6 ms·

Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments. Clearly, yo

by feral 15y ago

Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments. Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair enough. So, is there any way of getting back the utility, without increasing the fights? Maybe show points, but with a time lag? Show points, but just in bins (maybe logarithmicly binned?) You trust users above a certain karma threshold with downvote, because they've learned the ropes; maybe display points to these users? People that get in fights, and hence are downvoted, won't see points?

oconnore 15y ago
In general, useful is a good thing. A tool that washes your clothes for you is useful, and good. A tool that hammers nails for you is useful, and also good. Now, a tool that judges what you are reading is useful, but is it good?
- JangoSteve 15y ago
  The points don't judge if what I'm reading is useful, they merely indicate how useful others found it. This helps give me context in situations where I am a) inexperienced or b) short on time.
mcn 15y ago
>Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments. That is not the primary reason that I want points back. I believe that allowing people to signal their opinion with public upvotes discouraged redundant posts, and that visible upvotes encouraged participants to let their arguments stand rather than creating unnecessarily deep threads. A secondary issue is that votes were a valuable part of the signal in many "Ask HN" threads.
JangoSteve 15y ago
Here are two of the polls created by pg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039 186 days ago prefer points: 2355 prefer no-points: 1763 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 141 days ago prefer points: 2717 prefer no-points: 1703 So, 57.2% and 61.5%, respectively, were in favor of bringing points back. EDIT: succinctness and formatting EDIT 2: Not sure why this is being downvoted, I simply found and linked to the polls mentioned above, because I couldn't remember the exact outcomes.
- dlss 15y ago
  I think people are downvoting you because publicly viewable poll results are too similar to publicly viewable karma. My guess is pg just hasn't gotten around to hiding the results from everyone except the poster.
  - JangoSteve 15y ago
    I don't understand. Without publicly viewable results, polls are absolutely meaningless to everyone except the poster. In other words, the only content in a poll is the numbers.
    - dlss 15y ago
      It's an analogy. Without publicly viewable karma, posts lose a lot of their information content. Polls without results lose more, but some would argue[1] that there is no royal road to understanding what others think, and that the best way to use polls is to simply read the possible responses and ignore the results. For example, [1] believes that if you saw a poll on "which database do you use?", you should ignore the poll results and researching each option on your own. The person he is replying to is advocating researching databases in HN popularity order. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122546 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122546
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      >Without publicly viewable results, polls are absolutely meaningless to everyone except the poster. // Voting is a mini-poll on a comment. Without a result shown there's no point in voting.
      - akavi 15y ago
        That's a secondary, and arguably unwanted purpose of voting. The primary purpose is to push a valuable comment up towards the top of a page (or, conversely, push down a non-contributory comment).
        15y ago
jjcm 15y ago
I'd appreciate having the bins that you mentioned. My issue is that often times I see a parent comment being corrected by a child comment. However, due to no point values, I often dont know who is correct and who isnt. Here's an example: http://files.jjcm.org/example1.png http://files.jjcm.org/example1.png - Here we see a comment as it is now on HN. At the moment, I dont know if my page has a legitimate problem or not. With comment scores, I'll immediately know whether the problem is universal ( http://files.jjcm.org/example3.png http://files.jjcm.org/example3.png ), or if it's simply isolated to a specific user ( http://files.jjcm.org/example2.png http://files.jjcm.org/example2.png ). This is an issue that I find I encounter time and time again on HN. While comments are sorted by best score at each level, between indentation levels there is no way of discerning which is more highly ranked. I think having a system such as feral's logarithmic bins would be a nice middle ground here.
arctangent 15y ago
Your time lag idea is inspired.
jasonwilk 15y ago
+1 for the time delay idea. Once a post has been up for a certain amount of time, points are displayed so we can sort out which comments to immediately go to. No points makes HN more time consuming for me and less interesting. If there is a fight due to points, I'm just not going to read it.
llambda 15y ago
> They draw our attention to the best comments. Social proofs are bad. You should be reading the comments and then deciding what is interesting and noteworthy, not looking at comment scores and then reading and then "deciding" after your opinion has already been influenced by the group-mentality of popular opinion. > Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair enough. I don't think that's a fair comparison, see above. > So, is there any way of getting back the utility, without increasing the fights? This is not the utility you are looking for. waves hands In all seriousness, this kind of short cut seems nice on the surface but in reality is a bad habit: social proofs are misleading and bad, e.g. leading to groupthink. Hiding comment points was, in my view, a very good move. I certainly noticed an improvement after it happened and I think it's something that is needed in order to maintain a richness of quality in the comment threads.
- mjmahone 15y ago
  Wait, isn't the whole idea of HN (and reddit, etc.) to have a social proof indicating which articles/comments you should read? What else besides a social upvote pushes articles to the front page?
- feral 15y ago
  >Social proofs are bad. You should be reading the comments and then deciding what is interesting and noteworthy [...] Respectfully, I disagree. Its a core idea of this site, that the community does a good job of surfacing interesting interesting content; what appears on the front page is what has been upvoted sufficiently. I presume you wouldn't argue that HN users should read all submissions, and decide what is interesting and noteworthy for themselves. You have a point, in that there may be feedback effect with comments. Personally, I don't think that a comment being highly rated seriously effects my judgement of its content. It does, however, draw my attention to that comment. I would argue that comment scores should not be optimised to give the most accurate rating to comments, so much as to filter comments - e.g. draw attention to comments that are interesting, and might otherwise be overlooked. As such, if there is positive feedback in good comments being 'overvoted' I don't see a problem. I accept that this is a subjective perspective, determined by what I want from HN. I want to use the smart community here to quickly learn important information, and gain insight; as such, I don't really care whether comment scores are 'correct', so much as whether they are useful. As others have said, the ability to see the wider community's aggregated opinion on a particular set of conflicting comments, is also useful, where I lack the expertise to evaluate them myself - but I wouldn't be casting any votes, in such a situation.
kalvin 15y ago
I don't think those polls captured intensity, either. After several months to get used to no points, I feel very strongly they should be brought back. These threads are much less useful without them, especially when I don't have time to read/judge every single comment, or am not familiar with the discussion topic. E.g., if there were points in this thread, I'd have a much better idea what the 99% of non-commenters thought about points...
pseudonym 15y ago
> They draw our attention to the best comments. Just to note, they don't necessarily draw your attention to the best comments, just the ones that have been visible the longest. If you come across a post with 800 comments and the top post has 300 upvotes, how much less likely are you going to be to post a comment or thought? Removing the score both makes it less intimidating to post, and also increases the likelihood that people are going to find your post-- each user has to trawl through the top level comments on their own to figure out what's good, as opposed to stopping as soon as they hit the 1- or 2- upvoted comments at the bottom of the page.
- vacri 15y ago
  I can categorically state that the removal of publicly-viewable numbers has not made me more likely to read the 2-liner comments by latecomers, and I don't think I'm alone in this.
pbhjpbhj 15y ago
I agree.

