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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 vo
by jplewicke 15y 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 15y agoABSOLUTELY. Comment scores in the midst of an active discussion narrow thinking. Comment scores on historical artifacts are useful for research.
- cyanbane 15y agoI 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 15y agoThis 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 15y agoThat 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?
- raquo 15y agoSo the evident solution then would be to show comment scores after X (24?) hours since the news item was posted.
- hernan7 15y agoMore like after 1 week, I would say, but yes.
- lwhi 15y agoResearch into what?
- shii 15y agoExactly. Don't show scores for active threads if you want, but please, after x days or so, let the numbers show so searchyc can cache it correctly and people who come back to old threads have a sense of direction from the discussion.
- scott_s 15y agoHN already has "modes" for comments. Comments that are two weeks old are in archive-mode: you can't reply to them. Displaying scores on such comments makes sense to me.