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Experiment: No Comment Scores

• thorax 17y ago
  Interesting experiment. I thought I was going crazy all of a sudden. A suggestion: Any chance the numbers could show later as the article gets older? I'd like to see how the votes resolved after some time. Or perhaps hide them only on front page articles?
  • plinkplonk 17y ago
    "I thought I was going crazy all of a sudden." heh! so did I . I actually asked a friend to look at it and tell me if he saw what I was seeing! (Long day, too much code, off to bed) EDIT: I tried to vote up the comment above and got a "Can't make that vote" message. Then I tried to vote down a comment and got the same message. Bug? EDIT2: Now I get a blank page on upvoting. I guess PG has a REPL open and is changing the site "live" EDIT3: Blank page on voting (firefox/linux). This acts as a subtle disincentive to vote. "Oh I am going to see that blank page again and then need to click the browser back button. I'd rather continue reading(vs voting)". Is this by design? I hope not. EDIT4: Fixed.
    • chaosprophet 17y ago
      On a related note, I noticed that I'm just being shown a blank page after voting, rather than redirecting to the original discussion.
• deleted 17y ago
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• jrockway 17y ago
  I can still see the score on the "edit" page, which means I can still edit my post to whine about being downmodded. Since nobody knows the degree that I am being downmodded to (or corrected to), people might upvote more than they should. (I have also noticed that people don't stop upmodding even if the score is visible. I got 80 points yesterday on a one-line comment poking fun at Joel Spolsky. WTF?) Just like when there is the delayed "reply" link that isn't showing, you can still reply to a comment by clicking the "link" link. Edit: why is this being downmodded?
  • pg 17y ago
    Fixed. I didn't see the comment you mention, but that is exactly the sort of thing I meant about voting starting to have a mob feel.
    • jrockway 17y ago
      It was this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840748 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840748 Although I don't have any data, I think that if the same comment was posted today, it would end up with more points. If I see a comment with 80 upvotes, I usually let it stay there rather than bumping it to 81. One other comment; I find it hard to navigate my "threads" page now. I used to focus on highly-voted comments to improve and reply to; now that I don't know what other people like, I have nothing to go on. I guess spending less time on HN might not be a bad thing, however :) Edit: one more thing. I still have a reflex-like urge to click the upvote button when the author name says "pg". With no number, it is even harder to suppress the urge. So far I have managed, but I can't guarantee that I won't change my mind :)
      • netsp 17y ago
        I was thinking something similar when I saw this change. I know I am affected by by the comments score when I vote, but I think it's more of a moderating effect. I might vote down a smart ass one line remark if it has lots of points, or vote up something that is so-so if it's been voted down. Interesting to experiment.
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• chaosprophet 17y ago
  And here I was, thinking firefox was screwing up the JS. I guess this should improve the quality of discussions a lot, since a lot of people tend to just skim the few comments at the top. Not displaying the comment scores might make them read more.
  • yters 17y ago
    I don't think this'll stop people from just skimming the top. But, it will stop them from finding those highly rated comments hidden by a low rated parent comment.
    • chaosprophet 17y ago
      Which brings us to an interesting point: Shouldn't comment threads be sorted by the total votes for all comments in that thread???
      • NathanKP 17y ago
        That might make sense but it could still mean that a long, pointless, off-topic discussion would rise to the top, above other shorter, succinct comments that might end up buried at the bottom.
        • chaosprophet 17y ago
          I believe the shorter on-topic comment would be voted up more than the off-topic thread (unless ofcourse, the off-topic thread involves a sparky issue like Micheal Arrington).
• joshuaxls 17y ago
  Any chance we can see scores when we're looking at our own comments section? Often when I notice a bump in my karma I look at my comment threads to see what was so popular.
  • patio11 17y ago
    I am not alone in the world! And to register this, I clicked the up arrow next to the comment above me, but it redirected me to a blank page. (Chrome, Windows Vista.)
    • deleted 17y ago
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    • pg 17y ago
      Hmm, will investigate.
      • pg 17y ago
        Ok, should be fixed now. Sorry, the javascript for modifying displayed scores was breaking now that there weren't any.
        • axod 17y ago
          Now when I upmod a story on the main page, the score of the story doesn't change :/ BTW Cool experiment, think it might get rid of some of the group-think
          • 10ren 17y ago
            Same problem when upvoting the story on its comment page (e.g. here). It seems to be the javascript: the score is increased if you reload the page.
    • deleted 17y ago
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• mbrubeck 17y ago
  It looks like pg is still in the middle of changing things. A moment ago I could see other people's comments' scores in the replies on my "threads" page; now I can't.
  • jrockway 17y ago
    I have noticed things changing around too. I hear there is this thing called a "dev server"...
    • kylec 17y ago
      The lack of a dev server is what separates a "hacker" from a "software engineer". Besides, who hasn't gotten a thrill from tinkering with a live site?
    • pg 17y ago
      I usually do development on my local machine, but for small things like this I use the server's repl.
