absolutely prefer being able to see comment score can continue to see them, whereas those of you who find them a distraction don't have to view them. Or, IDK, add a "reveal score" javascript link so that it requires a click to view the score on a given comment.
apl 16y ago
One observation: I think that comment ordering is an inadequate substitute for numerical scores. A lot of interesting information goes missing when reducing a scale from interval to ordinal.
ck2 16y ago
Remove scores/points for people entirely. That way only posts/comments get points/scores, not people.
coffeedrinker 16y ago
Comment scores help me get to the best points (even if they are in disagreement) without spending a lot of time reading the whole page. I'm reading a lot let now because there are no scores; I just skim the top and then move on. Comment scoring allows the community to reveal quality.
acrum 16y ago
I like the lack of comment scores (to avoid everyone piling on one comment), but I think I would like it more if I knew what went into how high a comment was on the page. Is it a fact that the first displayed comment will be the one with the highest score? I know some different inputs are used, such as the karma of the submitter, how new it is, etc. but I guess we don't know "for sure". I don't think the solution is to bring back scores, though. A possible "simple" solution could be to color/star a comment above 50/100 points, etc. Comment scores could also be displayed as percentage or on a scale of 0 to 1, 0 to 10, etc. I'd be more likely to read a comment with a score of 95% than one with a score of 20%. This way you at least get an indication of the helpfulness of the comment other than just its position on the page.
- T-hawk 16y ago
  > I'd be more likely to read a comment with a score of 95% than one with a score of 20%. Seconding this idea, I really love it. The biggest problem with a linear point count is the large dependency on a comment's visibility and number of impressions, which in turn leaves posters competing for that as much as for inherent comment quality. The implementation would be up for discussion, maybe something like show a comment's positive percentage once it garners a sample size of 5 or 10 votes, and maybe round off to the nearest 10% so you can't triangulate back to the actual score from the change inflicted by your single vote.
huhtenberg 16y ago
Ah, no, don't. Stop fixating on the score and trying to write comments that other people like instead of writing what you actually have to say.
dexen 16y ago
Please do. But also, please split upvotes from downvotes. There's a huge difference between a +25 / - 24 comment (apparently a controversial one) and +1 / -0 (probably a mediocre one). Or perhaps, display only upvotes, and use some weighted form of (UPVOTE * U_WEIGHT - DOWNVOTE * D_WEIGHT) for positioning the comment among other ones.
hanifvirani 16y ago
With the comment score not being displayed, I find myself commenting less often for some reason. Others have echoed a similar sentiment in some of the earlier threads.
oscardelben 16y ago
I would make it an option.
bakhlawa 16y ago
I understand the minimalist theme at HN, but would a simple toggle switch to show/hide comment scores be a terribly bad idea? These could be set by logged in users (wouldn't apply to drive-by or anon users).
techtalsky 16y ago
I think a middle ground would be good. I understand the reasons for dropping comments scores but it makes it harder for me to get a quality experience out of the site and easily find the information I need. The scores mean something to me. I liked someone's suggestion of basing the comment score on "upvotes per view" so older comments don't dominate, and I also like the idea of using a dark-to-light gradient (dot) instead of a concrete number. Just sorting to the top (kinda) really just makes it hard to wade in, and makes me less likely to take a look at a topic I know little about and would like to see a couple of definitive words on it. It may be groupthink to some extent but this is a damn smart group.
achompas 16y ago
I'm struggling to understand why you need comment scores to know what to think about something. I can make up my mind about a comment's quality using the info available to me right now. Let's take the oft-repeated example in other comments: two comments on MySQL, one with a handful of points and the other with a lot of points. There are a number of indicators of comment quality: >> comment sorting works very well >> if a low-vote comment is controversial, you will surely find spirited discussion below it--the volume of discussion would be an indicator of community disagreement >> hit up Stack Overflow and find out if MySQL works as stated in the low-vote comment or if it works like the high-vote comment describes. The arguments for visible points boil down to "I don't know how to think about this statement, so I need external confirmation." Indicators of comment quality still exist, and karma gamesmanship looks like it has decreased a lot. Finally, you really want to avoid groupthink--hiding scores accomplishes that pretty well.
brk 16y ago
Another thing (and some might accuse me of "doing it wrong" this way) is that lack of score showing changes my motivation for voting overall. Some comments are so awesome, they deserve 50+ upvotes. Other comments are pretty good, and deserve maybe 8. I do not/did not personally try to upvote every single comment. I try to add upvotes to the comments that seem "best" in a particular thread discussion, and allocate votes in this way. Perhaps my behavior is something that pg was attempting to fix with this change, but I have a feeling I'm not alone in this regard.
rexreed 16y ago
Disagree. I believe that I can make a fair judgement of the quality of a comment by simply reading it. I don't do TL;DR on comments that I care about, so using scores as a proxy for quality doesn't mean much for me.
ignifero 16y ago
When i am interested in the subject, i usually read ALL comments. Having them in order of popularity helps, but does not really discourage me from reading on. Scores don't really matter. There is a tendency for short comments to sink down, regardless of how informative they are, simply because people spend less time on them, so they're less likely to hit that upvote button. Also, like all forums, the first upvoted comments get more replies creating a positive feedback loop, not necesarily because they are the best, but because people know their replies will be more visible. It would be interesting to have the statistics of number of upvotes vs position of the comment in the page.
lwhi 16y ago
How about allocating a 'hotness' quotient to comments? At the moment, a comment that's down-voted past zero becomes lighter. Perhaps very popular comments could be made more visible, or highlighted? I think this kind of fuzzy indication of popularity might be a good compromise.
- BrandonM 16y ago
  I agree. One of the more useful things I used comment scores for was to be sure to avoid missing useful comments that were down low on the page. Having a mechanism for setting apart well-regarded comments would be useful. It would likely have to be normalized based on the score of the submission or the total number of comments on that submission, though, which might be more complexity than pg wants.
msluyter 16y ago
FWIW, I find myself up/down-voting less without the scores. I guess I mostly tend to vote to rectify imbalances. If a comment has a lot of upvotes already, I probably won't upvote (I figure once it's near the top, it doesn't matter much anyway). But if its popularity seems unwarranted, I may be more likely to downvote. Conversely, I tend to upvote mostly what appear to be underrated comments that are low on karma. Not saying there's anything admirable about this approach -- what am I, some kind of Karma Robin Hood? -- but the new system definitely discourages it.
Symmetry 16y ago
I wonder if showing the rating of a comment only after you had voted on it would work? That would prevent some level of groupthink by forcing people make their own evaluations before seeing what others thought. That would require a +0 vote option, though, to prevent some obvious failure modes.
tokenadult 16y ago
Since I registered a username here on HN 890 days ago, I've seen a lot of comments about comment karma and about upvoting and downvoting. The most significant statement I have seen about comment voting here on HN was posted recently by pg, the founder of HN, in a thread-opening post 22 days ago titled "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." So the founder of HN thinks that before the recent experiment there was a comment voting problem: (a) mean comments were getting too many upvotes, and (b) dumb comments were getting too many upvotes, and (c) too many of the comments that got the most upvotes were either mean or dumb or both. Let's stop and think about what that means. That means that, according to pg posting as of that moment, comment karma scores were often NOT reliable signals of good comments, comments worth finding rapidly when skimming a thread. With that condition of HN less than a month ago in mind, how do the highest-voted comments visible in the bestcomments list http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments look to all of you recently? Are there fewer mean comments than before? Are there fewer dumb comments than before? Are the comments that are "massively upvoted" since the experiment began mostly comments that are reasonably kind and well-informed, helpful comments on the whole? In most of the treads you visit, do helpful, thoughtful comments seem to rise to a position of prominence, while mean or dumb comments gray out? A link and comment in another recent metadiscussion thread largely sums up the back-and-forth about visible comment scores as a signal on comments in active threads: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465357 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465357 >> Please bring back the comment scores. It helps a lot in parsing the comments and assigning a proportional weight to each when reading them. > 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. My impression too is that even with comment scores not visible, it is still convenient to browse threads to find thoughtful, informative comments, but now there is less anchoring bias http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm of most votes on a comment converging to one score level that shows up early in a thread's development, and more engagement by readers of HN in actively reading comments and upvoting (or downvoting) based on each comment's characteristics in light of the context of the thread. So far I can still find good comments quite readily here on HN. Indeed, I think that since the experiment began I am seeing more good comments more readily than before. The main motivation stated by pg for the current experiment with making comment karma scores less visible is to "stave off decline of HN," and that is what will decide if the experiment was successful. If the previous visibility of comment karma scores led too many casual readers of HN to upvote mean or dumb comments, and too few readers to upvote thoughtful, informative comments and to downvote mean or dumb comments, the arguments on the side of reader convenience aren't going to be convincing. It isn't convenient for ANY reader of HN if the comment scores are a poor signal, and if bad comments become more prominent and good comments get skimmed right over by readers in a hurry. If a change of rules here makes every reader read comments more carefully and more thoughtfully, and vote based on comment inherent quality rather than on crowd appeal, that is a feature rather than a bug. For comment scores to be a good guide to every reader here, every reader can help by actively upvoting informative, helpful comments, and also by downvoting comments that are either mean or dumb--and especially comments that are both. As I recall, the experiment has also involved some changes in the effects of flagging, so flagging inappropriate comments is also helpful. After edit: many comments in this thread ask about the karma rules and voting rules imposed by the software. We can all read the news.arc software ourselves https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc if we would like to see what the rules do (except I think that maybe a few aspects of the current experiment are hidden from the current distribution of the source code), as previous HN threads have pointed out. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307128 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307128 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2034449 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2034449
mcn 16y ago
Removing comment scores seems to have increased the amount of mediocre/poor comments around contested topics: I am noticing more more brother/sister comments that are basically reiterating each other and more debates that veer to uncontrollable levels of indentation when the key points were already covered in the top level post and first child. The relative absence of these black holes of discussion is one of the things that brought me to HN in the first place, and I think that showing comment scores discouraged them on multiple levels. Public upvoting lets people express their view on the topic without posting points similar to those already expressed. When two comments have a lopsided point spread it lets one "side" of the debate feel more comfortable letting the other have the last word.
thought_alarm 16y ago
Removal of the comment scores is a great innovation that has improved the quality of Hacker News. With scores visible, most "discussions" end up as little more than opinion polls.
grandalf 16y ago
I think that people are missing the point. A comment's quality is not measurable by it's score. If anything, that is a rough aggregation. By this logic, Ke$ha is a better musician than Joshua Bell. Top comments on HN were becoming more "top 40" and something had to be done before people started posting links to Trollface, etc. One approach would be to use category-based voting, which adds a lot of complexity. One approach would be to implement some sort of vote weighting sytem (time based, reputation based, context based), but that's ad-hoc and may not fix the problem. And one approach is to simply hide numerical comment scores from all but each user's own comments. This turns the quest for high karma into a personal battle against one's self, not a sport. PG wisely chose to make Karma a personal Everest for each individual to care about (or not).
chanux 16y ago
Button to make comment scores visible, please.
kqueue 16y ago
It's interesting to see an 8 hours post that has 374 points, and 156 comments on the second page instead of being on the first page.
jongraehl 16y ago
Ignorance is bliss. I'm happier not knowing that the crowd disagrees with my judgment of a comment's worth. I also feel like people are avoiding posting crappy comments with the intent of tapping into a popular vein for a high score. This could be a placebo, or perhaps, if real, it's instead caused by an improvement in voting.
tuhin 16y ago
Ok I just had another idea, so thought to write it here, in case PG gives it a look. How about showing votes after you took an action on a particular post. Say you upvoted a post, or replied to it, then you are eligible to seeing the points that it has. This helps because even if in hindsight, I would know if the comment was the general consensus or a popular one or not?
dennisgorelik 16y ago
No middle ground. Please bring exact score number.

442 points by Maro 16y ago

I miss comment scores. Perhaps we could strike middle ground by displaying a range, eg. 1, 2-5, 5-10, 10+

I would like it if the comment rating was only available in an html data attribute (eg data-rating="10"). That way my old user script would still be able to sort and high light comments. You would have to go out of your way to see the score but could still be used by us hackers who like to customize our experience.

deleted 16y ago

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fr0sty 16y ago

No one on this thread has picked up on the 'range' suggestion by Maro yet, so I'll add a thought: For my purposes, displaying actual scores within the range -4 -> 10 would be sufficient. the low end is already capped, and the high end could either just have a ceiling of 10 or a score of 10+. I am occasionally a "someone is Wrong on the internet!"[1] type and my inclination to wade in is directly proportioanl to the perceived traction of the inaccuracy. Without such a heuristic the choices are: reply to all, none, or a random sample which result in "poor information", "needless pedantry", and " undefined behavior" respectively. [1] http://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/

ghotli 16y ago

I found it particularly hard to read the recent Amazon Outage thread. There was so much information to sift through. It had me missing the comment scores.

AndyNemmity 16y ago

I much prefer it without. I like it like this

sktrdie 16y ago

I'm not going to read all the comments when they're more than 50. Finding insightful comments is hard without any number next to them. But I understand that it might bring more karma to "stupid comments" instead of "really insightful comments"... but who cares, the insightful comments is still there and probably going to get more karma than it would without any number next to it.

vipivip 16y ago

brk 16y ago

One of the things I liked about the Slashdot comment system was that you assigned a rating "Insightful" "Funny" "Helpful", etc.

iamdave 16y ago

I found the comment scores a good motivation for thinking about what I'm typing before hitting that 'add comment' button. Good imperative to participate instead of troll. The opposite is true for others, I'm sure.

J3L2404 16y ago
Adding +1, since you can't tell if the parent comment has been upvoted. EDIT: this -> parent comment
- ashleyw 16y ago
  You can see the points on your own comments.
- carbocation 16y ago
  You can see your own comments' scores.
- saturdayplace 16y ago
  The author of a comment can tell if it's been upvoted - no one else. I really wouldn't like to see comment threads full of posts similar to yours; it lowers the signal:noise.
  - J3L2404 16y ago
    Obviously it would be terrible if everyone posted 'I agree' comments, that's the point. Numbers show the viewers sentiment towards a comment without clogging the thread.
    - gloob 16y ago
      It is self-evidently true that removing visible comment scores mostly removes methods for trivially measuring "viewer sentiment". It is the contention of those in support of non-visible comment scores that trivial measurement of viewer sentiment harms, rather than aids, discussion. You have made no argument against that point.

iterationx 16y ago

I like the new system. It discourages winning an argument with numbers. 20 people upvoted the previous comment so that guy must be right.

bzupnick 16y ago
so why cant we start down voting with less karma, as opposed to now it being 500. so more people could counteract your issue. AND i think that if a comment has more upvotes, then they DID win the argument and that should be seen that they won.
- iterationx 16y ago
  I think you're missing the point. Logic wins arguments not upvotes.
  - bzupnick 16y ago
    yeh, logic wins arguments. but people will upvote the comment that is most logical, which should also be the correct one. if a comment is illogical, then its also incorrect. so basically, the right and logical ones will get upvoted. whule the stupid, illogical, and wrong ones will get downvoted
  - alain94040 16y ago
    Yes, logic wins arguments, but to continue with metaphors, I'm sure you have heard of the halting problem. Without upvotes, the thread will go on forever. Vote counts allows for closure. So threads are shorter and I'm happy to extract more information faster.
jasonlotito 16y ago
Do not confuse highlight quality comments with displaying scores. And while numbers shouldn't be the ultimate arbitrator, knowing that 20 people found X's arguments to be better then Y's arguments lends some weight to someone's arguments. Having been on both sides of this, I feel it's fair. It's important to understand when your view runs contrary to the community wisdom of HN. It doesn't mean you have to give in, but it's still good to know where your ideas stand.

