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I have found the gamification of Hacker News to be detrimental to my experience. Insightful but unpopular comments end up getting buried by retreads of the stat

by nathanb 15y ago

I have found the gamification of Hacker News to be detrimental to my experience. Insightful but unpopular comments end up getting buried by retreads of the status quo. It's the tragedy of the commons: if every single person can upvote, the most-upvoted comment will be the one which appeals to every single person. I prefer the threaded discussion style of kuro5hin back in the day where comments might be upvoted, but they stayed in the same temporal order they were posted in.

tyree732 15y ago
That works to level out the playing field so to speak, but falls victim to countless spam and useless comments clogging up the comments page.
arkitaip 15y ago
Upvotes/Downvotes need to go. I don't think it's too much to ask of adults to read entire thread in chronological order. It's fully sufficient to be able to flag spam or other comments that break policy and have favorites that are completely private.
- icebraining 15y ago
  People here have already said they use flags as downvotes for submissions, what makes you think the same wouldn't happen in comments?
amalcon 15y ago
This is the tricky thing about game mechanics. Yes, they are effective in creating goals, or at least things to strive for. For games, simply creating a goal (any goal) is often enough. It's much more difficult to create the goal you want. Forum karma and votes need voting ring and vendetta detection to be even minimally useful. Pandering detection would be great, but it's a hard problem. The only way to avoid pandering is to have a culture where: 1) People vote based on what they want to read, not what they agree with 2) People want to read things they don't agree with as much as things they agree with Both of these are hard. HN is the closest general-ish forum I've ever found to this, but it's still very far from the ideal. There's still a lot of pandering that goes on. The pandering just isn't all you see, like it is in many other places. StackOverflow is actually even closer, but this is because of the very narrow focus. People want to read the thing that gives the largest volume of correct information in a concise manner.
revorad 15y ago
I like the Reddit and LessWrong options of sorting comments by age or votes. Sure, it adds more complexity to the site's UI but considering HN is mainly about its discussions, making them better at the cost of complexity may not be so bad.
wanorris 15y ago
Personally, I tend to want to respond to an article or discussion with whatever thought I'm having at the moment. The HN karma (in particular, the average) reminds me to try to filter my comments based on whether I'm saying something that I think others will find useful or whether I'm just saying it because I feel like saying it. I probably censor about half of what I would otherwise post based on this guideline, and it's nearly always to the betterment of my signal/noise ratio.
- nathanb 15y ago
  I find myself willing to spend more time/thought crafting a response to an article which I think will be read by more people. For example, I'm just pounding this out stream-of-consciousness style since I know it will only be read by those involved in this subthread, if that. Why not do the right thing and focus on thoughtful, well-written comments for their own sake? Because I have the karma carrot dangling in front of me. I feel like gamification has in this case removed my motivation to do what is most beneficial to the site.
dennisgorelik 15y ago
That only means that gamification is not implemented correctly on HN. If weight of every voter's vote is evaluated by you (1), then the resulting weight would be tuned up for you. (1) You don't have to manually evaluate every voter. You just vote yourself, and if voter's votes correlate with your votes, then that voter's rank goes up (from the point of view of your personal rating system).

by nathanb 15y ago

tyree732 15y ago

That works to level out the playing field so to speak, but falls victim to countless spam and useless comments clogging up the comments page.

arkitaip 15y ago

Upvotes/Downvotes need to go. I don't think it's too much to ask of adults to read entire thread in chronological order. It's fully sufficient to be able to flag spam or other comments that break policy and have favorites that are completely private.

icebraining 15y ago
People here have already said they use flags as downvotes for submissions, what makes you think the same wouldn't happen in comments?

amalcon 15y ago

This is the tricky thing about game mechanics. Yes, they are effective in creating goals, or at least things to strive for. For games, simply creating a goal (any goal) is often enough. It's much more difficult to create the goal you want. Forum karma and votes need voting ring and vendetta detection to be even minimally useful. Pandering detection would be great, but it's a hard problem. The only way to avoid pandering is to have a culture where: 1) People vote based on what they want to read, not what they agree with 2) People want to read things they don't agree with as much as things they agree with Both of these are hard. HN is the closest general-ish forum I've ever found to this, but it's still very far from the ideal. There's still a lot of pandering that goes on. The pandering just isn't all you see, like it is in many other places. StackOverflow is actually even closer, but this is because of the very narrow focus. People want to read the thing that gives the largest volume of correct information in a concise manner.

revorad 15y ago

I like the Reddit and LessWrong options of sorting comments by age or votes. Sure, it adds more complexity to the site's UI but considering HN is mainly about its discussions, making them better at the cost of complexity may not be so bad.

wanorris 15y ago

Personally, I tend to want to respond to an article or discussion with whatever thought I'm having at the moment. The HN karma (in particular, the average) reminds me to try to filter my comments based on whether I'm saying something that I think others will find useful or whether I'm just saying it because I feel like saying it. I probably censor about half of what I would otherwise post based on this guideline, and it's nearly always to the betterment of my signal/noise ratio.

nathanb 15y ago
I find myself willing to spend more time/thought crafting a response to an article which I think will be read by more people. For example, I'm just pounding this out stream-of-consciousness style since I know it will only be read by those involved in this subthread, if that. Why not do the right thing and focus on thoughtful, well-written comments for their own sake? Because I have the karma carrot dangling in front of me. I feel like gamification has in this case removed my motivation to do what is most beneficial to the site.

dennisgorelik 15y ago

That only means that gamification is not implemented correctly on HN. If weight of every voter's vote is evaluated by you (1), then the resulting weight would be tuned up for you. (1) You don't have to manually evaluate every voter. You just vote yourself, and if voter's votes correlate with your votes, then that voter's rank goes up (from the point of view of your personal rating system).