4 ms·

I second this. At first I was against the hiding of points for the reasons others have stated: to show good comments. In reality you would get situations where

by cletus 15y ago

I second this. At first I was against the hiding of points for the reasons others have stated: to show good comments. In reality you would get situations where someone would post a thoughtful and well-reasoned comment (2 points) and someone would reply with a very minor correction (12 points). It also seemed like "wars" were fought over points too, purely anecdotally. My own experience is that voting now seems to be more rational. People seem to upvote when something should be upvoted (my guess is that this topped out before if someone thought a comment had too many votes). When something is negative, it's indicated so it doesn't tend to get downvoted into oblivion. As for curating interesting comments to the top, this happens now and seems to work quite well. I just wish there was a way to: - Look at comments you haven't seen yet; and - Filter comments by "quality", sorta like Slashdot has. The meaning of this can be vague and "quality" doesn't have to be a straight point measure but I'd like to see a way to just see the best comments, particularly when there are 300+ comments.

FluidDjango 15y ago
> - Look at comments you haven't seen yet; and I find this handled helpfully by http://hckrnews.com/about.html http://hckrnews.com/about.html
dantheman 15y ago
I think we also see less bandwagoning. To better illustrate this effect, let me present an example. When I'm reading a comment and it makes an initial impression on me (good or bad), I have to decide whether I'm going to vote on it (if I'm unsure, I'll just leave it unmoderated). When I see the score, it gives me more confidence in my opinion so I vote more. If others fall victim to this similar pattern of behavior we'll wild variation in comment votes and we'll see scale free behavior of votes (i.e. preferential attachment, comments with higher votes will tend to get more votes).
- mixmax 15y ago
  According to PG (I can't find the exact comment right now) the exact opposite has happened - posts with a lot of points get more points, not less. The reason probably being that when you look at a commentscore you assess whether it has the right score, and if it doesn't you vote it up (or down). If you can't see the scores you can't do this.
  - waqf 15y ago
    I still vote up comments that are greyed out (indicating a negative score) if I think they don't deserve to be downvoted.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  Generally the community here was pretty good at voting based on worth of the comment in furthering the conversation and not on the opinion expressed therein. Why vote? No one but you knows you did. The comment owner gets a number showing only assent or dissent which usually is irrelevant to their purpose for commenting.
wvenable 15y ago
I actually wish reddit would get rid of displaying karma; gaining karma has just become a game and is honestly causing more problems over there than not.
- pseudonym 15y ago
  I honestly hope that this happens. I got a Chrome extension that displays the number of times I've up/downvoted the comments of a given user wherever their name is displayed, and I never realized how many posts on the front page are posted by the same people.
pseudonym 15y ago
I'd like to also add that it would be nice to get a show-comment-at-full-opacity-on-mouseover for downvoted comments, like SomethingAwful's Forum Cancer. As it stands, having to highlight someone's comment just to see what they're getting blasted for (and my system highlight color is a light green, which makes it even more fun) seems like poor UI design.
redthrowaway 15y ago
Also, collapsing comment trees would be great so as to avoid having to scroll past dozens of comments in a long-winded discussion of something only tangentially-related to the submission.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  Yes. (See I have to do this, otherwise there is no way to indicate assent. For PG to know this is popular, if he just looks at the regular site page, he would need a huge string of such comments.)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- pbiggar 15y ago
  Try this: http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-hacker-news/ http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-...
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    Perfect, thanks. It'd still be nice if it was a site feature so I wouldn't have to install that script on every computer I browse HN from, but it's a great band-aid solution. Thanks again.
- Someone 15y ago
  As an alternative, I think it would be a good idea if some people could detach such branches, moving the entire branch into a separate topic. I would leave the top comment both as introduction for the new thread and at its original location, with a link to the new topic. I also think it might be possible to somewhat automatically detect such branches. That would make it easier for the 'some' that get this power to detect them. However, if one has such software, it might be better and easier to 100% automatically collapse all candidate threads with a generated remark "this appears to start a new topic", ideally with keywords describing what the topic is about)
alok-g 15y ago
>> As for curating interesting comments to the top, this happens now and seems to work quite well. The comments still form an N-ary tree. Useful top-level comments also take not-so-useful comments on them to the top. With the points visible, I could tell just by looking. Given the lack of time, I now find myself reading just the top-level (not top-on-the-page) comments.
pbhjpbhj 15y ago
>People seem to upvote when something should be upvoted // How do you know? All I see is some fading, which presumably means a comment has been heavily downvoted? But for all I know it could mean the commenter is new, or they're generally downvoted, or something else (perhaps it's cold in their city?).
vacri 15y ago
The problem is that a simple up/down vote system is too crude. - low effort for drive-by downmods (there are stupid numbers of comments blasted to nothing despite being insightful or informative) - upvote doesn't distinguish between 'I agree' and 'hey, this is really informative'; the former is mostly meaningless, the latter is useful - single downmod diminishes what you said and makes it harder to read (on an already low-contrast site). Hardly fair given the ease of 'drive-bys'. The forum I spend most of my time on has a reason required for the mod - it's not this brainless +/- system that the web is moving towards. You get an idea why people are up/downmodding, and it raises the bar ever so slightly so that it takes actual effort to mod (that is, critique) a comment. The displayed point value is also capped - while the user gets the karma for the mod, it's not displayed beyond a certain cap. Mostly I see the benefit of this system as stopping mindless up/downvoting - requiring the tiniest bit of effort produces better quality results. Still not perfect, but much, much better.
- dshah 15y ago
  The up/down voting system is indeed crude -- but it's both simple and relatively well understood (and popular). Also, what you characterize as "drive by voting", I think of as being "lightweight feedback". Sure, we could make things a wee bit harder so a (much) smaller fraction of people would vote with with more deliberation, but I'm not sure that actually improves things.
  - waqf 15y ago
    It's not well understood, as evidenced by the continuing arguments about how upvoting "should" mean informative but "does" mean agree.
    - pestaa 15y ago
      Agr... whatever. Seriously though, this is a problem I think a lot about. One solution that keeps popping up in my head is implemented in an OS forum somewhere (don't recall specifics), so that each comment can be marked as informative/funny/shocking/etc instead of mere upvotes. Downvotes should go along similar lines so downmodded people don't have to beg for reasons. If "it makes boring reading" [1], don't make people write it! [1]: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by cletus 15y ago

FluidDjango 15y ago

> - Look at comments you haven't seen yet; and I find this handled helpfully by http://hckrnews.com/about.html http://hckrnews.com/about.html

dantheman 15y ago

I think we also see less bandwagoning. To better illustrate this effect, let me present an example. When I'm reading a comment and it makes an initial impression on me (good or bad), I have to decide whether I'm going to vote on it (if I'm unsure, I'll just leave it unmoderated). When I see the score, it gives me more confidence in my opinion so I vote more. If others fall victim to this similar pattern of behavior we'll wild variation in comment votes and we'll see scale free behavior of votes (i.e. preferential attachment, comments with higher votes will tend to get more votes).

mixmax 15y ago
According to PG (I can't find the exact comment right now) the exact opposite has happened - posts with a lot of points get more points, not less. The reason probably being that when you look at a commentscore you assess whether it has the right score, and if it doesn't you vote it up (or down). If you can't see the scores you can't do this.
- waqf 15y ago
  I still vote up comments that are greyed out (indicating a negative score) if I think they don't deserve to be downvoted.
pbhjpbhj 15y ago
Generally the community here was pretty good at voting based on worth of the comment in furthering the conversation and not on the opinion expressed therein. Why vote? No one but you knows you did. The comment owner gets a number showing only assent or dissent which usually is irrelevant to their purpose for commenting.

wvenable 15y ago

I actually wish reddit would get rid of displaying karma; gaining karma has just become a game and is honestly causing more problems over there than not.

