The points provide information about what others think about the submission, which is useful in guaging the status of the comment. It does not have to affect your opinion, unless you let it.
Ask HN: Don't show points?
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Ask HN: Don't show points?
#12Sometimes I'll just upvote a submission on the 'new' page with 0 points to trigger group think because I might think the article will spark interesting debate, or to help prevent an 'ask hn' or 'rate my startup' submission from falling, which keeps other users here from seeking advice from the community.
Re: Ask HN: Don't show points?
#13And what about hiding karma points too ? Imo, the problem with karma is that people try to get more karma, per se.
It serves a purpose, though. When you see a user with high karma, you can easily tell that he has contributed a lot to the conversation.
Re: Ask HN: Don't show points?
#14Points have their uses in making it easier to zoom in on the important parts of a discussion (or the best contributions), it's helpful if you have a limited amount of time to spend and you want to make the most of that.
Unfortunately they tend to turn in to a goal by themselves.
Points are the root of all evil ;)
It's a classic case of influencing the system that you are measuring, same with google pagerank or a volt meter with a low internal resistance.
Re: Ask HN: Don't show points?
#15The way it works on Perlmonks(.org) is that you don't see points on a comment/submission until after you've voted. If you want to see the score you can do a "null vote". I definitely think this is a better way to handle it. I really can't think of any reason why you'd want to show score before voting.
>I really can't think of any reason why you'd want to show score before voting.
It really depends on whether you see yourself as a Hacker News reader, or as a Hacker News editor. It's just like Amazon: If I'm a customer, I want to hear what everyone else thinks about something. But if I were hiring someone to be a professional reviewer for Amazon, I'd hide the other ratings to make them as objective as possible.
So here are two ways ratings make HN a more pleasant experience:
- If I have limited time to go through HN, I want to be able to zoom in on the comments others judged to be of the highest quality.
- If the comment is on a topic I have little familiarity with, it's often hard to judge its accuracy/validity on my own. A decent number of votes gives me confidence that the person is right.
So in these respects, it's just like Google rankings or Amazon ratings.
Having points probably does cause some amount of groupthink. I bet hiding votes would scrunch the distribution of votes around the mean.
By the way, if HN's database contains the exact sequence of upmods/downmods for a particular story, e.g. 1, 1, -1, -1, -1, 1, ..., it would be possible to test how much groupthink is involved by modeling the sequence of votes as a random walk and testing how much the probability of an upmod/downmod is conditional on the current number of votes. Or, if HN starts hiding votes, you could analyze how this affects voting patterns. Sounds like an interesting college stats/psychology project for someone :)
Re: Ask HN: Don't show points?
#16I'd much rather deal with the ramifications of "groupthink" than wade through dozens of banal comments.
Vote counts give me more information. While that may affect my understanding of an idea, it's for the better.
Points may have an inherent bias towards older posts or well known authors, but I value what they represent.
Re: Ask HN: Don't show points?
#17Completely agree, and said as much not long ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447563
I tend to find myself influenced by the karma count more than anything else. I have to log myself out after commenting to increase the cost of checking the change to my net karma.
I'm a strong advocate of hiding the karma counts entirely (for users, submissions, and comments). That greatly reduces the conditioning effect, not to mention karma-related drama and groupthink (as Surowiecki argues, crowd wisdom is best procured when evaluations are performed independently). Submissions and comments can still be ordered by net karma over time, as they are now.
Whatever you choose to do, I think there's a strong argument in favor of experimentalism. Especially since the site isn't a commercial undertaking and can deal with the occasional disruption.
(Um, and yes, that user is me. I locked myself out of my account to keep myself from compulsively commenting and visiting the site. Apparently I still wanted back in.)
Re: Ask HN: Don't show points?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the more important question is should you? If 10 other people before have expended the mental energy to figure out that this comment isn't worth reading, why should I expend mine to determine the same thing? I like where you're going with this, but it uses our group mental capacity much less efficiently. There is probably a better solution... looking at a number is a pretty efficient filter and I don't think…
In most cases you’re probably right. But not always. The problem is you don’t know the moral character or intelligence level of the people who first stumbled on to a comment. If two ignorant people happen to see a quality comment first and both vote it down that comment is essentially lost to the group. I think we can all agree there are at least a few fools running around here so the idea isn’t farfetched. So the qu…
But 10 people's moral character? 30?
If the comment was really sparkling, it seems unlikely that the first two ignoramuses would drown out the larger cast of HN. It's not all about timing.
Re: Ask HN: Don't show points?
#19Completely agree, and said as much not long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447563 I tend to find myself influenced by the karma count more than anything else. I have to log myself out after commenting to increase the cost of checking the change to my net karma. I'm a strong advocate of hiding the karma counts entirely (for users, submissions, and comments). That greatly reduces the conditioning effect, not…
You are not good at locking yourself out of your account. While I appreciate the struggle with compulsion, I'm not sure you're fit to dictate guidelines.
Re: Ask HN: Don't show points?
#20I'm not so sure. How do you know that groupthink is the problem? Perhaps the problem is instead that the new users fit in a different groupthink pattern than the old users. In that case, you want to encourage groupthink when it leads to the correct behaviours.