14 ms·

I appreciate the changes. But while we're on the topic, could I throw out a thought? It should be easier for a late-arriver on a post to add a useful comment,

by bravura 13y ago

I appreciate the changes. But while we're on the topic, could I throw out a thought? It should be easier for a late-arriver on a post to add a useful comment, and have it be promoted. Have you considered using randomization to adjust the score of certain comments? HN comments seem to exhibit a rich-get-richer phenomenon. One early comment that is highly rated can dominate the top of the thread. (I will note that, qualitatively, this doesn't seem as bad as a few months ago.) The problem with this approach is that late commenters are less likely to be able to meaningfully contribute to a discussion, because their comment is likely to be buried. One thing interesting about the way FB feed appears to work is that they use randomization to test the signal strength of new posts. Have you considered using randomization in where to display a comment? By adding variation, you should be able to capture more information from voters about the proper eventual location for a comment. It also means more variation is presented to people who are monitoring a post's comments.

dang 13y ago
One new experiment we're currently working on is something like that for stories. If it works for stories, we may try a variation for comments.
- argumentum 13y ago
  Maybe this is what you're thinking of, but instead of randomly altering the actual score, how about randomizing just the position on a per page view per user basis? I.e. a particular comment/story has it's normal score + X% chance of being promoted to somewhere near the top. You can vary X depending on age & actual score. This seems much easier to implement, and many more stories/comments would get exposure (each to fewer users).
- dfc 13y ago
  So there is something that is different with the ranking/presentation of stories? Recently I have noticed that the front page will look dramatically different (story wise) than it did five minutes ago. By dramatically different I do not mean story #3 is #15 five minutes later, but that stories #2-12 will be completely different some of which I remember reading 8 hours before.
  - dang 13y ago
    No, the experiment I referred to hasn't been rolled out yet. We'll post about it when it does. In the meantime it's mostly moderation as usual.
    - dfc 13y ago
      So the method for listing stories on the front page has not changed recently?
      - dang 13y ago
        Correct.
        dfc 13y ago
        Correct...dfc, you are going crazy. While you are here I should take the opportunity to thank you for making my favorite corner of the internet even better. Thanks dang...
- bravura 13y ago
  You're right, the problem is especially acute for story submission. Once an article is on the frontpage, it is likely to stay there. People are much more likely to upvote a frontpage article than something in new, simply because they are far more likely to look at the frontpage. What you really want is to estimate the probably that a reader will click and/or upvote a link, not the total number of clicks/upvotes. You might also want to discount this by time, but this discounting might not be necessary---there might be a natural decay in the probability, particularly if you compute a moving average. If you'd like my feedback about how to model this, feel free to email me. I'm happy to provide you with a more concrete methodology.
- tempestn 13y ago
  Have you considered, instead of basing rank on upvotes/time, basing it on upvotes/views? Views could be either views of the actual link, or just views of the listing page containing the story, or a combination of the two. (Of course absolute number of votes would still have to factor in somewhat so brand new stories with one vote don't jump to the top.) Perhaps this is already happening, but my (probably simplified) understanding of the system was that it only took into account time since the story was posted, not the number of views it's had, compared to votes.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
cshimmin 13y ago
That's an interesting approach; it would cause comments that are really good to float to the top no matter when they are posted. In terms of Bayes' theorem: P(upvote | good post) = P(good post | upvote) * P(upvote) / P(good post) Let's neglect that opinions vary, and assume P(good post | upvote) = 1. P(upvote) should be proportional to P(post is read); but the readership at the bottom of the page (or wherever latecomers are dropped) is quite small. But this begs the question: what does it mean to "float to the top" if highly-rated comments are being placed in a random location?
- derefr 13y ago
  See also: Reddit's "best" ranking for comments: http://www.redditblog.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html http://www.redditblog.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sortin...
  - piyush_soni 13y ago
    Yes, every commenting system which has an 'upvotes' system should learn from reddit's sorting, because it's the only major one I've seen so far which takes care of this 'problem' of early comments get more votes, later ones get buried.
  - mcintyre1994 13y ago
    Would it be possible to use that algorithm and get the same sort of 95% confidence here given that many people can't downvote?
    - danford 13y ago
      Is there a resource on how much karma you need to do what on HN and what the username colors mean? I assume green is new, blue is a couple months old and grey is even older?
      - saraid216 13y ago
        Not that I'm aware of. Also, I've never actually seen blue, somehow. I believe that downvoting comes in around 500 at this time. But green is not reliably "new". It tends to be strongly correlated to newly created accounts, but I've seen weird behavior (like a child comment is marked green... whereas the comment thread was started by the same commenter in gray in the first place), which leads me to believe there's something subtler going on. I thus have no idea what the difference in color is supposed to indicate at all.
slg 13y ago
On the note of the rich getting richer, it isn't only when someone arrives in a thread. Average comment score is also a big factor. The way the algorithm works is that late arriving commenters with high average comments scores can often jump ahead of older comments from users with lower comment scores. Once example, I created a new HN account a little over a year ago to switch from a slightly unprofessional name to my current one. Some of my early comments got upvoted a decent amount giving me a higher comment score. That higher comment score led to appearing closer to the top of comment chains. That in turn resulted in more visibility and again more upvotes. I don't think the quality of comments is any different between the two accounts, but the comment score on this one is 2.5x higher simply because I started out with a lucky advantage. I am not sure if people will view this as a problem, but I certainly wasn't aware of how big advantage having a high average comment score was until I had one.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  Having a high average comment score helps a lot (maybe a bit too much as you've said) but AFAICT the average is only among relatively recent posts. I'm pretty sure it is something like the average of your last $X posts that matters rather than average score of every post you've ever made. So while it may still result in a "rich get richer" situation, it isn't quite as dire as it would be if your entire post history worked into the average.
  - ballard 13y ago
    The last mover advantage of waiting for other people to do the heavy lifting for them and then swoop in for the win.
  - chrisBob 13y ago
    I have strong recent evidence of this in my own score, and It was an interesting experience for me. Lets just say my average was less than one for a while, but then climbed back quickly over the last 72 hours. Its an interesting system that really punishes the type of comments that get downvoted, and while I was upset about it for a few days I can see that it is a good system.
- 13y ago
jader201 13y ago
I really wish, instead (or in addition), that there was a "new" indicator so that I could quickly see recent comments. This won't do a late comer any good as all posts appear as new, but for those engaged in the thread, it would help them be able to scan and read any new comments since they last visited. And/or indicate posts made in the past X minutes. Maybe these could be toggle options to quickly show/hide or just shrink/lighten to the background older/read posts. This is something I've been wanting since day one, but may impact performance too much, unless they handled the indicators/toggle client-side based on a last read timestamp cookie (or similar implementation).
- emhs 13y ago
  Some of this (especially the new post indicators) can be provided by a Chrom{e,ium} extension I've been using called Hacker News Enhancement Suite [0]. [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bappiabcodbpphnojd...
  - rlu 13y ago
    I just installed this. How do I know when a comment is new? I just looked at a few threads i hadn't opened before and I was expecting all of them to have the "new" UI element but they all looked normal (other than the new UI that the plugin brings for all of HN) edit: and as I post this, my own post is marked as new. For those interested, new posts seem to be denoted by an border on the left
Houshalter 13y ago
I thought HN already did this. At least new comments usually appear at the top of the thread and then gradually fall if they don't get any upvotes. Someone made a post about your suggestion here: http://danluu.com/randomize-hn/ http://danluu.com/randomize-hn/ And another person suggested an even better algorithm here: http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_randomized_algorithms.html http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_r...
- aspensmonster 13y ago
  Yes. That is what they do. Or used to do.
ANTSANTS 13y ago
I don't think you can fix these problems without totally changing the way HN works. The "News" in "Hacker News" means that current topics will always be prioritized over a long term discussion, pushing relatively healthy topics off the front page. The threaded Reddit-esque conversation model makes it incredibly painful to follow any modest conversation or even just read them after the fact. That comments are ranked in addition to this, unlike a mailing list, just makes it even harder to follow, because everything is constantly jumping around the page. The upvote system gets into your subconscious; as much as I tell myself that the points don't mean anything, it's hard not to feel bad when your highest rated comments are snarky one liners and the ones you actually put some time into rarely get any. Sometimes I find myself spending 15+ minutes writing a comment just to delete it because it "isn't good enough," despite being relevant to the thread and possibly helpful. We pay lip service to the benefits of long form writing and thoughtful conversation on a site that is designed to bury them. The Reddit discussion model is completely oriented towards providing the fast food of news commentary, where your enjoyment of the first look you take at a comment page is prioritized over active participation. That's great if you're trying to attach ads to pictures of cats, but if you're trying to have a real conversation, it just gets in the way. I can read, I don't need an algorithm to tell me which comments are notable and which ones are junk. If I see a troll post on any other site, I don't seize up and have an aneurism, I just scroll past it. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I can easily follow 50+ page PHPbb threads that drag on for months or even years, or 4chan threads with hundreds of posts and more on the way every time you refresh, but a small conversation (in reality; I considered it huge by my HN standards) I had on here the other day with about 10 comments or so made my head spin. I wrote half the posts and it was still hard to follow! Oh, and of course, no one but the people I responded to will ever read the things I wrote hours after the thread dropped off the front page. I think that the community, not the particulars of the software, is the reason for this site's success, and things would have turned out the same or better if it were a barebones BBS with a flat discussion model. You don't need complex ranking systems or update notifiers to browse those, you just need to be able to scroll down.
- kijin 13y ago
  There are indeed many proponents of flat discussion models. The most famous of them is probably Jeff Atwood, cofounder of Stack Overflow: http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ But one major disadvantage of a flat BBS is that after a while, it becomes difficult to keep track of who's replying to whom. This is especially dreadful when two or more discussions are going on at the same time and they get interleaved; it's catastrophic when the moderators merge several loosely related threads. That's why most forum users make extensive use of quotes. Without quotes, you quickly lose context. So after a few pages, half the text on the page is made up of quotes nested inside one another. A forum archive will probably compress very well ;) Of course, this can probably be fixed with a better UI. But if so, the threaded discussion model could also be greatly improved by a better UI. So I think it all ultimately boils down to how good the UI is. The ability to highlight new comments and collapse threads, for example, will probably help a lot. I also like the way Reddit notifies you of replies. It helps you avoid missing replies in the mess of a large thread.
illuminate 13y ago
"It should be easier for a late-arriver on a post to add a useful comment, and have it be promoted" That'd be nice, but not important enough to the discussion for me to recommend a feature. It'd just encourage threads to last even longer and with even more bickering.

by bravura 13y ago

dang 13y ago

One new experiment we're currently working on is something like that for stories. If it works for stories, we may try a variation for comments.

argumentum 13y ago
Maybe this is what you're thinking of, but instead of randomly altering the actual score, how about randomizing just the position on a per page view per user basis? I.e. a particular comment/story has it's normal score + X% chance of being promoted to somewhere near the top. You can vary X depending on age & actual score. This seems much easier to implement, and many more stories/comments would get exposure (each to fewer users).
dfc 13y ago
So there is something that is different with the ranking/presentation of stories? Recently I have noticed that the front page will look dramatically different (story wise) than it did five minutes ago. By dramatically different I do not mean story #3 is #15 five minutes later, but that stories #2-12 will be completely different some of which I remember reading 8 hours before.
- dang 13y ago
  No, the experiment I referred to hasn't been rolled out yet. We'll post about it when it does. In the meantime it's mostly moderation as usual.
  - dfc 13y ago
    So the method for listing stories on the front page has not changed recently?
    - dang 13y ago
      Correct.
      - dfc 13y ago
        Correct...dfc, you are going crazy. While you are here I should take the opportunity to thank you for making my favorite corner of the internet even better. Thanks dang...
bravura 13y ago
You're right, the problem is especially acute for story submission. Once an article is on the frontpage, it is likely to stay there. People are much more likely to upvote a frontpage article than something in new, simply because they are far more likely to look at the frontpage. What you really want is to estimate the probably that a reader will click and/or upvote a link, not the total number of clicks/upvotes. You might also want to discount this by time, but this discounting might not be necessary---there might be a natural decay in the probability, particularly if you compute a moving average. If you'd like my feedback about how to model this, feel free to email me. I'm happy to provide you with a more concrete methodology.
tempestn 13y ago
Have you considered, instead of basing rank on upvotes/time, basing it on upvotes/views? Views could be either views of the actual link, or just views of the listing page containing the story, or a combination of the two. (Of course absolute number of votes would still have to factor in somewhat so brand new stories with one vote don't jump to the top.) Perhaps this is already happening, but my (probably simplified) understanding of the system was that it only took into account time since the story was posted, not the number of views it's had, compared to votes.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

cshimmin 13y ago

That's an interesting approach; it would cause comments that are really good to float to the top no matter when they are posted. In terms of Bayes' theorem: P(upvote | good post) = P(good post | upvote) * P(upvote) / P(good post) Let's neglect that opinions vary, and assume P(good post | upvote) = 1. P(upvote) should be proportional to P(post is read); but the readership at the bottom of the page (or wherever latecomers are dropped) is quite small. But this begs the question: what does it mean to "float to the top" if highly-rated comments are being placed in a random location?

derefr 13y ago
See also: Reddit's "best" ranking for comments: http://www.redditblog.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html http://www.redditblog.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sortin...
- piyush_soni 13y ago
  Yes, every commenting system which has an 'upvotes' system should learn from reddit's sorting, because it's the only major one I've seen so far which takes care of this 'problem' of early comments get more votes, later ones get buried.
- mcintyre1994 13y ago
  Would it be possible to use that algorithm and get the same sort of 95% confidence here given that many people can't downvote?
  - danford 13y ago
    Is there a resource on how much karma you need to do what on HN and what the username colors mean? I assume green is new, blue is a couple months old and grey is even older?
    - saraid216 13y ago
      Not that I'm aware of. Also, I've never actually seen blue, somehow. I believe that downvoting comes in around 500 at this time. But green is not reliably "new". It tends to be strongly correlated to newly created accounts, but I've seen weird behavior (like a child comment is marked green... whereas the comment thread was started by the same commenter in gray in the first place), which leads me to believe there's something subtler going on. I thus have no idea what the difference in color is supposed to indicate at all.

slg 13y ago

On the note of the rich getting richer, it isn't only when someone arrives in a thread. Average comment score is also a big factor. The way the algorithm works is that late arriving commenters with high average comments scores can often jump ahead of older comments from users with lower comment scores. Once example, I created a new HN account a little over a year ago to switch from a slightly unprofessional name to my current one. Some of my early comments got upvoted a decent amount giving me a higher comment score. That higher comment score led to appearing closer to the top of comment chains. That in turn resulted in more visibility and again more upvotes. I don't think the quality of comments is any different between the two accounts, but the comment score on this one is 2.5x higher simply because I started out with a lucky advantage. I am not sure if people will view this as a problem, but I certainly wasn't aware of how big advantage having a high average comment score was until I had one.

georgemcbay 13y ago
Having a high average comment score helps a lot (maybe a bit too much as you've said) but AFAICT the average is only among relatively recent posts. I'm pretty sure it is something like the average of your last $X posts that matters rather than average score of every post you've ever made. So while it may still result in a "rich get richer" situation, it isn't quite as dire as it would be if your entire post history worked into the average.
- ballard 13y ago
  The last mover advantage of waiting for other people to do the heavy lifting for them and then swoop in for the win.
- chrisBob 13y ago
  I have strong recent evidence of this in my own score, and It was an interesting experience for me. Lets just say my average was less than one for a while, but then climbed back quickly over the last 72 hours. Its an interesting system that really punishes the type of comments that get downvoted, and while I was upset about it for a few days I can see that it is a good system.
13y ago

jader201 13y ago

I really wish, instead (or in addition), that there was a "new" indicator so that I could quickly see recent comments. This won't do a late comer any good as all posts appear as new, but for those engaged in the thread, it would help them be able to scan and read any new comments since they last visited. And/or indicate posts made in the past X minutes. Maybe these could be toggle options to quickly show/hide or just shrink/lighten to the background older/read posts. This is something I've been wanting since day one, but may impact performance too much, unless they handled the indicators/toggle client-side based on a last read timestamp cookie (or similar implementation).