      • jrockway 17y ago
        Nice. I wondered why things were changing quickly but there were never any page load errors. I don't trust myself not to kill my app with a live REPL :)
        • wglb 17y ago
          I do it in a live production environment and it can often give you a nice adrenaline flush. I do occasionally fat-finger things, so I try to avoid it.
• petercooper 17y ago
  If I try and vote on a comment now, the ersatz AJAX trick no longer works. I'm actually taken to /vote?for=12345 etc.. so I get a blank page every time I vote. Bug?
• sdp 17y ago
  PG: Will you be applying some metric to determine if this improves site feel? If so, what metric?
  • edd 17y ago
    I think the two obvious metrics are volume of comment votes and average comment score. I don't know which way you would want those two to go though.
    • philh 17y ago
      If the standard deviation in comment scores decreases, that indicates more people are voting in disagreement with the majority, which is probably the intended purpose. I believe pg has in the past just used "this seems better/worse" as a metric, but it's hard to say how noticeable any change from this will be.
    • noamsml 17y ago
      I'd say the most obvious metric would be whether it evens the distribution of comment scores.
• wglb 17y ago
  But don't votes also give feedback to the commentor? I have used this to learn what works within this community and what doesn't. Now, I only know by approximation to my total karma, or if i am bad, that I turn gray.
  • wglb 17y ago
    Just as an example, my karma just jumped a bunch of points. Was it because of the above post, or was it due to europe waking up to some posts made a few hours ago? Perhaps my sense of dislocation will pass in a while.
    • apotheon 17y ago
      I feel similarly, actually. It's okay if others' scores don't show up for me, but I don't think scores will serve as effective (dis)incentives for behavior if they're too abstracted from the immediate cause, as is the case with having to try to guess which of my last thirty comments resulted in the upticks in my overall karma score. In fact, if anything, I think linking it to overall karma score may tend to increase obsession with karma, because now I have to watch my overall karma like a hawk and spend time thinking about the likely source of change to determine whether I've stepped on my dick somewhere. I say bring back the ability to see one's own karma, perhaps with a preferences option to turn it off, regardless of what happens with the visibility of others' comment scores. In fact, if anything about one's own karma would be hidden, I think the overall score would be a better choice to hide than the scores of (one's own) individual comments.
    • crocowhile 17y ago
      >Just as an example, my karma just jumped a bunch of points. Was it because of the above post, or was it due to europe waking up to some posts made a few hours ago? Do you really care so much? Anyway, If I were pg I would play around actually: half users see votes, the other half orange dot or whatever. I bet the numerical scores create a sheep effect and people who see high numbers are more likely to rate comments up.
  • blogimus 17y ago
    You can still see the votes on your comments by looking at your comments history.
• quellhorst 17y ago
  I like this already. How long will you let the test run?
• pvg 17y ago
  It'd be interesting to see the results of the experiment - level of voting before and after, volatility of the voting before and after, rate of change of comment ordering, before and after. Are you planning on releasing some sort of aggregate data or publishing some sort of analysis?
• evgen 17y ago
  This will definitely be interesting. While I think not having comment scores will have a somewhat limiting effect on groupthink voting, it will also probably have a counter-effect on pithy/silly one-liner comments by preventing people from noticing that no matter how humorous or witty the comment might have been it has already gathered as many votes as it deserves. The great karnak predicts a lot more early comments at the first level of two of comment threads being short witticisms that attempts to predict the herd and thereby gather a lot of early upvotes.
• buugs 17y ago
  I think this is very nice because karma isn't really worth anything and comments that are popular still get to be seen without the mob mentality to vote them up
  • jrockway 17y ago
    I think karma was an incentive for people to contribute comments. You might not be getting sex or money, but you are getting that feeling of creating something other people like. Now you don't really know if people like your work or not, so why bother contributing? (I know why: "because someone is wrong on the Internet!" But it is nice to get some karma too, :)
• paraschopra 17y ago
  Ah, I love change! Though a smart hacker can make a model that takes into time and position of a comment to predict the comment score?
• gcheong 17y ago
  I didn't realize how much I was affected by the comment ratings until they went away. Commencing cognitive restructuring.
  • plinkplonk 17y ago
    "Commencing cognitive restructuring." Indeed. Interesting how fast the brain adapts. I just caught myself looking at the total score and trying to predict which comment is getting upvoted (since I see the total increasing). And I don't even care about comment score!
• noodle 17y ago
  i have to admit that i would equally like to see this happen for content submissions.
• ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  Does anyone else find their eyes constantly scanning to try and find the score for each comment? I wonder if this means that I rely too heavily on the comment score? It's amazing how such a subtle change can reveal something more profound.
• tc 17y ago
  Wow, this interferes with key elements of my system for voting/commenting on HN. Here are some things that don't work now: * If a comment is sitting at 1 or 0, I'll try to avoid downvoting it unless I really think the comment subtracts value from the site. * If a child is attracting more votes than the parent, and I think this is because the child commenter didn't comprehend what the parent was saying, I vote to level out the comments. * If I see a comment sitting in negative territory that I feel should only be a 0 or 1 because it wasn't that bad, I'll upvote it even if I otherwise wouldn't have. * If a thread is already dominated by a couple of high-scoring comments, relative to its age, I'm less likely to post a new top level comment. My feeling is that if a good comment just sits at the bottom because it arrived slightly too late, I've only added noise to the thread. The lack of visible points makes it much harder to gauge how a new comment will 'compete' on the thread. * If the scores indicate that something is being widely misunderstood, I might comment where I otherwise would not have to try to restore sanity. Of course, if this change were to stick, it would alter the character of the site, and we would all develop new voting and commenting systems. I can already tell that this change magnifies my tendency to vote with an eye toward reordering comments rather than voting on each comment in relative isolation.
  • pg 17y ago
    Voting patterns showed a lot of users voted to get a comment to what they felt was an appropriate score: they wouldn't up- or downvote something unless they felt its current score was too low or high respectively. But if comment scores aren't displayed, you won't need to anymore.
    • netsp 17y ago
      You don't think that this is a good thing?
    • tc 17y ago
      Hmmm... I always considered that a feature rather than a bug. Only voting when the scores looked "wrong" was an optimization. How do I decide when to vote now? I have a feeling I'm going to settle into a pattern of voting to reorder comments and that I'm going to vote less overall.
• plinkplonk 17y ago
  Weird suggestion: now hide the contributor too, avoiding the "vote pg up anyway"category of upvotes. Then there's just a list of comments and one can vote them up or down on the content of the comment. Ok I did say it was weird. EDIT: Some great counterpoints below. I agree with them. This is a bad idea.
  • cperciva 17y ago
    Knowing who wrote a comment often provides very useful context (especially when there is back-and-forth discussion going on).
    • plinkplonk 17y ago
      pvg said -> "It would be a little difficult to have an exchange with someone if you can't tell who is who." cperciva said "Knowing who wrote a comment often provides very useful context" You are both completely right. My suggestion doesn't make sense. It was just a "spur of the moment" suggestion to provoke thought (de Bono's PO mental operator). I dind't think it through at all.
      • Prolitheus 17y ago
        You could give everyone a unique identifier per thread.
        • Radix 17y ago
          That would only solve one of the problems. Some of the users here are skilled enough that the average user doesn't know enough to keep up a disagreement. It's easier if the user names stay. For instance, the ggp is a security professional. I give more credence to his opinions than others.
          • Prolitheus 17y ago
            It was only intended to solve one of the problems, as the other 'problem' is exactly what removing the names would seek to address: a person's authority/history influencing the weight of their comments within a thread. It'd really benefit people who've earned a negative following, but I don't see such a mob mentality on here as opposed to certain aggregators in which biases become apparent in just a few threads.
• huhtenberg 17y ago
  Why not hide the usernames as well then and let the comments be judged purely based on their content ?
  • stuntgoat 17y ago
    That would be a good feature to be able to turn off/on in your site preferences. I would likely leave 'view usernames for comments' off. Good idea.
  • johns 17y ago
    I bet that would lead a lot of people to start using signatures. No thanks.
    • unalone 17y ago
      Perhaps we could assign IDs to posters? The first commenter in a thread is A, the second commenter is B, so that each new thread gives users a new identity. The problem with that is that anonymity leads to trolling.
      • huhtenberg 17y ago
        Troll posts will be modded down and deleted. That's not really a problem.
  • neilk 17y ago
    That would be potentially neat if you were only interested in raw argument. But HN is a place for people to meet as well. Also, credibility matters. Some people are known for their expertise in certain areas, like Matt Maroon and poker.
  • fauigerzigerk 17y ago
    It's difficult to have a dialog if you don't know who is the same person and who is someone else. You could do it by assigning a random per thread ID to each participant in a thread.
• plinkplonk 17y ago
  Interestingly enough, comments voted below zero still show up as gray. Helps to decide whether to upvote an "unjustly downvoted" comment.
• soundsop 17y ago
  If this improves the site, should it be applied to submission scores too? Showing submission scores can create the same sort of mob mentality in voting. The only potential downside that I see is people voting less often.
• ivankirigin 17y ago
  I think you can remove the word "by"
  • siong1987 17y ago
    "10 points by ivankirigin" is actually quite misleading. It looks like "ivankirign" gave the comment 10 points. We are having the same problem on how to show it correctly on GraffitiGeo. We ended up using "by ivinkirigin, points: 10", which in my opinion is still not perfect. Any idea on this?
    • LeChuck 17y ago
      Why not just "ivinkirigin, 10 points" or something. I think it's fairly obvious that the first word is a username.
    • unalone 17y ago
      Somehow associate the points with the upvote/downvote icons and not with the username?
    • ivankirigin 17y ago
      10 ivankirigin 4 hours ago If the numbers are changing you get accustomed to it quickly. By the way, my original comment has an absurdly high karma count. I think that is a direct result of hiding the count.
    • qeorge 17y ago
      "10 points by ivankirigin" is actually quite misleading. It looks like "ivankirign" gave the comment 10 points. I don't believe I've seen a site where any user can give more than one vote, so I don't think this is misleading. But I've not thought about it before, and I do like "by ivinkirigin, points: 10" better. Kudos on putting so much thought into your UI. Definitely bodes well for GraffitiGeo.
• shaunxcode 17y ago
  Will comments still change tone til they fade to nothing as they are down voted?
• jamesbritt 17y ago
  Interesting. I still see some comments a light gray. Also, like some others , I like know if something I've posted was particularly liked (or not). And I've been skimming pages looking for the high-karma comments to try to dig out what are likely to be the most worthwhile comments. I suppose there's some feedback effect in place there, as popular comments simply get more attention (and so likely garner more up-votes votes), but there's pragmatic value in having a metric to selectively peruse a post with so much to read. (And, no, ZapRead isn't the answer :) )
• alexgartrell 17y ago
  One PLUS of karma scores next to comments is that I know when to stop reading :) If my personal interest + the comment score < arbitrary threshold, i quit
  • j_baker 17y ago
    You know, if there's one thing programmers should appreciate, it's making it easy to see which information you don't want to read.
    • tumult 17y ago
      A simple number next to a post doesn't necessarily tell you much about whether or not you want to read it.
      • kingnothing 17y ago
        Sure it does. This is a community of individuals who share common interests. If the community values a particular comment, there's a high probability that I'm going to find value in it as well because of those shared interests.
        • camccann 17y ago
          And conversely, if I consistently find that the community values comments that I think are junk, I'm probably going to eventually leave the community (which is why I'm here, and not on certain other sites).
        • tumult 17y ago
          You don't have to be part of the community to sign up for an account and start voting stuff up.
          • kingnothing 17y ago
            I think you're implicitly part of the community once you sign up.
• j_baker 17y ago
  I notice that nobody here is playing devil's advocate, so allow me. What was wrong with the site beforehand? Sure the comments have a mob feel to them sometimes, but that's just something a social anything app has to deal with. Over all, I like the comments on HN much more than say reddit or digg by far. Plus, I've never seen a community that responds so well to criticism as this one does.
  • billswift 17y ago
    Overall I agree with you, but I think this will be an interesting experiment, I want to see what happens.
    • j_baker 17y ago
      As do I. Like I said, I was playing devil's advocate. :-)
  • unalone 17y ago
    Social anything apps don't have to turn into mobs. Twitter's not a mob. Facebook's not a mob. Most large forums don't turn into mobs. In fact, forums, because they don't allow for comment voting, usually are much better against sensationalist postings because you understand every post is a user's opinion and not the vox populi.
• roder 17y ago
  I love it. Keeps comment voting honest it seems.
• adamhowell 17y ago
  I think only showing votes for comments and links once you've voted would be a better solution. It's what I'm trying with a side-project of mine.
  • chaosmachine 17y ago
    I was going to suggest the same thing. Most polls do not show you the results before you vote, this could work the same way.
• stuntgoat 17y ago
  If you gave me the option to switch karma on/off for submissions and comments, I would likely leave both off. Leaving karma off somehow gives me confidence to contribute more. Another idea is to remove the (time 'ago). Good comments are timeless :) and old comments seem like nobody is watching anymore, so the dialog seems over. Thank you Paul
  • fauigerzigerk 17y ago
    I don't need karma either, but the time of submission is important to know whether the poster is likely to read a reply.
• lionhearted 17y ago
  In long threads I skim based on scores. I try to give low comments at the bottom a quick read to vote on them, but one thing I definitely look for are long threads like this: +5 -3 +4 -2 +4 0 That means someone is being generally rude or uninsightful, but the replies are good, so I'll just read the replies. If there's a long thread of a bunch of 1's, then two people are talking at each other both uninsightfully. If both people are voted up a bit, that means it's a good discussion and the whole thing is worth reading. I'll give this a good trying out before forming an opinion either way, but the loss of skim-by-score ability is slowing me down just a touch right now. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.
• DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  Odd sort of "improvement" Hacker News -- now with less information? I would imagine that the more readers become engaged with the site the more information about the site they would want to consume, no?
  • pg 17y ago
    What matters is the quality of the information, not the amount. One of my goals has always been to decrease the amount of stupid information flowing through the system. That's why there are no downvotes on submissions: my observations of Reddit suggested that downvotes were more often reflexive than upvotes.
    • DanielBMarkham 17y ago
      I'm with you on your motives, and it'll be interesting to see how the site reacts. It just clashes with the idea that sites should be very simple to use, but engaging in detail over time -- that as users spend more time on a site they become interested in more details, whatever those details are. I think you see this in the number of HN mining apps posted. People who are engaged want more stuff from what they're engaged in. I'm definitely not for information for information's sake, just find your tweaking counter-intuitive. Seems like shooting all of the animals to prevent them from escaping the barn. I look forward to somebody telling us how the experiment went.
  • plinkplonk 17y ago
    "Odd sort of "improvement" " I don't see this as odd at all. Greater amounts of Information widely dispersed == "good/better" and less/restricted information == "bad/worse" is a very dominant underlying assumption - sometimes so embedded in our intuition that we see restricting information as counter-intuitive. If this experiment succeeds, then it might show that in some situations, the opposite is true? As a thought experiment, suppose you could know the exact moment of your death. This is more information than you have today. Is this good or bad? (I can see arguments for both sides) Suppose everyone knew. Would this be good or bad? (I can see arguments for both sides here too)
• mynameishere 17y ago
  The bandwagon effect (which is just ridiculous on reddit) occurs because top-rated comments stay at the top. Typical reddit comment at the top of a thread: reddit_user 622 points Glenn Beck is a wanker! He sniffs arses! Everyone agrees with this, needless to say, but they only upmod it because it's at the top of the pile. Otherwise, it's a worthless comment. I find the lack of mod points distracting to an unexpected degree. Bad quantification is better than no quantification...
  • billswift 17y ago
    That depends on how you define "bad quantification". Bad as inaccurate quantification is worse than none. Bad as rough, but roughly accurate is better than none.
• conoryoung 17y ago
  Interesting psychological side effect I just noticed: I wasn't previously aware of my tendency to scan a long thread for comments that stand out because of their high comment scores but I just did it when I opened this thread and felt like I didn't have my usual bearings. In one sense it levels the playing field. In another sense, though, it removes some key information that helps us to prioritize where we direct our attention.
• adrianwaj 17y ago
  I'd try out rounded percentage scores. Out of the total comment Karma alloted to all comments for an item, what proportion of this amount is contained within each comment? The issue here is that upon voting, you couldn't change all displayed comment percentages at once, it'd have to change on page reload. Also, it could be a rounded 1-10 scale. -- edit: would be good to reveal any comment score upon voting: gives an incentive to vote and remain critical. It's also like a marker as to what comments interest you for future recall -- that's something new.
  • adrianwaj 17y ago
    also - to make the score pertinent: - either cap underlying comment scores at 50 points OR - instead of giving a percentage score for a comment's proportion of total comment points, rank comments in terms of lowest positive score to highest positive score: then give each comment a score between 1-10 by segmenting the long tail into 10 even parts. (the initial ranking may not even need to be used) having no visible scores seems surreal.
• blogimus 17y ago
  About a year ago, I mentioned the problem of "bandwagon upvoting" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217822 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217822 So I'm really glad to see this and hopeful it works out. I think hiding the votes is better than a hard upper vote limit, as it is more organic. I'm really curious to know after the experiment how this affects the voting behavior (more votes, less votes, more for lead, less, etc)
• yason 17y ago
  This is good -- I really want to read threads without scores. If the experiment ends at some point, I would like to see it as an option checkbox. I often read comments with highest scores first while often there are good comments forgotten and sandwiched between a few übercomments. Or the übercomment is so conclusive that there's nowhere to take the discussion to. Hiding scores allows me to approach the discussion more objectively.
• chrischen 17y ago
  Ahhh.. And I thought my browser was acting up again.
• c00p3r 17y ago
  This decision is very good for improving quality of content of comments. Maybe it is good idea to display author's karma instead. People love to see magic numbers. =)
• kniwor 17y ago
  But now I cant quickly skim off information from a thread. There are 87 comments in this thread at this moment. I am not interested in reading 87 comments about this experiment. I am however very much interested in seeing what the top few most insightful comments in this thread are. That feedback is very important. Right now I am feeling blind as a bat...
  • tumult 17y ago
    Ones near the top are some kind of product of age (more recent) and score (higher). By the way, the kind of skimming you're describing is what leads to mob voting :) People skim for the highest rated stuff, read it, then rate it up more. Plenty of good comments never get rated up, and people who say the most inflammatory stuff (or just make stupid jokes) get the votes early on and stay in the "lead" as it were, the system having been made into a game.
    • DanielBMarkham 17y ago
      Repeat after me: you cannot have a system with points and expect people not to play games with it. Just accept it as a given and try to work around mob voting in other ways. Perhaps there is a way to make the system work against it's own mob tendencies. The entire point of using karma is that it means something -- it has value. Heck, I bet to some folks it has a lot of value. I'd further bet that it has so much value to some folks that you could monetize it. But that's a discussion for another day.
      • tumult 17y ago
        Of course it's a game. But it should be a game that fosters insightful comments and interesting threads, not one-liner jokes and inflammatory outbursts.
        • DanielBMarkham 17y ago
          I agree. I wonder if you could just have three buttons/widgets: insightful, funny, and troll. Then just click what you think of the article, and insightful articles rise to the top. Heck, you could even make it a user preference whether to sort insightful first, funny first, or troll first (why you'd want to do that I don't know, but some might) It would involve just one more graphic element than the current up/down arrows, and would give people release to say the funny things when they feel like they have to instead of having the site self-police.
• adrianwaj 17y ago
  turn off voting at 50 points.
• carbocation 17y ago
  If you had a Likert-type scale, this wouldn't be a problem. I would rate a post 7/10 regardless of what everyone else had rated it. But we just have ups and downs. I think we've all established a sense of what the "right" score is for a given comment. For example, a thoughtful, on-topic post probably has no upper limit for how many points it deserves, while a funny but off-topic post won't get an upvote if it's already got enough points. Won't this lead us towards a bimodal distribution? Without the crucial knowledge of where the comment's score is, the votes will tend towards extremes: we can't collectively decide when the target comment is near the range that we find appropriate.
• allenbrunson 17y ago
  this is weird and surprising to me, but it's causing me to look at news.yc in a refreshing new way. so i guess that has to be a good thing.
• pegobry 17y ago
  Great idea. (This one is going to go down, but that's all I have to say.)
• akamaka 17y ago
  Interesting idea, but now old threads like this, where people voted by modding up, don't make sense: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527681 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527681
• kingnothing 17y ago
  How about putting comment scores back in for people who have been here for at least X days / weeks / months or who have a comment score total greater than Y? I've been here since the beginning and value having the ability to pay more attention to higher rated comments when I'm skimming discussions.
• adrianwaj 17y ago
  How about an API?
• test12 17y ago
  WTF ?? <script>alert(/XSS/)</script>
• rend 17y ago
  How about having the scores show up after a week (or X amount of time). Practically nobody votes on week-old posts, but I often use -- for example -- searchyc.com's average points per post to get a feel for a user's contributions. That would balance the elimination of mob voting with being able to ascertain (historical) credibility.
• jurjenh 17y ago
  Just as an alternative idea - why not colour the score to the background colour - that way it is effectively invisible, yet can still be seen by highlighting the heading. Although that being said, I tend to gloss over the scores anyway for the most part...
• fjabre 17y ago
  Actually everyone should just try it out for a little while instead of instantly judging the change. I agree with PG, HN started to have mob feel in the comments section.
• araneae 17y ago
  I actually expect that posts may become more extremely negative than they used to. At some point, you become sorry for a person with a highly negative comment; or at least I do. Sometimes I upvote comments that are negative because I think that the downvotes are unreasonable. Now there's no way for others to provide a check on the immoral downvoting behavior of others.
  • camccann 17y ago
    It seems that negative-scored comments still start to gray out, so you'll be able to upvote something you think has been unjustly penalized. What you won't be able to do is aim things toward a desired positive score, such as downvoting a one-liner joke with 100+ points that you wouldn't downvote if it were at 20 points or less.
    • unalone 17y ago
      It'll be curious to see, then, if those one-liners get even more massively upvoted, or if the reaction towards them becomes something negative.
      • camccann 17y ago
        My guess would be: More groupthink, less bandwagon. That is, comments that (intentionally or not) pander to the audience will get more upvotes, but good comments that happen to get several early upvotes won't get the same pile-on effect. That's just a WAG, though.
        • unalone 17y ago
          One thing I do notice: I'm already much less frustrated at comments I'm reading here. If somebody says something I disagree with, I can't see if half the site has voted them up, to me it's just a typical comment that I can either ignore or respond to. Similarly, now dcurtis and I are arguing upthread, and I'm not anxiously wondering if he's been voted up more than me. We're just in a normal argument where neither of us will be proved by the community to be "more" right than the other. That's good.
• timwiseman 17y ago
  I anticipate that one effect of this will be that there will be more threads simply saying "I agree" or "Good comment" since this will no longer be so visibly reflected by the voting.
  • unalone 17y ago
    I think that those threads will be downvoted same as always, and when they grey out it'll give other users the impression that those comments are less interesting/worthwhile than other comments. And, to rant a teeny bit, that's what downvoting is used for. You don't downvote people that disagree with you or that say something you don't like. Downvoting is for removing comments that aren't relevant to the discussion. That's why they go grey. When I saw your comment, you'd been downvoted and greyed out, and you made a comment with a relevant or interesting point. You should not have been downvoted.
• justlearning 17y ago
  This is going to work wonders. imho, it will atleast 'confuse' people who upvote friends without reading the context, specially for all the 'voters' who upvote 'i love/hate my country' kind of comments. This feature will be interesting.
