61–70 of 74 posts
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Bluntly, I don't want to read every comment.
You don't have to. Highly voted comments are helpfully floated to the top of the thread or post. Just read a few at the top and you should be good to go.
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It's like removing karma on articles, and saying 'if you don't have time to read the articles and evaluate for yourself which ones are good or bad why are you even here'? For me there are a number of answers to your question: - I love HN because I get to learn about lots of stuff I know very little about. For example I'm a business guy not a progammer, but I love to learn more about the non-business things. I genuine…
As a PhD and researcher that occasionally sees articles on HN in my field, I can tell you that correctness of a comment's content can be independent of comment karma. I have seen 100% correct posts downvoted to oblivion with highly rated 100% incorrect responses by users playing some sort of formal debate game nonsense. In my pre-HN-bankruptcy account, I used engage and try to correct these discussions, but really it…
From a visual inspection things look the same as always.
Personally I'm really missing seeing the karma on comments. Fundamentally, removing them has changed the balance of what karma is all about. Karma previously had a function for the reader. It highlighted and bubbled up the good. It showed where there were good counter points. Now...well it's just for the account owner. It feels just like it's there for your own rpg-levelling style dopamine hit. It feels pointless. I…
I don't miss the karma at all. If you don't have time to read the comments and evaluate for yourself which ones are good or bad, why are you even here?
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If someone states that it is their firm belief that the Earth does indeed sit at the center of the universe, with the sun revolving around it, I just can't agree with it, and think it should not be a highly rated comment. Same sort of deal when people are factually wrong, but aren't being a jerk about it: I don't think they should rate that highly, but I wouldn't likely vote them into negative territory either. And y…
Then don't upvote then, it's simple! Remember http://xkcd.com/386/ I always thought that the saving grace of /. was the metamoderation. People here downvote based on personal bias here frequently enough, and it would be nice to have the bad actors dinged for it. I'm not saying you do this, but it is done. Far better to have a highly upvoted correction.
Downvoting obviously wrong comments is very simple too. And useful. Like I said though, in the past I've tended to do so because it's incorrect, not to "punish" as I might with a mean-spirited comment, so I would never go past -1.
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Why not show the comment score after you vote on the comment?
That misses the point - the comment score helps you decide which comments to read given time constraints.
What I recommended would encourage more voting, so you could just read the most highly ranked comments with some confidence about quality -- poor comments would probably be downvoted quickly.
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I totally understand why the karma is kept hidden, to avoid herding votes, but I also really miss the access to the HN community barometer. I placed great value in the information contained in those vote tallies, and it hurts to have that taken away completely. A good compromise would be to have a button at the bottom of the page that says, "OK, I'm done voting now, please show me the tallies", and the voting buttons…
A more thoroughly thought-out (easy to implement) architecture would be for voting to be disabled on all threads after x days, with vote tallies being displayed at that point. If you guys want to fancy it up, you could implement the feature where users could indicate they're done voting on the thread and see the tallies early, and you'd only have to keep track of x days worth of user thread status flags before you ca…
From a visual inspection things look the same as always.
Or how about the distribution of upvotes over comments under one post -- are upvotes more uniformly distributed?
Do the comments on the bestcomments list have greater or fewer upvotes on an average?
I've made one important change in how I vote as a result of the hidden score change. I'm now more afraid to downvote. My usual downvote algorithm was: If offtopic/noise and score >-4 then downvote. Now I don't downvote for fear that it already has 100s of downvotes and I'd just be dogpiling.
If the post is offtopic/noise why is -4 a magic threshold? If that threshold can be justified why not incorporate it into HN as policy? If it's just to protect egoes, then HN can just secretly use something like a log scale or some other relationship when displaying karma to users.
If voting patterns are more independent of a post's current karma, the measurement should be less biased. The same is true for positive karma--I often don't bother vote up comments that already have relatively "high" karma.