11 ms·

Ask PG: Any chance of an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News"?

229 points by tablatom 14y ago

mixmax 14y ago
on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.
- AndrewDucker 14y ago
  It would be nice to have some indication. When reading down the page it would be nice to know what the interesting comments that happen to be on low-rated threads are.
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  I like seeing comment points but I'm not sure that it's a good thing to display them. Threads are already sorted by comment score so that the best comments are close to the top - I'm not sure what additional benefit comes from seeing the actual snapshot numbers aside from sheer curiosity.
  - larrys 14y ago
    I agree. Also it creates a halo effect. And creates more incentive to click either up or down depending on how you view the number relative to your own opinion. Not having a count gives new comments a chance (since you don't automatically look at the "minutes ago" part). So a new comment can be not at the bottom giving it a chance to gain more exposure even though it has no points.
    - andyjohnson0 14y ago
      I also agree. From what I've seen on StackOverflow, having visible points encourages posting to gain points rather than to enrich the discussion.
  - bryanlarsen 14y ago
    Threads are sorted by comment score and by age, with newer threads floating to the top. I think this is a great heuristic. My only beef is that this also naturally floats poor replies to great comments. It would be nice to have a good heuristic to know when to read the replies and when to move on to the next thread. I think one does exist: expandos. Give us the ability to expand and compact threads, and then automatically compact any old replies that haven't received a reasonable number of upvotes. I use the extension from hckrnews.com to give me expandos, but intelligent compaction would be so much sweeter.
    - scott_s 14y ago
      Just as bad as uplifting poor replies to great comments, it pushes down great replies to poor comments. I've seen some threads were the most informative and insightful comment was halfway down the page because it was a reply correcting misconceptions. The only solution I can think of are collapsable threads, similar to reddit.
    - russell 14y ago
      +/- expansion/contraction seems like a good idea to me too. It would be a good way for me to hide the occasional off topic argument between a couple of individuals and to find the grand.. parent of a comment.
  - mixmax 14y ago
    We had this discussion back when the points were being hidden, and I went through a few posts with many comments to see whether it would be possible to find the good comments based on where they were in the thread. It turned out that because of the threaded comment system you get very little information about which comments have many votes and which don't. In the sample I checked it was impossible to get any idea of how popular a comment was around 50% of the time (this comment for instance, which is currently the only child to your comment could hav 0 upvotes or it could have 100. There's no way to know)
    - beagle3 14y ago
      The solution, I think, is some sort of "unthreaded" view (with link to the contextual "threaded" view). Because, even if you do see the score, it is unlikely anyone will notice a +1000 answer to a -2 top level post when there are 20 of the latter. The numbers themselves don't (and shouldn't) matter - only the rank.
- citricsquid 14y ago
  comments are still displayed based on their score: if a comment is at the top and ~1 hour old you can assume it's well rated.
  - mixmax 14y ago
    this only works for the main trunk though. Lot of insightful comments are hidden way down as a child of a comment that doesn't have a lot of upvotes.
- stralep 14y ago
  I would really like to see comments I have upvoted... There are bunch of wise comments somewhere, that I have read, upvoted, and forgot.
  - ColinWright 14y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=stralep http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=stralep
    - stralep 14y ago
      Comments, not stories...
      - ColinWright 14y ago
        Ah - noted - apologies. I personally keep a separate note of comments of interest, and I was a little quick to respond. Yes, an equivalent for comments of "saved" would be useful.
  - andyjohnson0 14y ago
    It would be useful to be able to 'star' or 'favourite' a comment or submission, to have them accessible in a private list, and to see how many people had done this to your own comments/submissions. I wouldn't like this to be generally visible though. As others have said, it creates a halo effect and discourages diversity of opinions.
    - stralep 14y ago
      I see no reason to use additional mechanism. Why not use upvote? I'm upvoting stories so I could see them later (as ColinWright noted), why not create a page I could see comments I liked?
      - andyjohnson0 14y ago
        Separation of concerns. You might want to be able to tag a post or comment as noteworthy but not want to upvote it. For example, to remind you to come back to it and add a comment explaining why its wrong or that you disagree with it. Basically: Upvote != Save for Later
- hxa7241 14y ago