• lhorie 17y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing this happening for posts in addition to comments, so that there's more of an incentive to vote based on one's own opinion of the post than to fall for "scorebait" and voting on the heat of the moment because it seems everyone else is doing the same
• hxa7241 17y ago
  As far as comment-scores are used to filter one's reading, there is an inherent contradiction in the system: * the reader wants some filtering, so they can just read the good stuff * the filtering is done by the readers, which requires they read more than just the good stuff So the filtering can never be extremely effective, i.e. showing everyone only the good stuff, because then the filtering would not get done at all. I suppose it is a weakness in all public-contribution-based systems. The work has to be done by someone. Perhaps there are other, better ways of allocating that work. A first thought: lower scored items appear stochastically -- lower score, less frequent random appearance. That might help by making it seem like there is less 'work' to do . . . It seems the whole subject would warrant a fair amount of pondering and experiment (although it looks basically economic) . . .
• deutronium 17y ago
  I kind of miss the lack of comment scores. I do think they allow me to be more selective about the comments I read, based on the wisdom of crowds. Is there any chance we could have two style sheets, one in which they are hidden and the other where they are visible?
• jacquesm 17y ago
  I see a lot of comments here that basically say the same thing: "don't change anything, I was used to the old situation, now I'm lost". Give it a couple of days worth of trying before casting your 'vote' on the changes, it's a pretty disruptive change because it breaks the routine, but I really think this sort of experimenting is what will bring out the best in HN, if hackers are starting to be conservatives then we really are in trouble. Give it the benefit of the doubt and an honest chance.
• proee 17y ago
  The Hacker News community should decide if this featured is enabled (maybe a poll post). Having you just take this away on a whim because you felt it "might" be better is pretty poor taste in my opinion. It all most feels like papa Apple just rejected an iPhone app because they didn't like the "feel" of it. Please bring back the comment scores ASAP. I can't envision myself staying round here without them ;-) At a minimum, give me the option to turn it on for my own viewing pleasure.
• proee 17y ago
  One Idea I've had for fixing this problem is to weight the value of a click based on position on the page. The further down on the page, the more weight its gets. Therefore the most popular topic at the top only get marginally incremented as people read it first and decide its worthy. On the same note, if an article is waaaay down at the bottom, and someone's taken the time to read it and likes it, then it should get a good solid bump. This will create a "bubble effect" and allow those treasures that are buried deep down in the comment land, to rise to the top and even accelerate as more users find out and rank them. This essentially is a formula to equalize the comments and give them a fair playing field as they battle for the top most position.
  • pg 17y ago
    That is a good idea. I will see if I can figure out an easy way to do that. It may be enough just to make the time decay on comment scores faster.
    • proee 17y ago
      Glad to hear you like the idea. My method for reading through HN and others is to scan through items with a certain threshold. Once I get below the "fold" of the page, I start to lower the level so I can compensate for the "decay factor" you mention. There's tons of good gems at the bottom of the page, and they need to compete at the same level as those at the top. You could tweek the "weighting equation" and try linear, quadratic, or exponential type formulas. You could also apply this technique to articles, so those at the top don't get overly hyped and those at the bottom have a fair chance to making some movement to the top. Also, one thought in terms of the scoring value is to have it with a few digits of decimal precision. So you could still see how competing articles are doing at the very top and see your vote make a difference (be it very small). Example two competing top articles: Article Exhibit A: (score 47.25) Article Exhibit B: (score 46.33) Now when I click to bump exhibit "B" it moves to say 46.38 a boost of "0.05"
    • pg 17y ago
      Update: I wrote a new function to rank comment threads, and it's being used now. Seems promising.
• xenophanes 17y ago
  I like the hidden comment scores. You can still see negative comments at a glance, and the comments are still ordered by the scores so you can read the high score comments first since they are on top. If they are turned back on, I'd suggest making it an option, and possibly hidden by default.
• pizza 17y ago
  It's a really good idea, but it kinda feels awkward.
  • jqueryin 17y ago
    I see nothing awkward about it. It just makes you upvote and reply to the most thought provoking and insightful posts rather than the ones with the highest counts.
• CamperBob 17y ago
  And they said K5 was dead...
• sgk284 17y ago
  I love this idea, but it should really be initially implemented as a kind of A/B test. Simply choose half of the UIDs at random and always show them the comment score, and don't show it to the other half. Track which comments are upvoted most when their score is visible versus when not (there are many other metrics to use as well). It should be pretty easy to determine how much groupthink plays into voting. I suspect that most people only read (and therefore only vote on) already popular comments, so I suspect groupthink is fairly high here.
  • mechanical_fish 17y ago
    On the one hand, I completely agree with the scientific merit of your suggestion. On the other hand, showing different HNs to different people doesn't exactly strike me as community-building behavior. I think it would make the site feel even more like Temple Grandin's barnyard, with us in the role of the cows. Will my species behave better if we design the floor like this? Will that tweak to the algorithm prevent us from starting fights among ourselves? Oh, no, a gathering of more than twelve people -- we'd better build a robot to break those up.
• johnnybgoode 17y ago
  I'm seeing dots for some comments instead of the score. It looks like gray dots for comments with a high score and red dots for comments with a very high score. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the change to some extent? Edit: Sorry, it looks like this was explained after I had loaded this page. Still, this seems like a partial reversal. Also, this story is at #16 on the front page and really should be at #1 considering the magnitude of the change. Oh and just one more question: I'm seeing this comment at the top of the page. Is that just how it looks for me, or is it that way for everyone because of the new ranking algorithm? Another edit: From PG's explanation, I thought the gray dots were all turned red, but I still see gray dots for some comments (including one with a negative score).
  • NathanKP 17y ago
    Where was it explained? I'm still searching.....
    • deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    • johnnybgoode 17y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123
    • NathanKP 17y ago
      Got it... Thanks. The comments here are getting to be so much that they are hard to follow. ;)
  • pg 17y ago
    I've been experimenting with various ways of indicating high scoring comments. At the moment I use an orange dot after the time. At one point I tried giving all comments initial dots, and turned them red when the comment had a high score.
    • buugs 17y ago
• pg 17y ago
  I'm now experimenting with changing the function used to rank comments. I'm hopeful this will both help users find the good comments on a thread, and solve the problem of good but late comments getting stuck at the bottom of the page.
  • zck 17y ago
    One suggestion: the point ranking could be merely probabilistic -- for each comment set its "page-sort" score by selecting a random number between 1 and the comment's score. (For negative comments, between 0 and their score?) Then sort the comments by their page-sort score. I've looked at this mostly on reddit, since their threads are much more popular than on HN, but finding late wheat in the chaff of low-voted comments can be a problem when threads get large.
  • blasdel 17y ago
    The ranking changes you just made completely eliminated whatever mental model of thread dynamics I had left. It's not clear that you understand the degree to which you're playing with fire here. A 'good but late' comment won't be seen by anyone anyway, due to your front page ranking algorithm that prevents even the most active threads from spending long enough on the front pages.
    • tel 17y ago
      I think HN has always been an experiment. Playing with fire sounds almost like a compliment then.
• njl 17y ago
  This change might improve voting, but it decreases the value of that voting. I'll stipulate that the voting might be more "fair", if that is a goal. I'm not sure it should be. It might make the "game" of getting high karma more fair, but I'm not bothering with or bothered by that game anyway. On the other hand, I can no longer use the results of this voting to help me skim a conversation. I want to know what everyone else found most valuable, without having to read through every comment on my own. I can't do that anymore. This completely breaks how I use HN.
  • snprbob86 17y ago
    Maybe the issue is just the absoluteness of the scores. Behind the scenes, unbounded numbers are fine, but when presented to users they cause a tendency for gaming. I propose a follow-up experiment: 1) Keep the absolute scores secret 2) Continue graying out down-voted comments 3) Do not show any numeric indicator for conversations with less than N comments (I'd experiment with N near 10) 4) When the number of comments is greater than the threshold, show which percentile the comment is in for the set of positive comment scores in that thread. This way, when you look at a comment you don't think "Does this guy deserve more points?", instead you think "Is this comment better than 75% of the other comments here?" I think this would improve voting AND increase the value of that voting: people would have the right frame of mind when voting and the UI will present an easier value to determine how worthwhile it is to keep reading.
  • pg 17y ago
    Ok, comments over a threshold (currently 5) now have a red dot prepended to them. Is that better?
    • pclark 17y ago
      I don't think it's clear what the red dot means. The issue with removing scores is I can't speed read only the "good" comments. Can you make the top n% of comments stand out somehow I wonder?
      • jrockway 17y ago
• tyn 17y ago
  This new system saves me a lot of time by making HN less attractive.
  • pg 17y ago
    That could be good, if it did it by removing bad attractions. Some controversial threads with large numbers of votes were starting to feel like fights that attracted a crowd of onlookers. Those are very engaging, certainly, but it's probably better for both fighters and onlookers to have less of them.
    • b3eck 17y ago
      If you're trying to prevent the wrong sorts of attractions, you might also try it on a selective basis. For example, if a thread hasn't received a vote in the past hour or day, or if a user isn't logged in and can't vote, you could continue to display the votes in that thread.
    • blasdel 17y ago
      The solution to that is to make the vote scores logarithmic. Removing information helps nobody.
      • deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
• moscoso 17y ago
  Please, don't think HN is big enough to justify this change (I wish I could downvote you! :).
• deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
• Pistos2 17y ago
  (Really sorry if this is already discussed, but I don't have time to read 300+ comments in depth) How about allowing users to set two thresholds for themselves: (1) show only comments above X; (2) begin greying out below Y What precisely X and Y are or could be I'll leave to the experts. But this would let everyone decide their own absolute or relative threshold of comments they want to see. Those of you with plenty of time to spend on HN can have fairly low X and Y, whereas those of us that only want to spend a little time on HN each day can have just the popular presented to us. Voluntary herd membership (or rejection), if you will. Variant along the same lines: An absolute number account setting indicating "I want to see only the N highest-scoring comments/parents".
  • qu1j0t3 17y ago
    I'm sure HN is not too proud to steal one of /.'s features. :)
• yason 17y ago
  Has this been reverted? I can see the comment scores again.