sibsibsib 16y ago

I didn't even notice they were gone at first...

jplewicke 16y ago

The only place I really miss having them is in older articles and on searchyc.com. I feel a much greater compulsion to engage each comment on its merit when voting and when reading, and I feel like reading HN has become more intellectually stimulating. However, this is more of a problem when I'm trying to assess information in areas that I'm not already familiar with. If I'm searching for information on which DNS providers are best and I find an Ask HN from 4 months ago, I can no longer tell what the true community consensus on it is. I expect the current masking of comments will provide less biased voting, so I think displaying comment scores on stories that are more than two months old would eventually provide the best of both worlds.

raganwald 16y ago
ABSOLUTELY. Comment scores in the midst of an active discussion narrow thinking. Comment scores on historical artifacts are useful for research.
- cyanbane 16y ago
  I think if people in general see a comment that has been upvoted heavily they are less likely to contribute their opinion to it if they agree with it. I like not being able to see its weight as I feel like more readers will comment with their opinions rather than just upvote, which creates more discussion, etc (I have no numbers to back this up, just what I believe).
  - rb01usa 16y ago
    This is true for me--I have felt more encouraged to contribute to discussions now that the votes are hidden as opposed to before; As long as the higher voted comments bubble up to the top I don't see a reason to see the votes count with a comment.
  - jaxn 16y ago
    That sound like it worsens the signal/noise ratio. If a comment is definitive (and ratified by up votes) then there would be fewer comments reiterating the point. Are we going for more informative or more participatory?

deleted 16y ago

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elbenshira 16y ago

I wonder how Hacker Monthly (http://hackermonthly.com/ http://hackermonthly.com/) will pick out the "best" comments.

woodson 16y ago
Supposedly via http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments I don't think that upvote count alone determines which are to be picked, but I could be mistaken.

uptown 16y ago

I'd prefer a system that reveals the score of comments you've already either replied to, or voted on. Gives you some kind of feedback on where the rest of the community's mind is with regard to that comment.

RuadhanMc 16y ago

Without the comment scores we're confronted with a wall of text that is hard to filter. Should I have to read every single comment just to find the gems? Comments scores have their downsides but they make filtering out noise much easier. Unfortunately I don't think everyone has time to judge each comment on its own merits -- there are simply too many comments -- so we need a little crowd-sourced ranking. It does lead to some group think at times but that's a (relatively) small price to pay.

Terretta 16y ago
In my experience, "wall of text" and "TL;DR" began as terms used by those generally uncomfortable with literacy or focused attention. Skimming is a valuable skill, becoming even more important as the world generates information ever faster.
- RuadhanMc 16y ago
  How about just having a finite amount of time in which to read the news? I'd prefer to focus on attention on filtered comments rather than waste time skimming hundreds of comments.
  - Terretta 16y ago
    Focus on "filtered" comments is a completely different discussion, and offering users an unnumbered slider to set personal threshold for where the grey vs black text divider falls on a percentile line between top and bottom scored remarks of the given thread, would accomplish 90% of what the TL;DR crowd want w/o all the problems of showing scores.
    - RuadhanMc 16y ago
      It's not really a different discussions if you viewed scored comments as filtered comments.

hooande 16y ago

The most important aspect of the comment scores was that they let me know what the HN community thought of a particular point or argument. I'm capable of making up my own mind about any topic. I find it interesting and useful to see what other people think. As a geek I miss being able to see that "people agreed with this side of the argument at +20 as opposed to that side at +10". If some people want to treat it as a "who can get more points" game, then so be it. I find that I can learn a lot from looking at which way public opinion is leaning.

lotusleaf1987 16y ago
|The most important aspect of the comment scores was that they let me know what the HN community thought of a particular point or argument. I'm capable of making up my own mind about any topic. I find it interesting and useful to see what other people think That seems like cognitive dissonance to me and a rationalization. If you truly make up your own mind about something then why would you care so granularly about how much/little HN likes a comment. The ordering of the comments allows you to know where the comments all compare, so I don't see what you're really missing other than the exactness.
- jaxn 16y ago
  Why care? Because up votes are also coming from the community and I believe we are all here because we respect the opinions of the people here. Also, comments sort within threads. Sometimes the best reply is to a no-so-great parent comment.
  - lotusleaf1987 16y ago
    |I believe we are all here because we respect the opinions of the people here. What does that even mean? That by not showing the comments we're somehow disrespecting those opinions? |Sometimes the best reply is to a no-so-great parent comment. And even then those replies are sorted again... what is your concern? Time? If you were saying hey, I only have so much time, I could maybe understand. But... I think it would be better for HN as a community to train people for more thought out discussions, fewer flame wars, and more of a focus on actually reading the comments and evaluating them based on their own content and not just on what others have said. As someone in this thread also pointed out, it also ends the perception that an argument can be won by popularity or upvotes-- I believe this has been especially beneficial at preventing/reducing typical fan-boy flaming. I think HN has already begun to benefit for the changes. Also, I would rather read fewer threads with better comments, than more threads with worse comments. Note: Better subjectively being defined as more thought out, less antagonistic, more discussion based, more logic, and more citations/sources.

lotusleaf1987 16y ago

I disagree. It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit. Often times the highest voted comment seemed to be highest voted comment simply because it was the first comment and kept being upvoted for being upvoted by others. Also, the ordering of the comments does the same thing as having the comment scores! I do wish there was a way to still search for the highest rated comments on searchyc.com, but I still think it's a small sacrifice for an overall better community/environment. I have definitely seen less iOS/Android/Windows flaming, so I think the site is already benefitting from the changes.

alain94040 16y ago
It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit I understand your argument. Just keep in mind that there are multiple ways that HN is useful. Some of us want to go deep into a topic, will read all the comments. And some of us are in a hurry and want to a quick feel and extract a summary. In the first case (I call it "researcher mode"), not having votes is a good thing. But it prevents me from browsing in the second mode (the "quick update mode"). I wish you could set this in my preferences, but it wouldn't fulfill pg's original goal of staving the decline of HN (that I don't see - but that's another discussion).

known 16y ago

Previously, I used to read the comments first and then the article. Now I'm reading the article first and ignoring the comments/vote.

jashmenn 16y ago

I really miss comment points on book recommendations. I can't tell you how many books ive purchased over the years based on a highly rated HN comment. I second what others have mentioned that it would be good to re-display comment scores on older posts. This way we could at least see the community consensus after some time has passed.

blhack 16y ago

People can be wrong about things, and comment scores are useful information that helps us know if they are. "that is not how mysql works" with 2 Points And "that is not how mysql works" with 102 points Are not the same piece of info. I don't see any benefit to hiding this from people. It also helps newbies understand the customs here (they can get feedback on other people's comments) edit now that I'm not on my phone: When you google things, you probably skip over results like daniweb, about.com, or expertsexchange.com, and hope for a stackexchange page. The little URL at the bottom of the description tells you "hey, this is from $foo source" and you're a smart human being that can put this information to good use. Of course, you could make a case that this is bad, because you should read each one of the results and judge it based on its merits. Maybe we should even strip all of the identifying information away from the page, and just let it stand on its own (this would be a neat experiment, actually [and that's the experiment that I think we're performing here]). The point counts on the comments act just like the URL does on google results. It's not saying "this is definitely 100% accurate", but it is useful piece of information that we can put to good use. Depriving us of this information doesn't break the comments, but I have certainly found myself reading comments a bit less lately as a result of it (instead of actually reading comments, I'm usually just skimming them now). With comment scores, things seem to have a bit of order to them, without, it just feels like a lot of people shouting at one another. (Maybe this was the point?) Naturally, I'm never going to stop reading HN; it is by far my favorite website on the internet. Complaining about the lack of comment points here is like complaining that my favorite bar switched to a new, very slightly different glass. I can see the difference, but it's not really going to change my habits.

deleted 16y ago
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lwhi 16y ago
You can see how agreeable a comment is by how far up the page it is. I think having the scores hidden is a good decision. It means that we concentrate on content rather than a 'karma game'. ""that is not how mysql works" with 2 Points And "that is not how mysql works" with 102 points Are not the same piece of info." In my opinion, both of those comments are bad comments unless they further qualify the statement. I don't think karma should be used to infer whether a statement is correct.

iworkforthem 16y ago

By removing comment scores, does it increase/decrease traffic to HN? My gut is telling me that traffic is likely to be lower. Reality might be different of course.

citricsquid 16y ago

http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2477527 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2477527 My comment here explaining it has made me comment less has 40 points. I think a lot of people agree.

alanfalcon 16y ago
It's interesting because (although I can't explain why) it actually freed me to post more comments, and I have far lower karma (and avg/post). So the system could lead to more posts by undesirables (me) and fewer posts by those with more knowledge (you).

awakeasleep 16y ago

I really like the lack of comment scores. Things are still sorted, so the cream floats to the top, and it made me realize I felt group-impulses based on the score. Now, there is little to no incentive to one-up someone, and I don't consider people refuted based on their score, but rather based on what I think of their comment. That last part has nurtured my curiosity, I find myself exploring thoughts I didn't on the 'old' HN

hernan7 16y ago
Sorting works well enough for me too. I would even add a bit (10% or so) of randomness to the sorting, to give the less popular comments a bit of time in the spotlight.
grandalf 16y ago
Very well put. I have experienced the same thing. Yes, at times I'm curious what a comment's score is, but that's my lizard brain talking.
JacobAldridge 16y ago
This is my dilemma, and based on pg's recent poll may be part of why that vote was split. Basically, I feel that I'm interacting more intelligently but receiving less value from the conversation. I feeling that I am contributing differently, assessing comments more on merit and adding my own thoughts less. I'm certainly voting on comments less (both up and down). But I find I lack context in many of those discussions - when there are two different views on technical matters, I can't tell the difference in the group's opinion (especially if one is a reply to the other, so not comparable by which is 'higher' in the tree). Group think is bad, by blhack's mysql example is positive group interaction. I also notice a similar lack of feedback on what is and isn't acceptable by the group. If a snide one-liner sits at the same level as a well-reasoned response, there's nothing to tell us all that one has 15pts in support and one has 1pt (an extreme example - other, more subtle ones, are now only noticeable if someone is greyed out for a negative score). There's no opportunity for us to learn from other's experience. All in all, I want them back.
- 16y ago

jbail 16y ago

Seeing comment scores helps me to quickly scan comments to find the ones of most interest. It's not about "who's right" or "who's wrong" --- but what comments are more insightful and interesting. This is what the community of HN provides in voting people's comments up and down. This concept is missing now. All in all, not showing comment points is a step backwards in helping people get the most out of the site in the most efficient way possible.

jsherry 16y ago

Hidden comment scores help us avoid groupthink.