  There is a dilemma there. If you are only skimming a few comments, you are not reading most. But if the comments are not being read, how can they be scored properly? The extent to which points allow reduced/selective reading is the extent to which the accuracy of that selection is itself reduced.
- happimess 14y ago
  In my experience with reddit, displaying the score of a comment leads to bandwagon voting, which adds easily avoided noise to the sorting process. It also leads to a certain amount of karma fetishization, which results in easy jokes and fluff. With regards to skimming, I think that comment folding is a useful feature with few drawbacks.
- dclowd9901 14y ago
  I don't think this is a good idea. I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions. Let a comment stand for its merit. I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too. I feel like there are way too many recognizeable handles around here, which can have a similar effect of self-fulfilling prophecy. Case in point: has PG ever been downvoted? Ever?
  - tokenadult 14y ago
    Case in point: has PG ever been downvoted? Ever? I downvoted a recent comment by pg that for quite a while was (and STILL is) the top comment in its thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4253156 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4253156 but that pg later acknowledged didn't have a sufficient factual basis. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4254592 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4254592 Conspiracy theories are very enticing to the human mind, so they often get too many upvotes here on HN. Although I did downvote pg's first comment in the thread mentioned here, I was outnumbered by many more people who upvoted it, mistakenly.
    - jeswin 14y ago
      It is perhaps more useful when a mistake is corrected with a reply/comment, than with a down-vote. Doing so gets people to read both. Besides in the absence of the original comment (incorrect as it may be), the followups lose context. Reserve down votes for opinions that do not deserve a reply. Such as pure trolling.
      - scott_s 14y ago
        Top comments in a thread frame discussion - if the top comment in a thread is a conspiracy theory, then it's likely that the entire discussion will be derailed. For that reason, I think it's valid to downvote such comments, to prevent them from derailing the discussion.
  - 14y ago
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  The only way I see to satisfy both sides of this argument is to hide the scores until you're done voting on comments for that page. Maybe an "I'm done voting" button at the top and bottom of the page, which removes all voting arrows and replaces them with scores. The score for a comment could also be displayed after you've voted on it. [The problem might lie in the implementation for this solution. You probably don't want to store the 'done voting on this story' information in cookies, since that's tied to a single device and vulnerable to user manipulation. This means that you need to maintain a list of stories for which each user is done voting in your database, and then check against that list on each page load. This adds a significant amount of server resource usage, as well as maintenance and performance tuning work for what amounts to an unnecessary feature. Showing scores for a comment after voting on it should be easy to implement, but then you'd be encouraging people to vote just so they can see a score, possibly even up-voting everything on the page. My guess is we're stuck with the status quo for the foreseeable future.]
  - Peaker 14y ago
    Users would vote on comments randomly just to see their score...
- brudgers 14y ago
  Maybe seeing comment scores could be a reward for 10,000 karma points.
- breckinloggins 14y ago
  Compromise: how about showing points on comments but only after you yourself have accumulated a significant number of points?
  - politician 14y ago
    Up-voted with a challenge: of what value is seeing comment points except stroking your own ego when your or your friends or people-you-always-agree-with comments' are voted up?
    - breckinloggins 14y ago
      Of none whatsoever; but ego can be a great motivator. The problem isn't being motivated by ego, it's being motivated by ego before you've proven to others that you can handle the responsibility. :)
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  >My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them. I completely disagree. The crowd is not always right in upvoting, as PG pointed out in his statement of the problem (dumb or useless comments getting massively upvoted). Relying on comment votes as a heuristic for rapidly scanning and deciding what to read is a good idea. Read for yourself and decide, and if you lack the knowledge to decide then bookmark it for later research if it's important, or move on to something else if not.
- brandnewlow 14y ago
  IPhone app I use to read HN has been busted and not showing usernames on comments for over a year now. It's annoying at often tell when some of the more active HN users comment because because their voices come through so strongly. A Patio11 comment (uber-detailed) is immediately recognizable. So is a Tptacek comment (aggressively but gracefully contrarian) or a PG comment (short declarative sentences followed by many many many responses).