by feral 15y ago

oconnore 15y ago

In general, useful is a good thing. A tool that washes your clothes for you is useful, and good. A tool that hammers nails for you is useful, and also good. Now, a tool that judges what you are reading is useful, but is it good?

JangoSteve 15y ago
The points don't judge if what I'm reading is useful, they merely indicate how useful others found it. This helps give me context in situations where I am a) inexperienced or b) short on time.

mcn 15y ago

>Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments. That is not the primary reason that I want points back. I believe that allowing people to signal their opinion with public upvotes discouraged redundant posts, and that visible upvotes encouraged participants to let their arguments stand rather than creating unnecessarily deep threads. A secondary issue is that votes were a valuable part of the signal in many "Ask HN" threads.

JangoSteve 15y ago

Here are two of the polls created by pg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039 186 days ago prefer points: 2355 prefer no-points: 1763 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 141 days ago prefer points: 2717 prefer no-points: 1703 So, 57.2% and 61.5%, respectively, were in favor of bringing points back. EDIT: succinctness and formatting EDIT 2: Not sure why this is being downvoted, I simply found and linked to the polls mentioned above, because I couldn't remember the exact outcomes.

dlss 15y ago
I think people are downvoting you because publicly viewable poll results are too similar to publicly viewable karma. My guess is pg just hasn't gotten around to hiding the results from everyone except the poster.
- JangoSteve 15y ago
  I don't understand. Without publicly viewable results, polls are absolutely meaningless to everyone except the poster. In other words, the only content in a poll is the numbers.
  - dlss 15y ago
    It's an analogy. Without publicly viewable karma, posts lose a lot of their information content. Polls without results lose more, but some would argue[1] that there is no royal road to understanding what others think, and that the best way to use polls is to simply read the possible responses and ignore the results. For example, [1] believes that if you saw a poll on "which database do you use?", you should ignore the poll results and researching each option on your own. The person he is replying to is advocating researching databases in HN popularity order. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122546 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122546
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    >Without publicly viewable results, polls are absolutely meaningless to everyone except the poster. // Voting is a mini-poll on a comment. Without a result shown there's no point in voting.
    - akavi 15y ago
      That's a secondary, and arguably unwanted purpose of voting. The primary purpose is to push a valuable comment up towards the top of a page (or, conversely, push down a non-contributory comment).
      - 15y ago

