5 ms·
Ask HN: Orange dot?
What is this little orange dot I keep seeing around the comments?
Is it related to the now-missing comment ratings?
- jacquesm 17y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123
- seiji 17y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846343 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846343 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123
- colbyolson 17y agoI see, thanks guys for the timely replies.
- chanux 17y agoOrange? Apparently PG sees it red :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123
- ugh 17y agoThe color was changed.
- erlanger 17y agoSilliness. A community far too self-aware. By the way, suppressing these metrics is pointless. We are intelligent people who notice the difference between two comments with very similar upvotes and one that far outpaces the other and find these proportions to be of interest. The new portrayal of comment rankings keeps interesting information from users and will end up stunting the community's progress. If you're just trying to ward off users, maybe remove the nav and make the site even slower. There are far more interesting ways to differentiate. I'd like to see this site be as light and fast as possible (would appeal to our hacker ethic) and allow users to customize the hell out of it given knowledge of Arc or similar (good chance to promote your language as well).
- ujjwalg 17y agohopefully, it wont last too long. The experiment with orange dot will fail and we will have comment score back.
- dc2k08 17y agoI hope it lasts long enough to gather some stats on voting; whether or not more or less votes are cast with the new system, how spread out they are etc. I liked the idea of masking votes when it was initially suggested too. Bravo to pg for trying it out.
- NathanKP 17y agomake the site even slower Yes, concerning the site speed I definitely upvote the idea of making the server faster. Maybe they really removed the comment scores to save bandwidth. ;)
- rendezvouscp 17y agoI’m pretty sure there are a few font elements that could’ve been removed first. ;)
- NathanKP 17y agoYeah, removing the stylesheet would have also been good. ;)
- j_baker 17y agoI honestly haven't ever had a problem with the speed of HN.
- NathanKP 17y agoIt's not terrible slow, but I've noticed that recently, within the past two weeks, it has started hanging periodically, even on a T1 connection.
- 17y ago
- pg 17y agoI'm experimenting with not displaying comment scores. The orange dot is an alternate way to help users find high-scoring comments. More details here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979
- lsb 17y agoPerhaps allow comment score over a certain karma and/or age, just like the ability to change topcolor and downvote?
- reedlaw 17y agoHere's the reference： 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.
- yters 17y agoI like the idea. The dot is basically shorthand for what we use the score for, minus a kind of "attractor" effect whereby two high scores, one higher than the other, skews my mind one way. Anyways, have definitely noticed a distinct difference in how I read thread. Instead of skimming scores, I now skim text.
- apotheon 17y agoI'm not exactly sure I understand what you're saying. Are you saying . . . 1. You used to pay more attention to scores than to text? (i.e., "I used to skim the score to see if I wanted to read the comment, but now I skim the text.") 2. You used to pay more attention to text than you do now? (i.e., "I used to skim scores, then read text more carefully, but now I just skim text and move on.") 3. Something else entirely?
- j_baker 17y agoMight I suggest starting an additional thread whenever a change like this happens? There's a certain point beyond which I quit reading comments in a single thread. If I saw a thread on the front page that said something like "we're using orange dots to keep track of scores", I'd have been a lot less confused.
- wvenable 17y agoI'm surprised nobody suggested adding a mouse over to the orange dots. The first thing I did was mouse-over to look for a tooltip to explain the dot and got nothing.
- antirez 17y agoI did exactly the same thing indeed, and probably tons of other people we can no longer count because of lack of score on your comment ;)
- indiejade 17y agoSuggestion for what the mouseover could read: "Our most sincere apologies; YC News has contracted a rather serious case of the chicken pox." (:
- tetha 17y agoYou get nothing, because it is no image. Which does not enhance the information gained.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- akamaka 17y agoHey admins, have you considered toning down the shade of orange a bit? It's pretty distracting right now, compared to the neutral colors of the rest of the page. I'd suggest using something closer to #ff9955
- tumult 17y agoIn case pg or anyone else is still reading this thread, I just thought I'd throw out my opinion on the experiment: Today was the best day on HN in recent memory, and by a large margin. I've followed almost all the links on the front, and the signal-to-noise ratio in the comments seems to have increased by a full order of magnitude. Please return the old behavior of displaying comment scores. I suffered an extra hour's loss of productivity today. (This is awesome, please don't go back to regular comment scores.)
- hughprime 17y agoI disagree -- to me, signal-to-noise looks somewhat lower. I also found a thread which seemed to have devolved into the trading of personal insults without getting greyed out. I didn't like that.
- yters 17y agoOne prob w/ lack of score: I misinterpret time as score.
- mapleoin 17y agoAlso, it should be topcolor, not orange...
- mechanical_fish 17y agoOh, dear. My topcolor is a light blue that looks good with orange but would be invisible in dot form.
- antirez 17y agoTo work hard is the only way to build great things. You can get rich by accident, but you can't build great things by accident. Only working hard. Still it is very important to realize that it's better to improve the quality of your work and work 6/8 hours a day and find the time to relax and enjoy the life. To work very well and focused for 6 hours a day without interruptions I think can be considered to work hard as much as working 12 hours a day with a lot of breaks, environmental noise, and so on. Usually I work from home, but I have a company with five people working together with me, and from time to time I go to work on the office in order to organize the work, solve the hardest tech problems, and so forth. When I'm at the office I'm a lot less focused because I receive many questions, I can't just have my usual working patterns, and my productivity is something like 20% compared to my working at home productivity.
- antirez 17y agoMy score is -2 but I got no replies, I wonder if it's because you think that 6 hours of hard work a day are too little, or for other reason. Please feel free to comment even anonymously because I'm very interested in this issue. Thanks to downmodders for any hint, I believe that smart people should use critics to improve themselves.
- allenbrunson 17y agoyou got modded down because your comment has nothing to do with the topic at hand. perhaps you meant your comment to go in some other thread.
- antirez 17y agoOoops sorry, I posted in the wrong topic indeed. This post was about "working hard is overrated".
- tel 17y agoIn my usage, the orange dot is getting confused with the orange star of "this is my post". I like the consistent color scheme, but maybe there needs to be something else to make it more distinct. Other than that, I really like it.