The site founder, pg, asked for suggestions on how to "stave off decline of HN" in a thread he opened 787 days ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

The site founder, pg, asked for suggestions on how to "stave off decline of HN" in a thread he opened 787 days ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 He then announced the current (now long-standing) experiment of not showing comment karma scores just more than a week later. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333 He noted back then that he might change settings back and forth as the experiment continued. About two days later he opened a simple yes/no poll about the current experiment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039 and not long after that he replied to a question with a preliminary report on how voting behavior has changed. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271 Since then we have quite a while with comment karma scores being visible only to the persons who submit the comments. (In other words, I can see my own score on each comment I submit, and I have no idea what scores there are on any other comment.) I think this system is working well. Comments in threads I follow have become better, and the better comments are more visible in the threads I frequent. I use the bestcomments view of Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments from time to time as a reality check on how comments in other threads that I never read in the first place are doing. Generally many, but not all, of the comments on the first page of bestcomments are informative and interesting, and not mean or dumb. Paul Graham has stressed civility as a goal for our community here, and I know he is still thinking about further software tweaks to reduce the number of mean or dumb comments. It seems the direction he is going in now is to track how people use their upvotes and downvotes, so that upvotes of bad comments will somehow be discounted. I am not privy to the technical details of site administration here. I'm just replying as one user among thousands.