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Wish API would show comment votes instead of only showing them up until 8 years ago when displaying them was turned off on the main site. Aside from allowing us

Wish API would show comment votes instead of only showing them up until 8 years ago when displaying them was turned off on the main site. Aside from allowing users to enable them via their on interface, do analysis, etc — it broke HN’s comment search based on comment popularity. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535637

metadat 4y ago
What difference would exposing counts make? Why should this data be mineable? We're already helping to create a training set of slightly above average English speaker discourse for free.
- O__________O 4y ago
  If it was up to me, all data would be publicly available aside from emergency recovery email and password. This would include mod commutations and mod logs; unless it was security related, which would have a formal process with deadlines for release. —- To address you specific question as why the comment voting data would be of use, among other reasons, it would allow users to have custom filters. For example, posts and comments with high up/down votes tend to be flamewars. Mods also random boost/ding posts/comments too.
  - metadat 4y ago
    I hear you, but what is the endgame with this? Does it lead to a better HN? Lobste.rs actually exposes even less and doesn't provide an API because the users haven't consented to such intrusions. Personally, I don't want to be able to review every vote for or against my HN account. It wouldn't be productive and would likely lead to me not wanting to be here at all. It'd be like having a super strong mirror and then looking at your skin and being confronted with too much information about the reality of how nasty looking and imperfect being human is. Basically not a healthy pastime. FWIW, if you're truly passionate about this, it's not difficult to setup your own site with the lobste.rs open-source code. Maybe there is a whole subset of like-minded folks. The lobste.rs origin story may also be of interest to you. The TL;DR is jcs was being singled out and abused by pg on HN. Thankfully there is no evidence dang has (or would ever) do this, it was certainly toxic behavior on Paul's part. Being a moderator isn't for everyone, it's a Certain Thing, and net-positive mods who avoid power tripping are truly rare gems on the Internet. Open information would guarantee such abuses couldn't happen in the dark, but at what cost to the best aspects enabled by the HN ecosystem? References: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112665
    - O__________O 4y ago
      Again, just expressing my opinion, but another example would be it would allow custom ranking algorithms like PageRank, TrustRank, etc. And yes, aware of Lobste.rs mod logs, but Lobste.rs is basically dead compared to HN — largely because it’s an HN clone.
      - ElCheapo 4y ago
        This is a website where people post links and other people comment below them. Most front page discussions don't surpass 50 replies. I don't really think we should care so much about this place to the point that we're willing to employ state of the art data analysis tools just to read a blog post and see if someone has critiqued it in the comments
        hombre_fatal 4y ago
        This kind of stuff would probably just seed the sort of neuroticism that makes forums worse.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        dinkledunk 4y ago
        Yes, it is. And if you feel that way, that's fine. Why gatekeep?
        ElCheapo 4y ago
        What am I gatekeeping, exactly?
        O__________O 4y ago
        For starters, that you only want HN to be used the way you want to use it; which for sure it not the way I want to use it and more than likely significant number of other users too. If that’s not gatekeeping, then what is?
  - bambax 4y ago
    > This would include mod commutations In 2019 I set up a bot to store titles for HN stories as soon as they appear on the "new" page, so that I could then compare them to the current version. I had also made a browser extension for FF and Chrome that compared the current version of any HN story to the stored one, and displayed a warning if they differed. There was zero downloads of the extensions, so they fell into disrepair and don't work anymore, but the cron job for storing the titles is still active. If there is any interest I could resuscitate the extensions, or some other system to make that information useful.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    It's not going to happen. Showing comments led to constantly flamewars about unfair commenting. Even without the comment scores, the mods are still constantly having to remind people to stop arguing about scores. The decision not to display or make available other people's scores was litigated intensely; it is now part of the premise of the community.
    - O__________O 4y ago
      By “showing comments led” do you mean showing comment points/votes? Also, if comment viewable comment points are gone forever, then the “popularity” filter should be removed from HN’s search and the old voting data removed from the public API. To me, if users have concerns about “unfair voting” to me the solution is not to hide them. Also, if comment points aren’t important, why even allow them? They are obviously important and if a users is not available to respect guidelines not to complain about them, what’s difference between that an guidelines related to comments about being downvoted?
      - tptacek 4y ago
        Like I said, this has been heavily litigated. So much so that I think you'd have difficulty coming up with an argument that hadn't been made already about it. Not making other people's comment scores available is, as I said, a part of the premise of the community. There are other communities that work differently. There isn't a single optimal set of policies.
        O__________O 4y ago
        You’re right, obviously the best way to secure the community was to obscure the votes of people that were upvoting toxic content instead of the mods/community just publicly tagging and flagging the related undesirable content and penalizing the voting weights of anyone upvoting that content. If votes being public impacts voting patterns, listing top users, having usernames publicly associated with comments, being able to follow given user’s comments, etc — for sure does too. What’s the difference?
chrismorgan 4y ago
I’d like to be able to conveniently access my most popular comments. There are quite a few things in there that I might like to write longer-form articles about. (https://james.darpinian.com/blog/scraping-my-own-hacker-news-comments https://james.darpinian.com/blog/scraping-my-own-hacker-news... gives one way of doing it, by crawling your /threads?id=‹username› page, which does contain the point counts for each comment by you.)
- O__________O 4y ago
  Which would be possible if HN was API first and all data beside email for recovery were public. Otherwise, HN is simply not designed to be responsive to user system design requests — but their have been a massive amount of alternative systems built by users that built things HN would have never made.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  (Aside: I finally got round to scraping my comments in that way. My comments follow the sort of distribution you’d expect, ranging from −4 to +76, but there’s one outlier at +283, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27274146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27274146. People really hate stale bots on bug trackers.)
superb-owl 4y ago
I wrote a script that will allow you to use cookies to download your comment scores [1]. I also did some analysis of my own scores [2] [1] https://github.com/superb-owl/hacker-news-comments https://github.com/superb-owl/hacker-news-comments [2] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/commenting-on-hacker-news https://superbowl.substack.com/p/commenting-on-hacker-news
1123581321 4y ago
I don’t want vote information to be publicly available. Hiding those numbers was good for the site. Users have ways to get their own data. That’s enough.

