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Experiment HN: Remove Numbered Listing
I tend to not give much attention to the news items that are towards the bottom of the front/news pages, more so to the ones on the 'next' pages, and I think part of that might be due to the number rankings next to them. My mind attaches some sort of numbered value, which could color the way I view the submission quality-wise. I'd imagine others might be doing the same. Might be interesting to see if there's more user engagement with submissions if those numbers are completely removed.
- pg 17y agoI think I tried this when I was writing it, and without numbers the page seems too unstructured. You need something, and bullets don't do it.
- jacquesm 17y agoFunny how when you make something 'minimalist' the smallest changes can upset the balance because they are a large part of the whole. One a 'bombastic' site such a small change would hardly be noticeable. HN is like a laboratory experiment.
- gbookman 17y agoYou could do an iTunes-esque stripe pattern, alternating between white and some other contrasting color. This site does something similar: http://slickdeals.net/ http://slickdeals.net/
- mrfish 17y agoI read HN from google reader so it doesn't even affect me. I wonder how many people actually read the site instead of from their reader. edit: I just realized that by doing it this way, I negate the point system. Oops.
- scott_s 17y agoI didn't consciously notice that items have numbers next to them until a few days ago. The numbers communicate the same thing as the relative position. So I doubt it makes a difference for me.
- mattj 17y agoHow about just randomizing the order on the front page? That's a more standard approach to testing something like this...
- BrianB 17y ago..Or a way to retrieve a random article. Maybe with some point threshold qualifier. HN fortunes.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y agoHow about just leaving it alone? I like the numbers.
- pg 17y agoThe ranking of the news is also news.
- mbrubeck 17y agoAs I write this, #30 on the front page is yesterday's #1. Just remember that from time to time and you might not give the numbers so much significance.
- makecheck 17y agoI use the numbers mostly when browsing pages (with "More"), since there is no other indication of what page you're on.
- petercooper 17y agoI don't notice the numbers anymore - they're just bullets to me. But even when I deliberately look, I don't apply any importance to them. It feels kinda random to me - I've seen stories with < 10 points beating not-particularly-old stories with > 100 points. I know there's a formula but since I don't know what it is.. it's random to me :-)
- chaosprophet 17y agoI thought it would be pretty interesting to view the listings without numerical rankings, so I whipped up a script which removed the rankings. As of now, I haven't really noticed much impact on the way I use HN, but maybe it's going to take more time. I think it would make a more positive impact if the points score was removed for the titles. The greasemonkey script is at: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/60421 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/60421