gbog 14y ago
May I ask too to modify the bestcomments page? It should weight less on upvotes and more on time, currently I check everyday and it doesn't change that much.
- tocomment 14y ago
  Hey there, really dumb question = me, but where would i find the best comments page?
  - freehunter 14y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
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      [deleted]
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  - tokenadult 14y ago
    where would i find the best comments page? From the lists that appear on the bottom of most HN pages http://news.ycombinator.com/lists http://news.ycombinator.com/lists to the link http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
    - politician 14y ago
      Is there an additional gate for down-voting comments? On the bestcomments page, certain comments are downvote-able while others are not. Specifically, from my account your comments cannot be downvoted. Is this intended behavior or a bug?
tokenadult 14y ago
In the submitted article from February 2009, Paul Graham wrote, "Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa. "Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people, because they feel uncomfortably constrained in a place where they have to behave well. But this way of keeping them out is gentler and probably also more effective than overt barriers." Trying to set barriers to bad user behavior has been an ongoing problem. In March 2011, pg wrote that Hacker News was still having user behavior problems, under the title "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." So the founder of Hacker News thought then that there was a comment voting problem: (a) mean comments were getting too many upvotes, and (b) dumb comments were getting too many upvotes, and (c) too many of the comments that got the most upvotes were either mean or dumb or both. Let's stop and think about what that means. That means that, according to pg posting as of last year, two more years after the article submitted here, comment karma scores were often NOT reliable signals of good comments, comments worth finding rapidly when skimming a thread. So pg changed the Hacker News software a few days later so that comment karma scores were hidden from Hacker News readers (they are STILL visible to each person who makes a comment, on his or her own comments). You can check the scores of each of your own comments. We can all READ comments to see which comments are the good comments. (Better comments also tend in general to thread to the top of discussions, with some other rules also influencing that evaluation as "better.") Checking the results of the software change involves empirical investigation. How do the highest-voted comments visible in the bestcomments list http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments look to all of you recently? Are there fewer mean comments than two years ago? Are there fewer dumb comments than two years ago? Are the comments that are "massively upvoted" since the experiment began mostly comments that are reasonably kind and well-informed, helpful comments on the whole? In most of the treads you visit, do helpful, thoughtful comments seem to rise to a position of prominence, while mean or dumb comments gray out? In my observation, after 1345 days here, and rather active participation on Hacker News, the comments have improved both in the threads I post in and in the threads I only lurk in. Occasional checks of the best comments page STILL reveal a lot of high-ranked comments that consist of one-liner jokes or whining about something, so the signal provided by upvotes still isn't perfect, but looking at the average comment karma score of some users I've been following for years suggests that comment karma is better allocated now than it was two years ago, which as I said is also my impression when I look at particular threads under submitted stories. There may be some more changes yet to make, but Hacker News has scaled up some more and still managed to emphasize quality of comments, which is not an easy thing to do.
RageKit 14y ago
Great article, but i don't really understand the last paragraph about games and social media, and the correlation between usefulness and self-fulfillment. Especially the part where games = crack = bad.
- politician 14y ago
  This person's username is green, their comment is graying, and they are the only green name on the thread. RageKit has simply asked a question asking for clarification. Given this post is already a meta discussion, what factors influenced the downvote? From what I see, it could be that the general nature of the comment is tangential to the tack that the general nature of all of the other comments took, that the user is new, and/or that the "games = crack = bad" phrase is atypical of sentence construction on this site.
  - RageKit 14y ago
    I've used this sentence construction because english isn't my first language and it was the easiest/fastest way to say what i wanted to say. The downvote system is automatic ? I thought user could downvote each other threads I'm still asking for clarification on why games are compared to crack. I'm a gamedesigner you see, and i went a little bit crossed-eyed on this sentence. Edit : i don't see my comment grayed.
    - dbaupp 14y ago