metadat 4y ago

What difference would exposing counts make? Why should this data be mineable? We're already helping to create a training set of slightly above average English speaker discourse for free.

O__________O 4y ago
If it was up to me, all data would be publicly available aside from emergency recovery email and password. This would include mod commutations and mod logs; unless it was security related, which would have a formal process with deadlines for release. —- To address you specific question as why the comment voting data would be of use, among other reasons, it would allow users to have custom filters. For example, posts and comments with high up/down votes tend to be flamewars. Mods also random boost/ding posts/comments too.
- metadat 4y ago
  I hear you, but what is the endgame with this? Does it lead to a better HN? Lobste.rs actually exposes even less and doesn't provide an API because the users haven't consented to such intrusions. Personally, I don't want to be able to review every vote for or against my HN account. It wouldn't be productive and would likely lead to me not wanting to be here at all. It'd be like having a super strong mirror and then looking at your skin and being confronted with too much information about the reality of how nasty looking and imperfect being human is. Basically not a healthy pastime. FWIW, if you're truly passionate about this, it's not difficult to setup your own site with the lobste.rs open-source code. Maybe there is a whole subset of like-minded folks. The lobste.rs origin story may also be of interest to you. The TL;DR is jcs was being singled out and abused by pg on HN. Thankfully there is no evidence dang has (or would ever) do this, it was certainly toxic behavior on Paul's part. Being a moderator isn't for everyone, it's a Certain Thing, and net-positive mods who avoid power tripping are truly rare gems on the Internet. Open information would guarantee such abuses couldn't happen in the dark, but at what cost to the best aspects enabled by the HN ecosystem? References: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112665
  - O__________O 4y ago
    Again, just expressing my opinion, but another example would be it would allow custom ranking algorithms like PageRank, TrustRank, etc. And yes, aware of Lobste.rs mod logs, but Lobste.rs is basically dead compared to HN — largely because it’s an HN clone.
    - ElCheapo 4y ago
      This is a website where people post links and other people comment below them. Most front page discussions don't surpass 50 replies. I don't really think we should care so much about this place to the point that we're willing to employ state of the art data analysis tools just to read a blog post and see if someone has critiqued it in the comments
      - hombre_fatal 4y ago
        This kind of stuff would probably just seed the sort of neuroticism that makes forums worse.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - dinkledunk 4y ago
        Yes, it is. And if you feel that way, that's fine. Why gatekeep?
        ElCheapo 4y ago
        What am I gatekeeping, exactly?
        O__________O 4y ago
        For starters, that you only want HN to be used the way you want to use it; which for sure it not the way I want to use it and more than likely significant number of other users too. If that’s not gatekeeping, then what is?
- bambax 4y ago
  > This would include mod commutations In 2019 I set up a bot to store titles for HN stories as soon as they appear on the "new" page, so that I could then compare them to the current version. I had also made a browser extension for FF and Chrome that compared the current version of any HN story to the stored one, and displayed a warning if they differed. There was zero downloads of the extensions, so they fell into disrepair and don't work anymore, but the cron job for storing the titles is still active. If there is any interest I could resuscitate the extensions, or some other system to make that information useful.
- tptacek 4y ago
  It's not going to happen. Showing comments led to constantly flamewars about unfair commenting. Even without the comment scores, the mods are still constantly having to remind people to stop arguing about scores. The decision not to display or make available other people's scores was litigated intensely; it is now part of the premise of the community.
  - O__________O 4y ago
    By “showing comments led” do you mean showing comment points/votes? Also, if comment viewable comment points are gone forever, then the “popularity” filter should be removed from HN’s search and the old voting data removed from the public API. To me, if users have concerns about “unfair voting” to me the solution is not to hide them. Also, if comment points aren’t important, why even allow them? They are obviously important and if a users is not available to respect guidelines not to complain about them, what’s difference between that an guidelines related to comments about being downvoted?
    - tptacek 4y ago
      Like I said, this has been heavily litigated. So much so that I think you'd have difficulty coming up with an argument that hadn't been made already about it. Not making other people's comment scores available is, as I said, a part of the premise of the community. There are other communities that work differently. There isn't a single optimal set of policies.
      - O__________O 4y ago
        You’re right, obviously the best way to secure the community was to obscure the votes of people that were upvoting toxic content instead of the mods/community just publicly tagging and flagging the related undesirable content and penalizing the voting weights of anyone upvoting that content. If votes being public impacts voting patterns, listing top users, having usernames publicly associated with comments, being able to follow given user’s comments, etc — for sure does too. What’s the difference?

chrismorgan 4y ago

I’d like to be able to conveniently access my most popular comments. There are quite a few things in there that I might like to write longer-form articles about. (https://james.darpinian.com/blog/scraping-my-own-hacker-news-comments https://james.darpinian.com/blog/scraping-my-own-hacker-news... gives one way of doing it, by crawling your /threads?id=‹username› page, which does contain the point counts for each comment by you.)

O__________O 4y ago
Which would be possible if HN was API first and all data beside email for recovery were public. Otherwise, HN is simply not designed to be responsive to user system design requests — but their have been a massive amount of alternative systems built by users that built things HN would have never made.
chrismorgan 4y ago
(Aside: I finally got round to scraping my comments in that way. My comments follow the sort of distribution you’d expect, ranging from −4 to +76, but there’s one outlier at +283, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27274146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27274146. People really hate stale bots on bug trackers.)

superb-owl 4y ago

I wrote a script that will allow you to use cookies to download your comment scores [1]. I also did some analysis of my own scores [2] [1] https://github.com/superb-owl/hacker-news-comments https://github.com/superb-owl/hacker-news-comments [2] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/commenting-on-hacker-news https://superbowl.substack.com/p/commenting-on-hacker-news

1123581321 4y ago

I don’t want vote information to be publicly available. Hiding those numbers was good for the site. Users have ways to get their own data. That’s enough.