3 ms·

Too bad the same behavior happens anyway because of recognizable names.

lhnz 15y ago
That actually is the case for me now, and it's difficult to stop myself. There are a handful of users that always post interesting posts so when I am skimming a thread and read one of their posts I am always more considerate to them...
- gnosis 15y ago
  People also probably make enemies on HN, and vote against people who they think have particularly loathsome opinions or against those who they've gotten in to particularly acrimonious arguments with. Revenge voting, spite voting, and fan voting would be mostly mitigated by making comments anonymous (ie. by not showing usernames next to comments). But people could still intentionally or unintentionally give themselves away by, for example, either signing their comment or by writing in a distinctive style. In any case, I'm pretty sure HN will never switch to completely anonymous comments for everyone, so this is all purely hypothetical.
mixmax 15y ago
besides it isn't true. PG posted at some point that comments which had a lot of points before actually have more points after the don't-show-points change.
- swombat 15y ago
  Not very surprising. I used to vote based on "does the comment have a fair number of points", so a comment with 100 points would very rarely get an upvote from me - whereas now I don't have that information, so I can only use "do I like this comment/do I want to see more like it". Similarly for negative votes, of course... I'm installing the extension.
- gnosis 15y ago
  Unfortunately, simply taking away visible comment scores isn't a perfect solution to the problem of voting with the herd. Even without visible comment scores there are still some indications of how many votes a given comment has received. Highly rated comments tend to be at the top of the page of comments. This can have a huge influence, especially in long threads where people often don't have the energy or interest to read all of the comments, so they'll tend to only ever see (and, consequently ever vote on) the comments near the top. Also, since most everyone knows that comments near the top tend to have more votes, seeing a comment at or near could sway someone's vote as much as just seeing the explicit vote total itself. The other indicators of how many votes a given comment has gotten are that comments with a vote total of 0 or less are grayed-out and tend to be near the bottom. Again, this could sway people to vote the comment down, as it's a cue that the community approves of voting that particular comment down. Like voting on polls, voting on comments would be fairer were the order of comments completely randomized and there was no indication at all (explicit or implicit) of how many votes a given comment had gotten. Unfortunately, unlike polls, the order of comments can't be randomized without completely destroying the threading feature of HN, and without making the reading of a comment thread incredibly confusing (as replies could then be placed above the comments they were replies to, or not, since the order would be random). However, even stopping short of complete randomization of the comment order, some of the other indications of comment scores could be removed. In particular, HN could be changed so that highly rated comments no longer tend to move to the top, and so that lower rated comments don't tend to move to the bottom. And, of course, comments with low scores need not be grayed out. If these changes were implemented, voting on comments would be fairer, but (obviously) scanning through a heap of comments to see which are the most approved/disapproved comments would become more difficult.
  - eru 15y ago
    You can still randomize the order of leaves in each node of the tree.

lhnz 15y ago

That actually is the case for me now, and it's difficult to stop myself. There are a handful of users that always post interesting posts so when I am skimming a thread and read one of their posts I am always more considerate to them...

gnosis 15y ago
People also probably make enemies on HN, and vote against people who they think have particularly loathsome opinions or against those who they've gotten in to particularly acrimonious arguments with. Revenge voting, spite voting, and fan voting would be mostly mitigated by making comments anonymous (ie. by not showing usernames next to comments). But people could still intentionally or unintentionally give themselves away by, for example, either signing their comment or by writing in a distinctive style. In any case, I'm pretty sure HN will never switch to completely anonymous comments for everyone, so this is all purely hypothetical.

mixmax 15y ago

besides it isn't true. PG posted at some point that comments which had a lot of points before actually have more points after the don't-show-points change.

swombat 15y ago
Not very surprising. I used to vote based on "does the comment have a fair number of points", so a comment with 100 points would very rarely get an upvote from me - whereas now I don't have that information, so I can only use "do I like this comment/do I want to see more like it". Similarly for negative votes, of course... I'm installing the extension.
gnosis 15y ago
Unfortunately, simply taking away visible comment scores isn't a perfect solution to the problem of voting with the herd. Even without visible comment scores there are still some indications of how many votes a given comment has received. Highly rated comments tend to be at the top of the page of comments. This can have a huge influence, especially in long threads where people often don't have the energy or interest to read all of the comments, so they'll tend to only ever see (and, consequently ever vote on) the comments near the top. Also, since most everyone knows that comments near the top tend to have more votes, seeing a comment at or near could sway someone's vote as much as just seeing the explicit vote total itself. The other indicators of how many votes a given comment has gotten are that comments with a vote total of 0 or less are grayed-out and tend to be near the bottom. Again, this could sway people to vote the comment down, as it's a cue that the community approves of voting that particular comment down. Like voting on polls, voting on comments would be fairer were the order of comments completely randomized and there was no indication at all (explicit or implicit) of how many votes a given comment had gotten. Unfortunately, unlike polls, the order of comments can't be randomized without completely destroying the threading feature of HN, and without making the reading of a comment thread incredibly confusing (as replies could then be placed above the comments they were replies to, or not, since the order would be random). However, even stopping short of complete randomization of the comment order, some of the other indications of comment scores could be removed. In particular, HN could be changed so that highly rated comments no longer tend to move to the top, and so that lower rated comments don't tend to move to the bottom. And, of course, comments with low scores need not be grayed out. If these changes were implemented, voting on comments would be fairer, but (obviously) scanning through a heap of comments to see which are the most approved/disapproved comments would become more difficult.
- eru 15y ago
  You can still randomize the order of leaves in each node of the tree.