      Your comment is no longer grayed because others have upvoted it, likely because politician's comment pointed out that the downvotes were not deserved.
    - politician 14y ago
      World of Warcraft is widely considered to be a highly refined Skinner box. If you're unfamiliar with the experiment, I strongly recommend that you look it up on Wikipedia and then google "wow detox". Also, you may want to research Asian governments' restrictions on XP/hour. I'm sure you'll come to the right conclusions.
joshlegs 14y ago
I must say, I enjoyed reading this. It seems I have noticed a lot of changes in the last few weeks. And I suppose it's time to fess up ;) I had another account that got hellbanned recently. Because the comment guidelines were what I felt a bit ambiguous, and because I had seen other comments that I thought seemed reflective in nature that had been downvoted (perhaps because they expressed a view that is contrary to what most on the site hold?), I wanted to experiment with comments to see what the clear lines were. I found out very quickly :P
- astrofinch 14y ago
  Your comment was bad and you should feel bad! :P
- doesitwork 14y ago
  I have had 3 accounts hell banned. Each time was slightly mysterious to me, but let me relate the context and maybe someone can enlighten me. - The first ban was after I posted a comment that suggested that some venture capitalists that fund start ups may be exploiting young naive technologists. My guess was that saying anything bad about VCs or the startup culture merits a ban. - The second ban was after a post where I said that Flouride is rat poison. I understand this is controversial, but it is also an indisputable fact. Flouride is used in rat poison. I assumed that mentioning any inconvenient/controversial fact merits a ban. - The third ban was after I disagreed with someone on how the brain learns. There was nothing particularly controversial about it at all. I assumed that I had angered someone with moderation powers and was rewarded with a ban. My conclusion is that developing a moderation system that rewards people who agree with your world view tends to be self-selecting towards that world view. Down voting or banning anyone who disagrees with you rapidly develops group think, regardless of how 'intelligent' that particular world view is. I assume that any criticism of HN or the moderation system also merits a ban, so I expect this post will not be visible for very long.
  - RageKit 14y ago
    Hum, i'd like to know more about all these bans. Is the ban system automatic ? Or did someone (admin/moderator) actually banned you on purpose ?
pg 14y ago
It's remarkably close to what I'd write today. The biggest difference now is the numbers. Now on a typical weekday we get about 150k unique IPs and 1.5m pageviews.
- 3pt14159 14y ago
  Anecdote: My brother is a construction engineer with Ellis Don and he goes to HN even though he has no interest in startups because he likes the "quality of thought and discourse for current events" and is working his way through learning python the hard way in order to script some of his more mundane tasks.
  - mynegation 14y ago
    Excellent story! Discussion on HN is indeed second to none. Would you brother mind sharing what kind of tasks he would like to script? I am a big fan of Python and it is always interesting to see how people use it in various industries.
    - 3pt14159 14y ago
      He doesn't have an HN account, but I've answered the question here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287400 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287400
  - maayank 14y ago
    Can you/he give examples for task he can automate with a program?
    - 3pt14159 14y ago
      Sure. Since Ellis Don is a huge company they often end up doing join partnerships with other huge companies because large projects often need companies with multiple deep fields of expertise. This results in needing to use both companies systems to track things like concrete truck tickets, personnel on site, meeting minutes, etc. Usually the tools that are built for very large construction companies use fairly open file formats, like xml, or CSV files. Instead of having to double enter the data, he'd like to be able to enter in the information once, then have it propagate to the other system. This would free up about 5 hours a week for him on his current project that is expected to take about 3 years. So the total time saved would be about 750 hours, minus the time it took him to program the system. That would be the most complex case. Others include needing to rename hundreds of thousands of site photos, or to include in an email only photos that matched a certain pattern (for example: duff-site_2011-09-14_4201.jpg would match a pattern looking for all the photos on the duff site taken in September but only between floors 40 and 45). Other programs he would like would be to import into their in house tracking system any invoices his subtrades email him, again, matching a certain pattern (dig-con_final-invoice_duff-site_req-345.pdf).
ramblerman 14y ago
Skimming the discussion, I'm intrigued to see that no one has tackled the elephant in the room. PG finishes with an honest open question, is Hackernews genuinely contributing to productivity or is it a giant timesink for 99% of it's members. I'm inclined to agree with the latter.

229 points by tablatom 14y ago

on a somewhat related note; any chance of getting points on comments back? My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.

AndrewDucker 14y ago
It would be nice to have some indication. When reading down the page it would be nice to know what the interesting comments that happen to be on low-rated threads are.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
I like seeing comment points but I'm not sure that it's a good thing to display them. Threads are already sorted by comment score so that the best comments are close to the top - I'm not sure what additional benefit comes from seeing the actual snapshot numbers aside from sheer curiosity.
- larrys 14y ago
  I agree. Also it creates a halo effect. And creates more incentive to click either up or down depending on how you view the number relative to your own opinion. Not having a count gives new comments a chance (since you don't automatically look at the "minutes ago" part). So a new comment can be not at the bottom giving it a chance to gain more exposure even though it has no points.
  - andyjohnson0 14y ago
    I also agree. From what I've seen on StackOverflow, having visible points encourages posting to gain points rather than to enrich the discussion.
- bryanlarsen 14y ago
  Threads are sorted by comment score and by age, with newer threads floating to the top. I think this is a great heuristic. My only beef is that this also naturally floats poor replies to great comments. It would be nice to have a good heuristic to know when to read the replies and when to move on to the next thread. I think one does exist: expandos. Give us the ability to expand and compact threads, and then automatically compact any old replies that haven't received a reasonable number of upvotes. I use the extension from hckrnews.com to give me expandos, but intelligent compaction would be so much sweeter.
  - scott_s 14y ago
    Just as bad as uplifting poor replies to great comments, it pushes down great replies to poor comments. I've seen some threads were the most informative and insightful comment was halfway down the page because it was a reply correcting misconceptions. The only solution I can think of are collapsable threads, similar to reddit.
  - russell 14y ago
    +/- expansion/contraction seems like a good idea to me too. It would be a good way for me to hide the occasional off topic argument between a couple of individuals and to find the grand.. parent of a comment.
- mixmax 14y ago
  We had this discussion back when the points were being hidden, and I went through a few posts with many comments to see whether it would be possible to find the good comments based on where they were in the thread. It turned out that because of the threaded comment system you get very little information about which comments have many votes and which don't. In the sample I checked it was impossible to get any idea of how popular a comment was around 50% of the time (this comment for instance, which is currently the only child to your comment could hav 0 upvotes or it could have 100. There's no way to know)
  - beagle3 14y ago
    The solution, I think, is some sort of "unthreaded" view (with link to the contextual "threaded" view). Because, even if you do see the score, it is unlikely anyone will notice a +1000 answer to a -2 top level post when there are 20 of the latter. The numbers themselves don't (and shouldn't) matter - only the rank.
citricsquid 14y ago
comments are still displayed based on their score: if a comment is at the top and ~1 hour old you can assume it's well rated.
- mixmax 14y ago
  this only works for the main trunk though. Lot of insightful comments are hidden way down as a child of a comment that doesn't have a lot of upvotes.
stralep 14y ago
I would really like to see comments I have upvoted... There are bunch of wise comments somewhere, that I have read, upvoted, and forgot.
- ColinWright 14y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=stralep http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=stralep
  - stralep 14y ago
    Comments, not stories...
    - ColinWright 14y ago
      Ah - noted - apologies. I personally keep a separate note of comments of interest, and I was a little quick to respond. Yes, an equivalent for comments of "saved" would be useful.
- andyjohnson0 14y ago
  It would be useful to be able to 'star' or 'favourite' a comment or submission, to have them accessible in a private list, and to see how many people had done this to your own comments/submissions. I wouldn't like this to be generally visible though. As others have said, it creates a halo effect and discourages diversity of opinions.
  - stralep 14y ago
    I see no reason to use additional mechanism. Why not use upvote? I'm upvoting stories so I could see them later (as ColinWright noted), why not create a page I could see comments I liked?
    - andyjohnson0 14y ago
      Separation of concerns. You might want to be able to tag a post or comment as noteworthy but not want to upvote it. For example, to remind you to come back to it and add a comment explaining why its wrong or that you disagree with it. Basically: Upvote != Save for Later
hxa7241 14y ago