Maro 16y ago
But make it harder to filter information. I feel safe from groupthink, hence the post.
- jsherry 16y ago
  Definitely agree on that as well - it's a pros and cons argument. Frankly I miss the scoring for the reason you mention, but I think this method promotes merit. Of course, now we are all subjected to whatever secret algorithm pushes comments to the top of the page, but I'll naively trust that it's doing its job properly ;-)

joshfinnie 16y ago

The only issue I see with not being able to see the scores of comments is that joke or off-the-cuff comments are probably getting a lot more points. If there was a comment that made me laugh (while sticking to the point) I will be more likely to upvote it, but if it already had 10+ upvotes a laugh on my part probably didn't justify another upvote.

siddhant 16y ago

Cant we have a "showcommentscores" option for displaying comment scores? Personally, I really (really) miss seeing comment scores, but its apparent that there are a lot of people who like HN the other way.

mooism2 16y ago
No, because the point of not displaying comment scores is to invite different commenting behaviour from us. If we make it an option, then we don't get the different behaviour from the whole userbase.
joshuacc 16y ago
The problem is that part of what we like about not displaying the comment scores is the effect it has on other people's behavior. Letting others opt in to seeing the scores would defeat a large part of the purpose.
- fr0sty 16y ago
  > The problem is that part of what you like about not displaying the comment scores is the apparent effect it has on other people's behavior. That, I believe is more correct. I miss the scores, personally, and found them rather useful.

thekevan 16y ago

I don't usually want to post, "me too" posts but... I really miss the comment scores. Sometimes I am not totally familiar with whatever the original post is talking about, often the top rated couple of comments give me some good insight or jumping off points to look into it further. I respect the HN community and have learned a lot here. I generally trust their judgement and I have found if a comment is rated highly, it most likely adds a lot of value to the discussion. Sometimes I disagree with the highest rated comment(s). I then see my opinion is in a minority and maybe I re-examine it or stand firm and make a comment to the contrary.

pclark 16y ago

I have been quite surprised at how my enthusiasm for contributing to Hacker News has diminished at the removal of comment scores. Not necessarily a bad thing for anyone.

patrickk 16y ago

My initial reaction was also "just bring em back". With reflection, I think a good idea might be to show the score after you vote. This way you get the feeling of making some difference i.e. immediate feedback, but also the knowledge that your vote wasn't subconsciously affected by a visible score beforehand. The main downside of this would be people voting out of curiosity to see what a comments current score is. Perhaps displaying the score of a comment once it reaches a certain age (maybe three or four days old) would mitigate against this.

shasta 16y ago
[...people voting out of curiosity...] If voting reveals the score, then there would need to be a new way to abstain and reveal the score.
- fragmede 16y ago
  Why? If you feel positively or negatively towards a comment, then vote thusly. Abstaining to reveal the score is far too easily gamed with a secondary account.

losvedir 16y ago

Nah, I like not seeing the comment scores. But today I did think of a different improvement I'd like to see, which for lack of better place to put it, will say here: When I click on "reply" to a comment, it takes you to a page with just that comment and a text box. I'd like to see that comment's parents all the way to the OP, to give me some more context as I frame my reply. I think it would improve discussion as you'll see the context in which the person you're replying to replied, and might interpret their words a little differently.

deleted 16y ago

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jsdalton 16y ago

How about we make it an option to just not show comment scores? Those of us (like myself) who absolutely prefer being able to see comment score can continue to see them, whereas those of you who find them a distraction don't have to view them. Or, IDK, add a "reveal score" javascript link so that it requires a click to view the score on a given comment.

apl 16y ago

One observation: I think that comment ordering is an inadequate substitute for numerical scores. A lot of interesting information goes missing when reducing a scale from interval to ordinal.

ck2 16y ago

Remove scores/points for people entirely. That way only posts/comments get points/scores, not people.

coffeedrinker 16y ago

Comment scores help me get to the best points (even if they are in disagreement) without spending a lot of time reading the whole page. I'm reading a lot let now because there are no scores; I just skim the top and then move on. Comment scoring allows the community to reveal quality.

acrum 16y ago

I like the lack of comment scores (to avoid everyone piling on one comment), but I think I would like it more if I knew what went into how high a comment was on the page. Is it a fact that the first displayed comment will be the one with the highest score? I know some different inputs are used, such as the karma of the submitter, how new it is, etc. but I guess we don't know "for sure". I don't think the solution is to bring back scores, though. A possible "simple" solution could be to color/star a comment above 50/100 points, etc. Comment scores could also be displayed as percentage or on a scale of 0 to 1, 0 to 10, etc. I'd be more likely to read a comment with a score of 95% than one with a score of 20%. This way you at least get an indication of the helpfulness of the comment other than just its position on the page.