jjcm 15y ago

I'd appreciate having the bins that you mentioned. My issue is that often times I see a parent comment being corrected by a child comment. However, due to no point values, I often dont know who is correct and who isnt. Here's an example: http://files.jjcm.org/example1.png http://files.jjcm.org/example1.png - Here we see a comment as it is now on HN. At the moment, I dont know if my page has a legitimate problem or not. With comment scores, I'll immediately know whether the problem is universal ( http://files.jjcm.org/example3.png http://files.jjcm.org/example3.png ), or if it's simply isolated to a specific user ( http://files.jjcm.org/example2.png http://files.jjcm.org/example2.png ). This is an issue that I find I encounter time and time again on HN. While comments are sorted by best score at each level, between indentation levels there is no way of discerning which is more highly ranked. I think having a system such as feral's logarithmic bins would be a nice middle ground here.

arctangent 15y ago

Your time lag idea is inspired.

jasonwilk 15y ago

+1 for the time delay idea. Once a post has been up for a certain amount of time, points are displayed so we can sort out which comments to immediately go to. No points makes HN more time consuming for me and less interesting. If there is a fight due to points, I'm just not going to read it.

llambda 15y ago

> They draw our attention to the best comments. Social proofs are bad. You should be reading the comments and then deciding what is interesting and noteworthy, not looking at comment scores and then reading and then "deciding" after your opinion has already been influenced by the group-mentality of popular opinion. > Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair enough. I don't think that's a fair comparison, see above. > So, is there any way of getting back the utility, without increasing the fights? This is not the utility you are looking for. waves hands In all seriousness, this kind of short cut seems nice on the surface but in reality is a bad habit: social proofs are misleading and bad, e.g. leading to groupthink. Hiding comment points was, in my view, a very good move. I certainly noticed an improvement after it happened and I think it's something that is needed in order to maintain a richness of quality in the comment threads.

mjmahone 15y ago
Wait, isn't the whole idea of HN (and reddit, etc.) to have a social proof indicating which articles/comments you should read? What else besides a social upvote pushes articles to the front page?
feral 15y ago
>Social proofs are bad. You should be reading the comments and then deciding what is interesting and noteworthy [...] Respectfully, I disagree. Its a core idea of this site, that the community does a good job of surfacing interesting interesting content; what appears on the front page is what has been upvoted sufficiently. I presume you wouldn't argue that HN users should read all submissions, and decide what is interesting and noteworthy for themselves. You have a point, in that there may be feedback effect with comments. Personally, I don't think that a comment being highly rated seriously effects my judgement of its content. It does, however, draw my attention to that comment. I would argue that comment scores should not be optimised to give the most accurate rating to comments, so much as to filter comments - e.g. draw attention to comments that are interesting, and might otherwise be overlooked. As such, if there is positive feedback in good comments being 'overvoted' I don't see a problem. I accept that this is a subjective perspective, determined by what I want from HN. I want to use the smart community here to quickly learn important information, and gain insight; as such, I don't really care whether comment scores are 'correct', so much as whether they are useful. As others have said, the ability to see the wider community's aggregated opinion on a particular set of conflicting comments, is also useful, where I lack the expertise to evaluate them myself - but I wouldn't be casting any votes, in such a situation.

kalvin 15y ago

I don't think those polls captured intensity, either. After several months to get used to no points, I feel very strongly they should be brought back. These threads are much less useful without them, especially when I don't have time to read/judge every single comment, or am not familiar with the discussion topic. E.g., if there were points in this thread, I'd have a much better idea what the 99% of non-commenters thought about points...

pseudonym 15y ago

> They draw our attention to the best comments. Just to note, they don't necessarily draw your attention to the best comments, just the ones that have been visible the longest. If you come across a post with 800 comments and the top post has 300 upvotes, how much less likely are you going to be to post a comment or thought? Removing the score both makes it less intimidating to post, and also increases the likelihood that people are going to find your post-- each user has to trawl through the top level comments on their own to figure out what's good, as opposed to stopping as soon as they hit the 1- or 2- upvoted comments at the bottom of the page.

vacri 15y ago
I can categorically state that the removal of publicly-viewable numbers has not made me more likely to read the 2-liner comments by latecomers, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

pbhjpbhj 15y ago

I agree.