There is a dilemma there. If you are only skimming a few comments, you are not reading most. But if the comments are not being read, how can they be scored properly? The extent to which points allow reduced/selective reading is the extent to which the accuracy of that selection is itself reduced.
happimess 14y ago
In my experience with reddit, displaying the score of a comment leads to bandwagon voting, which adds easily avoided noise to the sorting process. It also leads to a certain amount of karma fetishization, which results in easy jokes and fluff. With regards to skimming, I think that comment folding is a useful feature with few drawbacks.
dclowd9901 14y ago
I don't think this is a good idea. I think that when someone sees a comment that would otherwise not be agreeable on a personal level, when it has votes from many other members, it has a tendency to sway your personal convictions a bit, just enough to make you second guess your own opinions. Let a comment stand for its merit. I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too. I feel like there are way too many recognizeable handles around here, which can have a similar effect of self-fulfilling prophecy. Case in point: has PG ever been downvoted? Ever?
- tokenadult 14y ago
  Case in point: has PG ever been downvoted? Ever? I downvoted a recent comment by pg that for quite a while was (and STILL is) the top comment in its thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4253156 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4253156 but that pg later acknowledged didn't have a sufficient factual basis. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4254592 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4254592 Conspiracy theories are very enticing to the human mind, so they often get too many upvotes here on HN. Although I did downvote pg's first comment in the thread mentioned here, I was outnumbered by many more people who upvoted it, mistakenly.
  - jeswin 14y ago
    It is perhaps more useful when a mistake is corrected with a reply/comment, than with a down-vote. Doing so gets people to read both. Besides in the absence of the original comment (incorrect as it may be), the followups lose context. Reserve down votes for opinions that do not deserve a reply. Such as pure trolling.
    - scott_s 14y ago
      Top comments in a thread frame discussion - if the top comment in a thread is a conspiracy theory, then it's likely that the entire discussion will be derailed. For that reason, I think it's valid to downvote such comments, to prevent them from derailing the discussion.
- 14y ago
WiseWeasel 14y ago
The only way I see to satisfy both sides of this argument is to hide the scores until you're done voting on comments for that page. Maybe an "I'm done voting" button at the top and bottom of the page, which removes all voting arrows and replaces them with scores. The score for a comment could also be displayed after you've voted on it. [The problem might lie in the implementation for this solution. You probably don't want to store the 'done voting on this story' information in cookies, since that's tied to a single device and vulnerable to user manipulation. This means that you need to maintain a list of stories for which each user is done voting in your database, and then check against that list on each page load. This adds a significant amount of server resource usage, as well as maintenance and performance tuning work for what amounts to an unnecessary feature. Showing scores for a comment after voting on it should be easy to implement, but then you'd be encouraging people to vote just so they can see a score, possibly even up-voting everything on the page. My guess is we're stuck with the status quo for the foreseeable future.]
- Peaker 14y ago
  Users would vote on comments randomly just to see their score...
brudgers 14y ago
Maybe seeing comment scores could be a reward for 10,000 karma points.
breckinloggins 14y ago
Compromise: how about showing points on comments but only after you yourself have accumulated a significant number of points?
- politician 14y ago
  Up-voted with a challenge: of what value is seeing comment points except stroking your own ego when your or your friends or people-you-always-agree-with comments' are voted up?
  - breckinloggins 14y ago
    Of none whatsoever; but ego can be a great motivator. The problem isn't being motivated by ego, it's being motivated by ego before you've proven to others that you can handle the responsibility. :)
SkyMarshal 14y ago
>My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them. I completely disagree. The crowd is not always right in upvoting, as PG pointed out in his statement of the problem (dumb or useless comments getting massively upvoted). Relying on comment votes as a heuristic for rapidly scanning and deciding what to read is a good idea. Read for yourself and decide, and if you lack the knowledge to decide then bookmark it for later research if it's important, or move on to something else if not.
brandnewlow 14y ago
IPhone app I use to read HN has been busted and not showing usernames on comments for over a year now. It's annoying at often tell when some of the more active HN users comment because because their voices come through so strongly. A Patio11 comment (uber-detailed) is immediately recognizable. So is a Tptacek comment (aggressively but gracefully contrarian) or a PG comment (short declarative sentences followed by many many many responses).

gbog 14y ago

May I ask too to modify the bestcomments page? It should weight less on upvotes and more on time, currently I check everyday and it doesn't change that much.

tocomment 14y ago
Hey there, really dumb question = me, but where would i find the best comments page?
- freehunter 14y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
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- tokenadult 14y ago
  where would i find the best comments page? From the lists that appear on the bottom of most HN pages http://news.ycombinator.com/lists http://news.ycombinator.com/lists to the link http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
  - politician 14y ago
    Is there an additional gate for down-voting comments? On the bestcomments page, certain comments are downvote-able while others are not. Specifically, from my account your comments cannot be downvoted. Is this intended behavior or a bug?

tokenadult 14y ago

In the submitted article from February 2009, Paul Graham wrote, "Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa. "Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people, because they feel uncomfortably constrained in a place where they have to behave well. But this way of keeping them out is gentler and probably also more effective than overt barriers." Trying to set barriers to bad user behavior has been an ongoing problem. In March 2011, pg wrote that Hacker News was still having user behavior problems, under the title "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." So the founder of Hacker News thought then that there was a comment voting problem: (a) mean comments were getting too many upvotes, and (b) dumb comments were getting too many upvotes, and (c) too many of the comments that got the most upvotes were either mean or dumb or both. Let's stop and think about what that means. That means that, according to pg posting as of last year, two more years after the article submitted here, comment karma scores were often NOT reliable signals of good comments, comments worth finding rapidly when skimming a thread. So pg changed the Hacker News software a few days later so that comment karma scores were hidden from Hacker News readers (they are STILL visible to each person who makes a comment, on his or her own comments). You can check the scores of each of your own comments. We can all READ comments to see which comments are the good comments. (Better comments also tend in general to thread to the top of discussions, with some other rules also influencing that evaluation as "better.") Checking the results of the software change involves empirical investigation. How do the highest-voted comments visible in the bestcomments list http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments look to all of you recently? Are there fewer mean comments than two years ago? Are there fewer dumb comments than two years ago? Are the comments that are "massively upvoted" since the experiment began mostly comments that are reasonably kind and well-informed, helpful comments on the whole? In most of the treads you visit, do helpful, thoughtful comments seem to rise to a position of prominence, while mean or dumb comments gray out? In my observation, after 1345 days here, and rather active participation on Hacker News, the comments have improved both in the threads I post in and in the threads I only lurk in. Occasional checks of the best comments page STILL reveal a lot of high-ranked comments that consist of one-liner jokes or whining about something, so the signal provided by upvotes still isn't perfect, but looking at the average comment karma score of some users I've been following for years suggests that comment karma is better allocated now than it was two years ago, which as I said is also my impression when I look at particular threads under submitted stories. There may be some more changes yet to make, but Hacker News has scaled up some more and still managed to emphasize quality of comments, which is not an easy thing to do.

RageKit 14y ago

Great article, but i don't really understand the last paragraph about games and social media, and the correlation between usefulness and self-fulfillment. Especially the part where games = crack = bad.

politician 14y ago
This person's username is green, their comment is graying, and they are the only green name on the thread. RageKit has simply asked a question asking for clarification. Given this post is already a meta discussion, what factors influenced the downvote? From what I see, it could be that the general nature of the comment is tangential to the tack that the general nature of all of the other comments took, that the user is new, and/or that the "games = crack = bad" phrase is atypical of sentence construction on this site.
- RageKit 14y ago
  I've used this sentence construction because english isn't my first language and it was the easiest/fastest way to say what i wanted to say. The downvote system is automatic ? I thought user could downvote each other threads I'm still asking for clarification on why games are compared to crack. I'm a gamedesigner you see, and i went a little bit crossed-eyed on this sentence. Edit : i don't see my comment grayed.
  - dbaupp 14y ago
    Your comment is no longer grayed because others have upvoted it, likely because politician's comment pointed out that the downvotes were not deserved.
  - politician 14y ago
    World of Warcraft is widely considered to be a highly refined Skinner box. If you're unfamiliar with the experiment, I strongly recommend that you look it up on Wikipedia and then google "wow detox". Also, you may want to research Asian governments' restrictions on XP/hour. I'm sure you'll come to the right conclusions.

joshlegs 14y ago

I must say, I enjoyed reading this. It seems I have noticed a lot of changes in the last few weeks. And I suppose it's time to fess up ;) I had another account that got hellbanned recently. Because the comment guidelines were what I felt a bit ambiguous, and because I had seen other comments that I thought seemed reflective in nature that had been downvoted (perhaps because they expressed a view that is contrary to what most on the site hold?), I wanted to experiment with comments to see what the clear lines were. I found out very quickly :P

astrofinch 14y ago
Your comment was bad and you should feel bad! :P
doesitwork 14y ago
I have had 3 accounts hell banned. Each time was slightly mysterious to me, but let me relate the context and maybe someone can enlighten me. - The first ban was after I posted a comment that suggested that some venture capitalists that fund start ups may be exploiting young naive technologists. My guess was that saying anything bad about VCs or the startup culture merits a ban. - The second ban was after a post where I said that Flouride is rat poison. I understand this is controversial, but it is also an indisputable fact. Flouride is used in rat poison. I assumed that mentioning any inconvenient/controversial fact merits a ban. - The third ban was after I disagreed with someone on how the brain learns. There was nothing particularly controversial about it at all. I assumed that I had angered someone with moderation powers and was rewarded with a ban. My conclusion is that developing a moderation system that rewards people who agree with your world view tends to be self-selecting towards that world view. Down voting or banning anyone who disagrees with you rapidly develops group think, regardless of how 'intelligent' that particular world view is. I assume that any criticism of HN or the moderation system also merits a ban, so I expect this post will not be visible for very long.
- RageKit 14y ago
  Hum, i'd like to know more about all these bans. Is the ban system automatic ? Or did someone (admin/moderator) actually banned you on purpose ?

pg 14y ago

It's remarkably close to what I'd write today. The biggest difference now is the numbers. Now on a typical weekday we get about 150k unique IPs and 1.5m pageviews.

3pt14159 14y ago
Anecdote: My brother is a construction engineer with Ellis Don and he goes to HN even though he has no interest in startups because he likes the "quality of thought and discourse for current events" and is working his way through learning python the hard way in order to script some of his more mundane tasks.
- mynegation 14y ago
  Excellent story! Discussion on HN is indeed second to none. Would you brother mind sharing what kind of tasks he would like to script? I am a big fan of Python and it is always interesting to see how people use it in various industries.
  - 3pt14159 14y ago
    He doesn't have an HN account, but I've answered the question here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287400 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4287400
- maayank 14y ago
  Can you/he give examples for task he can automate with a program?
  - 3pt14159 14y ago
    Sure. Since Ellis Don is a huge company they often end up doing join partnerships with other huge companies because large projects often need companies with multiple deep fields of expertise. This results in needing to use both companies systems to track things like concrete truck tickets, personnel on site, meeting minutes, etc. Usually the tools that are built for very large construction companies use fairly open file formats, like xml, or CSV files. Instead of having to double enter the data, he'd like to be able to enter in the information once, then have it propagate to the other system. This would free up about 5 hours a week for him on his current project that is expected to take about 3 years. So the total time saved would be about 750 hours, minus the time it took him to program the system. That would be the most complex case. Others include needing to rename hundreds of thousands of site photos, or to include in an email only photos that matched a certain pattern (for example: duff-site_2011-09-14_4201.jpg would match a pattern looking for all the photos on the duff site taken in September but only between floors 40 and 45). Other programs he would like would be to import into their in house tracking system any invoices his subtrades email him, again, matching a certain pattern (dig-con_final-invoice_duff-site_req-345.pdf).

ramblerman 14y ago

Skimming the discussion, I'm intrigued to see that no one has tackled the elephant in the room. PG finishes with an honest open question, is Hackernews genuinely contributing to productivity or is it a giant timesink for 99% of it's members. I'm inclined to agree with the latter.