pseudonym 15y ago
I honestly hope that this happens. I got a Chrome extension that displays the number of times I've up/downvoted the comments of a given user wherever their name is displayed, and I never realized how many posts on the front page are posted by the same people.

pseudonym 15y ago

I'd like to also add that it would be nice to get a show-comment-at-full-opacity-on-mouseover for downvoted comments, like SomethingAwful's Forum Cancer. As it stands, having to highlight someone's comment just to see what they're getting blasted for (and my system highlight color is a light green, which makes it even more fun) seems like poor UI design.

redthrowaway 15y ago

Also, collapsing comment trees would be great so as to avoid having to scroll past dozens of comments in a long-winded discussion of something only tangentially-related to the submission.

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
Yes. (See I have to do this, otherwise there is no way to indicate assent. For PG to know this is popular, if he just looks at the regular site page, he would need a huge string of such comments.)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
pbiggar 15y ago
Try this: http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-hacker-news/ http://alexander.kirk.at/2010/02/16/collapsible-threads-for-...
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  Perfect, thanks. It'd still be nice if it was a site feature so I wouldn't have to install that script on every computer I browse HN from, but it's a great band-aid solution. Thanks again.
Someone 15y ago
As an alternative, I think it would be a good idea if some people could detach such branches, moving the entire branch into a separate topic. I would leave the top comment both as introduction for the new thread and at its original location, with a link to the new topic. I also think it might be possible to somewhat automatically detect such branches. That would make it easier for the 'some' that get this power to detect them. However, if one has such software, it might be better and easier to 100% automatically collapse all candidate threads with a generated remark "this appears to start a new topic", ideally with keywords describing what the topic is about)

alok-g 15y ago

>> As for curating interesting comments to the top, this happens now and seems to work quite well. The comments still form an N-ary tree. Useful top-level comments also take not-so-useful comments on them to the top. With the points visible, I could tell just by looking. Given the lack of time, I now find myself reading just the top-level (not top-on-the-page) comments.

pbhjpbhj 15y ago

>People seem to upvote when something should be upvoted // How do you know? All I see is some fading, which presumably means a comment has been heavily downvoted? But for all I know it could mean the commenter is new, or they're generally downvoted, or something else (perhaps it's cold in their city?).

vacri 15y ago

The problem is that a simple up/down vote system is too crude. - low effort for drive-by downmods (there are stupid numbers of comments blasted to nothing despite being insightful or informative) - upvote doesn't distinguish between 'I agree' and 'hey, this is really informative'; the former is mostly meaningless, the latter is useful - single downmod diminishes what you said and makes it harder to read (on an already low-contrast site). Hardly fair given the ease of 'drive-bys'. The forum I spend most of my time on has a reason required for the mod - it's not this brainless +/- system that the web is moving towards. You get an idea why people are up/downmodding, and it raises the bar ever so slightly so that it takes actual effort to mod (that is, critique) a comment. The displayed point value is also capped - while the user gets the karma for the mod, it's not displayed beyond a certain cap. Mostly I see the benefit of this system as stopping mindless up/downvoting - requiring the tiniest bit of effort produces better quality results. Still not perfect, but much, much better.

dshah 15y ago
The up/down voting system is indeed crude -- but it's both simple and relatively well understood (and popular). Also, what you characterize as "drive by voting", I think of as being "lightweight feedback". Sure, we could make things a wee bit harder so a (much) smaller fraction of people would vote with with more deliberation, but I'm not sure that actually improves things.
- waqf 15y ago
  It's not well understood, as evidenced by the continuing arguments about how upvoting "should" mean informative but "does" mean agree.
  - pestaa 15y ago
    Agr... whatever. Seriously though, this is a problem I think a lot about. One solution that keeps popping up in my head is implemented in an OS forum somewhere (don't recall specifics), so that each comment can be marked as informative/funny/shocking/etc instead of mere upvotes. Downvotes should go along similar lines so downmodded people don't have to beg for reasons. If "it makes boring reading" [1], don't make people write it! [1]: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html