I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count • Hacker News Board

Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

#51

Post by zwieback » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 10:24 PM UTC

I'm not a heavy user of social networks so I don't know if this exists somewhere but why can't I have a customized view where posters I like are weighted more than others. Then I can do this:

- The poster's weighting would show up as a color (good,better,best)

- The product of the poster's weight and the popularity of the comment determines the order on the page

Now I can look at the top of the page where very popular comments show up and then scroll toward the bottom and quickly identify any posters I really like

I realize this wouldn't be too hard to do by scraping the comment page and maintaining my own database of favorite commenters.

Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

#52

Post by alex_c » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 10:24 PM UTC

gamble wrote: post #26

I've been trying to give it a chance, but so far it doesn't seem like hiding the vote counts has done anything to improve the quality of comments on HN. Honestly, I think it's had the opposite effect. The number of in-depth comments seems to have plummeted.

It's pretty hard to quantify quality of comments, and I've seen at least one other comment in this thread saying the quality of comments has gone up (personally, I'm undecided).

I wonder how much one's perception of the change in comment quality is colored by their initial opinion about hidden comment scores.

Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

#53

Post by merloen » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 10:25 PM UTC

There are so much more possibilities than just "show vote counts" and "hide vote counts": different sort orders based on more than just votes, collapsing threads, marking people as friends, or adding them to a kill-file. Giving votes different weights based on karma, or average comment score. Tagging of articles, and filtering or sorting based on that. And so on, and so on.

I understand that pg hasn't got the time to do all kinds of experiments, but this is HN, where more than half of us are great programmers.

Give us a simple API and let us do our own experiments. That's all I want.

Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

#54

Post by albertsun » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 10:25 PM UTC

Why not have a (high) karma threshold, above which you can choose whether or not you want to see vote counts?

I think respected, established members of the community would know themselves well enough to decide for themselves whether it's good or bad to personally have vote counts.

FWIW: Below the threshold I think it's better to not have counts.

Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

#55

Post by jshen » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 10:26 PM UTC

"because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes. "

This is a mistake. People frequently vote down things that are right because they don't understand the material as well as they think they do.

Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

#56

Post by JabavuAdams » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 10:26 PM UTC

Wow. I never realized that people paid attention to upvotes. This explains a lot...

> Especially as an engineer who knows little about business, it was extremely helpful to get a community perspective on the startup stuff.

It's not a community perspective. It's a positive feedback loop.

> The value of HN, from the perspective of simply learning, has been destroyed for me since upvotes were hidden.

Now, you're learning.

Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

#57

Post by yosho » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 10:27 PM UTC

Can we at least maybe have a star rating or color rating or something that lets us differentiate high voted comments from mediocre comments? It really does simply take too long to scan and read all the comments. Most of the time I'm just looking for interesting snippets of information, I simply don't have the time to read everything.

Please bring something back, I find myself never reading the comments now.

Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

#58

Post by wdewind » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 10:28 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #28

wdewind wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is absolutely a fault in any social proof system. As I mentioned, upvotes need to be taken with a grain of salt. I still hold they are far superior to nothing. Edit: case in point: I'd REALLY like to know how many people upvoted mmaunders original comment.

"I still hold they are far superior to nothing." I disagree. Since the new system was implemented the signal:noise ratio seems to have gone up. The fact that HN is more difficult to read now is a good thing; it forces people to think for themselves, and improves the overall level of discussion. I do agree that the voting should be shown after a few days, but for right now the changes seem to be making things better.

Removing the obvious noise comments like "+1", "lol", bad jokes etc. how are you defining signal and noise?

This is my entire point: I don't care about the points when I know about the topic, it's when I'm not qualified to decide what is signal and noise that they are valuable.

I can't agree that the signal noise ratio has gone up since the system changed, though this is a subjective, unmeasurable point.

Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

#59

Post by JabavuAdams » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 10:29 PM UTC

ajj wrote: post #47

wdewind wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is absolutely a fault in any social proof system. As I mentioned, upvotes need to be taken with a grain of salt. I still hold they are far superior to nothing. Edit: case in point: I'd REALLY like to know how many people upvoted mmaunders original comment.

I agree. In terms of learning new things, the vote count helps tremendously! You can tell that a security-related suggestion earning 50 up votes is sound (of course considering context), technology-wise. I've learned a lot about passwords, plaintext, server-side hashing, salting and related best-practices solely from HN comments. Displaying scores might make the other aspects troubling (since group-think is supported…

> In terms of learning new things, the vote count helps tremendously! You can tell that a security-related suggestion earning 50 up votes is sound (of course considering context), technology-wise.

No, absolutely not! You can only tell that other non-experts agree in some path-dependent fashion.

I'll occasionally see highly-upvoted nonsense in an area that I'm expert in. This is very bad.

This is some kind of cognitive bias.

EDIT> I should clarify that it's entirely possible for experts to disagree. So this isn't the you disagree with me so you dumb argument.

Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

#60

Post by dhughes » Thu, Apr 28, 2011, 10:29 PM UTC

lukifer wrote: post #18

mmaunder wrote: post #3

You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction. The problem with vote counts is that two downvotes can start a cascade of reflex downvotes. Or at best, it won't get upvoted. When vote counts where active, this effect caused many instances where an excellent comment was found greyed out at the bottom of the page until a few smart HN folks with high karma voted it back up.

Idea: a [view count] link. Once clicked, votes are ignored for that comment. You can vote, or get the social proof, but not both.

I figured that is part of how it works anyway not just upvotes.