T-hawk 16y ago
> I'd be more likely to read a comment with a score of 95% than one with a score of 20%. Seconding this idea, I really love it. The biggest problem with a linear point count is the large dependency on a comment's visibility and number of impressions, which in turn leaves posters competing for that as much as for inherent comment quality. The implementation would be up for discussion, maybe something like show a comment's positive percentage once it garners a sample size of 5 or 10 votes, and maybe round off to the nearest 10% so you can't triangulate back to the actual score from the change inflicted by your single vote.

huhtenberg 16y ago

Ah, no, don't. Stop fixating on the score and trying to write comments that other people like instead of writing what you actually have to say.

dexen 16y ago

Please do. But also, please split upvotes from downvotes. There's a huge difference between a +25 / - 24 comment (apparently a controversial one) and +1 / -0 (probably a mediocre one). Or perhaps, display only upvotes, and use some weighted form of (UPVOTE * U_WEIGHT - DOWNVOTE * D_WEIGHT) for positioning the comment among other ones.

hanifvirani 16y ago

With the comment score not being displayed, I find myself commenting less often for some reason. Others have echoed a similar sentiment in some of the earlier threads.

oscardelben 16y ago

I would make it an option.

bakhlawa 16y ago

I understand the minimalist theme at HN, but would a simple toggle switch to show/hide comment scores be a terribly bad idea? These could be set by logged in users (wouldn't apply to drive-by or anon users).

techtalsky 16y ago

I think a middle ground would be good. I understand the reasons for dropping comments scores but it makes it harder for me to get a quality experience out of the site and easily find the information I need. The scores mean something to me. I liked someone's suggestion of basing the comment score on "upvotes per view" so older comments don't dominate, and I also like the idea of using a dark-to-light gradient (dot) instead of a concrete number. Just sorting to the top (kinda) really just makes it hard to wade in, and makes me less likely to take a look at a topic I know little about and would like to see a couple of definitive words on it. It may be groupthink to some extent but this is a damn smart group.

achompas 16y ago

I'm struggling to understand why you need comment scores to know what to think about something. I can make up my mind about a comment's quality using the info available to me right now. Let's take the oft-repeated example in other comments: two comments on MySQL, one with a handful of points and the other with a lot of points. There are a number of indicators of comment quality: >> comment sorting works very well >> if a low-vote comment is controversial, you will surely find spirited discussion below it--the volume of discussion would be an indicator of community disagreement >> hit up Stack Overflow and find out if MySQL works as stated in the low-vote comment or if it works like the high-vote comment describes. The arguments for visible points boil down to "I don't know how to think about this statement, so I need external confirmation." Indicators of comment quality still exist, and karma gamesmanship looks like it has decreased a lot. Finally, you really want to avoid groupthink--hiding scores accomplishes that pretty well.

brk 16y ago

Another thing (and some might accuse me of "doing it wrong" this way) is that lack of score showing changes my motivation for voting overall. Some comments are so awesome, they deserve 50+ upvotes. Other comments are pretty good, and deserve maybe 8. I do not/did not personally try to upvote every single comment. I try to add upvotes to the comments that seem "best" in a particular thread discussion, and allocate votes in this way. Perhaps my behavior is something that pg was attempting to fix with this change, but I have a feeling I'm not alone in this regard.

rexreed 16y ago

Disagree. I believe that I can make a fair judgement of the quality of a comment by simply reading it. I don't do TL;DR on comments that I care about, so using scores as a proxy for quality doesn't mean much for me.

ignifero 16y ago

When i am interested in the subject, i usually read ALL comments. Having them in order of popularity helps, but does not really discourage me from reading on. Scores don't really matter. There is a tendency for short comments to sink down, regardless of how informative they are, simply because people spend less time on them, so they're less likely to hit that upvote button. Also, like all forums, the first upvoted comments get more replies creating a positive feedback loop, not necesarily because they are the best, but because people know their replies will be more visible. It would be interesting to have the statistics of number of upvotes vs position of the comment in the page.

lwhi 16y ago

How about allocating a 'hotness' quotient to comments? At the moment, a comment that's down-voted past zero becomes lighter. Perhaps very popular comments could be made more visible, or highlighted? I think this kind of fuzzy indication of popularity might be a good compromise.

BrandonM 16y ago
I agree. One of the more useful things I used comment scores for was to be sure to avoid missing useful comments that were down low on the page. Having a mechanism for setting apart well-regarded comments would be useful. It would likely have to be normalized based on the score of the submission or the total number of comments on that submission, though, which might be more complexity than pg wants.

msluyter 16y ago

FWIW, I find myself up/down-voting less without the scores. I guess I mostly tend to vote to rectify imbalances. If a comment has a lot of upvotes already, I probably won't upvote (I figure once it's near the top, it doesn't matter much anyway). But if its popularity seems unwarranted, I may be more likely to downvote. Conversely, I tend to upvote mostly what appear to be underrated comments that are low on karma. Not saying there's anything admirable about this approach -- what am I, some kind of Karma Robin Hood? -- but the new system definitely discourages it.

