6 ms·

Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality. Fuck that. Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying a

by unalone 17y ago

Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality. Fuck that. Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying and form your own opinions? That groupthink is just going to naturally turn out better than forcing every member to think about what they're reading? For the longest time, HN has become more and more "accessible", at the cost of a lot of intellectual discussion. I've seen a lot of conversations where one side of the argument is downvoted to hell and it makes the other side look "correct". I just saw a thread two days ago where somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit. That's utter shit and it hurts Hacker News. I'm fine with spending more time reading a thread if it means I'm legitimately thinking about what people are saying. This is a terrific improvement to the system, and it feels a hell of a lot less claustrophobic than it did when every single thing people said was being judged as if it were an objective statement capable of being "good" and "bad." Hopefully this also stops people from downvoting statements based on disagreement. Feels less vindictive when you can't see what your vote's done.

NathanKP 17y ago
somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit. That's assuming that the majority is right. If somebody gets voted down there is a pretty good chance that they were wrong, or even if they were right, they said in the wrong tone/manner.
- unalone 17y ago
  "Pretty good chance." But here's the thing. What if they're not wrong? What if a bunch of people read the comment, didn't quite understand it, and then downvoted it because it already had downvotes? I know I act like that a lot while reading. I also see a curious downvoting pattern on those frequent incidents when somebody mass downvotes all my comments for some reason or other. I'll assume for argument that on average I make useful, relevant comments. When new comments that I make get downvoted, there's about a 50-50 chance that the next person to come along also downvotes the comment, even when it's a good one. They see the other person's downvote and it reenforces in their mind that there was a good reason the comment was being downvoted. The ones that get a reverse upvote, however, then soar upwards. I had made one comment a few days ago that go downvoted such, then for a while hovered between -1 and -2, with very little differentiation. Then it hit 1 again, and within a few hours had hit up to something like 16. That's a pattern that I see a lot. People are less willing to upvote a comment that's grey than they are to upvote something solidly in the black. That's a flaw.
  - 10ren 17y ago
    "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth. The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that". Also consider pg's comment recently about "bogus" research, and how so many people then jumped on him. Actually, someone got sued in the UK for calling research "bogus", instead of factually and objectively calling out the problem with it. It's also in the HN guidelines to use neutral and factual language without connotations. By observing myself, I've noticed that my interpretation of a comment is affected by the upvotes/downvotes on it. It's not surprising, given the experimentally confirmed tendency to conform in humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3).
    - unalone 17y ago
      "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth. There's no such thing as a democratic theory of truth. The truth isn't something that can be voted on. Does God exist because more people believe in Him than believe in a secular universe? The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that". "Fuck that" obscures nothing. It's a concise way to say what I wanted to say. I could have said "I disagree", which takes twice as long to say and sounds garbled. I think there's a place for the word "fuck": It's for saying something very clearly and quickly when there's no need for delay. So, "Fuck that" doesn't have connotations. Not in the way that "That's shit" does, or even "Fuck you". Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3). I agree completely. As an aside, it's interesting right now watching my comments just in this thread. Once they hit 0 and turn grey, there's a lot of turbulence and they hover around there until they go black again, but the comments here that are in the black have quite high scores. That reinforces my belief that reading a grey comment biases you to think it's a bad comment. So in my mind, the threshold now where a single voter can grey a comment is too low. Setting it to -2 means there'd have to be a three-vote discrepancy between ups and downs, which I think sounds about right.
dcurtis 17y ago
Fuck that. Don't you think that reaction is a little bit extreme? Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site.
- unalone 17y ago
  If I'd just said Fuck that, absolutely! As it is, I went on to add a whole ton of details. Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site. Really? When you're spending 30 days flying around on a plane and sleeping in airports, I'd imagine you're the one with more time to waste. The top comments on HN are still the highest-voted ones. Read however many you want before the discussion tires you. Also, I can't think of many HN threads that ended up with more than 300 comments. 300 is at most an hour's reading; an hour isn't very long.
  - dcurtis 17y ago
    Who are you? Why does it seem like you're angry all the time? I pointed out an observation. Your response used the word fuck and then called me lazy, which is extremely rude. Would you have said that to my face? This isn't personal, dude. I just get the same feeling now when scanning comments that I get when I am looking at products on Amazon and can't see the price.
    - unalone 17y ago
      I'm an art student who is very rarely angry and doesn't think swearing indicates emotion. I also believe that it's better to have to spend time thinking about what to read, how to spend your time, than it is to be offered an easy way out that risks devaluing what people are saying. (I further believe that being called lazy usually isn't an insult.) In person, I'd probably be doubly critical. Don't think of it as rude; I think criticizing what somebody's saying is a sign of respecting them. To quote a guy I'm in the middle of reading: "The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself." If I were being rude, I'd ignore your comment and not call out what I thought was stupid/wrong about it. As it is, I'm debating what you said because I think there's a discussion to be had. For instance: Why would you feel the same reading comments as you would buying things? There's no harm to reading a few extra comments. You lose nothing but your time, which you're already spending on Hacker News.
derefr 17y ago
I'm the guy who said "Look at your comment score; looks like I'm right." The details are off a bit, though; it was "judging by your comment score, the parent speaks for the majority." I didn't participate in the discussion before that, so "I'm right" would have been a nonsequitor. More importantly, though, the discussion itself was about the poster's demeanor. In all other situations, downvoting isn't an accurate measure of sentiment toward the post, because voting mixes such things as agreement, clarity, obnoxiousness, and humor ratings, weighted differently for each person, into one opaque integer. However, in this case, when a person is voted down for [obnoxiously] arguing that they aren't obnoxious, and the parent is voted up for arguing that they are, in fact, obnoxious, the score really only has one meaning, in both cases: how much people dislike the poster. This is an exceptional situation; I never would have argued "by comment score" otherwise.
- unalone 17y ago
  Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying!