emhs 13y ago
Some of this (especially the new post indicators) can be provided by a Chrom{e,ium} extension I've been using called Hacker News Enhancement Suite [0]. [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bappiabcodbpphnojd...
- rlu 13y ago
  I just installed this. How do I know when a comment is new? I just looked at a few threads i hadn't opened before and I was expecting all of them to have the "new" UI element but they all looked normal (other than the new UI that the plugin brings for all of HN) edit: and as I post this, my own post is marked as new. For those interested, new posts seem to be denoted by an border on the left

Houshalter 13y ago

I thought HN already did this. At least new comments usually appear at the top of the thread and then gradually fall if they don't get any upvotes. Someone made a post about your suggestion here: http://danluu.com/randomize-hn/ http://danluu.com/randomize-hn/ And another person suggested an even better algorithm here: http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_randomized_algorithms.html http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_r...

aspensmonster 13y ago
Yes. That is what they do. Or used to do.

ANTSANTS 13y ago

I don't think you can fix these problems without totally changing the way HN works. The "News" in "Hacker News" means that current topics will always be prioritized over a long term discussion, pushing relatively healthy topics off the front page. The threaded Reddit-esque conversation model makes it incredibly painful to follow any modest conversation or even just read them after the fact. That comments are ranked in addition to this, unlike a mailing list, just makes it even harder to follow, because everything is constantly jumping around the page. The upvote system gets into your subconscious; as much as I tell myself that the points don't mean anything, it's hard not to feel bad when your highest rated comments are snarky one liners and the ones you actually put some time into rarely get any. Sometimes I find myself spending 15+ minutes writing a comment just to delete it because it "isn't good enough," despite being relevant to the thread and possibly helpful. We pay lip service to the benefits of long form writing and thoughtful conversation on a site that is designed to bury them. The Reddit discussion model is completely oriented towards providing the fast food of news commentary, where your enjoyment of the first look you take at a comment page is prioritized over active participation. That's great if you're trying to attach ads to pictures of cats, but if you're trying to have a real conversation, it just gets in the way. I can read, I don't need an algorithm to tell me which comments are notable and which ones are junk. If I see a troll post on any other site, I don't seize up and have an aneurism, I just scroll past it. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I can easily follow 50+ page PHPbb threads that drag on for months or even years, or 4chan threads with hundreds of posts and more on the way every time you refresh, but a small conversation (in reality; I considered it huge by my HN standards) I had on here the other day with about 10 comments or so made my head spin. I wrote half the posts and it was still hard to follow! Oh, and of course, no one but the people I responded to will ever read the things I wrote hours after the thread dropped off the front page. I think that the community, not the particulars of the software, is the reason for this site's success, and things would have turned out the same or better if it were a barebones BBS with a flat discussion model. You don't need complex ranking systems or update notifiers to browse those, you just need to be able to scroll down.

kijin 13y ago
There are indeed many proponents of flat discussion models. The most famous of them is probably Jeff Atwood, cofounder of Stack Overflow: http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ But one major disadvantage of a flat BBS is that after a while, it becomes difficult to keep track of who's replying to whom. This is especially dreadful when two or more discussions are going on at the same time and they get interleaved; it's catastrophic when the moderators merge several loosely related threads. That's why most forum users make extensive use of quotes. Without quotes, you quickly lose context. So after a few pages, half the text on the page is made up of quotes nested inside one another. A forum archive will probably compress very well ;) Of course, this can probably be fixed with a better UI. But if so, the threaded discussion model could also be greatly improved by a better UI. So I think it all ultimately boils down to how good the UI is. The ability to highlight new comments and collapse threads, for example, will probably help a lot. I also like the way Reddit notifies you of replies. It helps you avoid missing replies in the mess of a large thread.

illuminate 13y ago

"It should be easier for a late-arriver on a post to add a useful comment, and have it be promoted" That'd be nice, but not important enough to the discussion for me to recommend a feature. It'd just encourage threads to last even longer and with even more bickering.