Symmetry 16y ago

I wonder if showing the rating of a comment only after you had voted on it would work? That would prevent some level of groupthink by forcing people make their own evaluations before seeing what others thought. That would require a +0 vote option, though, to prevent some obvious failure modes.

tokenadult 16y ago

Since I registered a username here on HN 890 days ago, I've seen a lot of comments about comment karma and about upvoting and downvoting. The most significant statement I have seen about comment voting here on HN was posted recently by pg, the founder of HN, in a thread-opening post 22 days ago titled "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." So the founder of HN thinks that before the recent experiment there was a comment voting problem: (a) mean comments were getting too many upvotes, and (b) dumb comments were getting too many upvotes, and (c) too many of the comments that got the most upvotes were either mean or dumb or both. Let's stop and think about what that means. That means that, according to pg posting as of that moment, comment karma scores were often NOT reliable signals of good comments, comments worth finding rapidly when skimming a thread. With that condition of HN less than a month ago in mind, how do the highest-voted comments visible in the bestcomments list http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments look to all of you recently? Are there fewer mean comments than before? Are there fewer dumb comments than before? Are the comments that are "massively upvoted" since the experiment began mostly comments that are reasonably kind and well-informed, helpful comments on the whole? In most of the treads you visit, do helpful, thoughtful comments seem to rise to a position of prominence, while mean or dumb comments gray out? A link and comment in another recent metadiscussion thread largely sums up the back-and-forth about visible comment scores as a signal on comments in active threads: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465357 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465357 >> Please bring back the comment scores. It helps a lot in parsing the comments and assigning a proportional weight to each when reading them. > 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. My impression too is that even with comment scores not visible, it is still convenient to browse threads to find thoughtful, informative comments, but now there is less anchoring bias http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm of most votes on a comment converging to one score level that shows up early in a thread's development, and more engagement by readers of HN in actively reading comments and upvoting (or downvoting) based on each comment's characteristics in light of the context of the thread. So far I can still find good comments quite readily here on HN. Indeed, I think that since the experiment began I am seeing more good comments more readily than before. The main motivation stated by pg for the current experiment with making comment karma scores less visible is to "stave off decline of HN," and that is what will decide if the experiment was successful. If the previous visibility of comment karma scores led too many casual readers of HN to upvote mean or dumb comments, and too few readers to upvote thoughtful, informative comments and to downvote mean or dumb comments, the arguments on the side of reader convenience aren't going to be convincing. It isn't convenient for ANY reader of HN if the comment scores are a poor signal, and if bad comments become more prominent and good comments get skimmed right over by readers in a hurry. If a change of rules here makes every reader read comments more carefully and more thoughtfully, and vote based on comment inherent quality rather than on crowd appeal, that is a feature rather than a bug. For comment scores to be a good guide to every reader here, every reader can help by actively upvoting informative, helpful comments, and also by downvoting comments that are either mean or dumb--and especially comments that are both. As I recall, the experiment has also involved some changes in the effects of flagging, so flagging inappropriate comments is also helpful. After edit: many comments in this thread ask about the karma rules and voting rules imposed by the software. We can all read the news.arc software ourselves https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc if we would like to see what the rules do (except I think that maybe a few aspects of the current experiment are hidden from the current distribution of the source code), as previous HN threads have pointed out. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307128 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307128 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2034449 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2034449

mcn 16y ago

Removing comment scores seems to have increased the amount of mediocre/poor comments around contested topics: I am noticing more more brother/sister comments that are basically reiterating each other and more debates that veer to uncontrollable levels of indentation when the key points were already covered in the top level post and first child. The relative absence of these black holes of discussion is one of the things that brought me to HN in the first place, and I think that showing comment scores discouraged them on multiple levels. Public upvoting lets people express their view on the topic without posting points similar to those already expressed. When two comments have a lopsided point spread it lets one "side" of the debate feel more comfortable letting the other have the last word.

thought_alarm 16y ago

Removal of the comment scores is a great innovation that has improved the quality of Hacker News. With scores visible, most "discussions" end up as little more than opinion polls.

grandalf 16y ago

I think that people are missing the point. A comment's quality is not measurable by it's score. If anything, that is a rough aggregation. By this logic, Ke$ha is a better musician than Joshua Bell. Top comments on HN were becoming more "top 40" and something had to be done before people started posting links to Trollface, etc. One approach would be to use category-based voting, which adds a lot of complexity. One approach would be to implement some sort of vote weighting sytem (time based, reputation based, context based), but that's ad-hoc and may not fix the problem. And one approach is to simply hide numerical comment scores from all but each user's own comments. This turns the quest for high karma into a personal battle against one's self, not a sport. PG wisely chose to make Karma a personal Everest for each individual to care about (or not).

chanux 16y ago

Button to make comment scores visible, please.

kqueue 16y ago

It's interesting to see an 8 hours post that has 374 points, and 156 comments on the second page instead of being on the first page.

jongraehl 16y ago

Ignorance is bliss. I'm happier not knowing that the crowd disagrees with my judgment of a comment's worth. I also feel like people are avoiding posting crappy comments with the intent of tapping into a popular vein for a high score. This could be a placebo, or perhaps, if real, it's instead caused by an improvement in voting.

tuhin 16y ago

Ok I just had another idea, so thought to write it here, in case PG gives it a look. How about showing votes after you took an action on a particular post. Say you upvoted a post, or replied to it, then you are eligible to seeing the points that it has. This helps because even if in hindsight, I would know if the comment was the general consensus or a popular one or not?

dennisgorelik 16y ago

No middle ground. Please bring exact score number.