by unalone 17y ago

NathanKP 17y ago

somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit. That's assuming that the majority is right. If somebody gets voted down there is a pretty good chance that they were wrong, or even if they were right, they said in the wrong tone/manner.

unalone 17y ago
"Pretty good chance." But here's the thing. What if they're not wrong? What if a bunch of people read the comment, didn't quite understand it, and then downvoted it because it already had downvotes? I know I act like that a lot while reading. I also see a curious downvoting pattern on those frequent incidents when somebody mass downvotes all my comments for some reason or other. I'll assume for argument that on average I make useful, relevant comments. When new comments that I make get downvoted, there's about a 50-50 chance that the next person to come along also downvotes the comment, even when it's a good one. They see the other person's downvote and it reenforces in their mind that there was a good reason the comment was being downvoted. The ones that get a reverse upvote, however, then soar upwards. I had made one comment a few days ago that go downvoted such, then for a while hovered between -1 and -2, with very little differentiation. Then it hit 1 again, and within a few hours had hit up to something like 16. That's a pattern that I see a lot. People are less willing to upvote a comment that's grey than they are to upvote something solidly in the black. That's a flaw.
- 10ren 17y ago
  "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth. The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that". Also consider pg's comment recently about "bogus" research, and how so many people then jumped on him. Actually, someone got sued in the UK for calling research "bogus", instead of factually and objectively calling out the problem with it. It's also in the HN guidelines to use neutral and factual language without connotations. By observing myself, I've noticed that my interpretation of a comment is affected by the upvotes/downvotes on it. It's not surprising, given the experimentally confirmed tendency to conform in humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3).
  - unalone 17y ago
    "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth. There's no such thing as a democratic theory of truth. The truth isn't something that can be voted on. Does God exist because more people believe in Him than believe in a secular universe? The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that". "Fuck that" obscures nothing. It's a concise way to say what I wanted to say. I could have said "I disagree", which takes twice as long to say and sounds garbled. I think there's a place for the word "fuck": It's for saying something very clearly and quickly when there's no need for delay. So, "Fuck that" doesn't have connotations. Not in the way that "That's shit" does, or even "Fuck you". Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3). I agree completely. As an aside, it's interesting right now watching my comments just in this thread. Once they hit 0 and turn grey, there's a lot of turbulence and they hover around there until they go black again, but the comments here that are in the black have quite high scores. That reinforces my belief that reading a grey comment biases you to think it's a bad comment. So in my mind, the threshold now where a single voter can grey a comment is too low. Setting it to -2 means there'd have to be a three-vote discrepancy between ups and downs, which I think sounds about right.

dcurtis 17y ago

Fuck that. Don't you think that reaction is a little bit extreme? Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site.

unalone 17y ago
If I'd just said Fuck that, absolutely! As it is, I went on to add a whole ton of details. Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site. Really? When you're spending 30 days flying around on a plane and sleeping in airports, I'd imagine you're the one with more time to waste. The top comments on HN are still the highest-voted ones. Read however many you want before the discussion tires you. Also, I can't think of many HN threads that ended up with more than 300 comments. 300 is at most an hour's reading; an hour isn't very long.
- dcurtis 17y ago
  Who are you? Why does it seem like you're angry all the time? I pointed out an observation. Your response used the word fuck and then called me lazy, which is extremely rude. Would you have said that to my face? This isn't personal, dude. I just get the same feeling now when scanning comments that I get when I am looking at products on Amazon and can't see the price.
  - unalone 17y ago
    I'm an art student who is very rarely angry and doesn't think swearing indicates emotion. I also believe that it's better to have to spend time thinking about what to read, how to spend your time, than it is to be offered an easy way out that risks devaluing what people are saying. (I further believe that being called lazy usually isn't an insult.) In person, I'd probably be doubly critical. Don't think of it as rude; I think criticizing what somebody's saying is a sign of respecting them. To quote a guy I'm in the middle of reading: "The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself." If I were being rude, I'd ignore your comment and not call out what I thought was stupid/wrong about it. As it is, I'm debating what you said because I think there's a discussion to be had. For instance: Why would you feel the same reading comments as you would buying things? There's no harm to reading a few extra comments. You lose nothing but your time, which you're already spending on Hacker News.

derefr 17y ago

I'm the guy who said "Look at your comment score; looks like I'm right." The details are off a bit, though; it was "judging by your comment score, the parent speaks for the majority." I didn't participate in the discussion before that, so "I'm right" would have been a nonsequitor. More importantly, though, the discussion itself was about the poster's demeanor. In all other situations, downvoting isn't an accurate measure of sentiment toward the post, because voting mixes such things as agreement, clarity, obnoxiousness, and humor ratings, weighted differently for each person, into one opaque integer. However, in this case, when a person is voted down for [obnoxiously] arguing that they aren't obnoxious, and the parent is voted up for arguing that they are, in fact, obnoxious, the score really only has one meaning, in both cases: how much people dislike the poster. This is an exceptional situation; I never would have argued "by comment score" otherwise.

unalone 17y ago
Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying!