Agreed, votes are a good way to filter out the most of noise from the signal.
I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
71–80 of 248 posts
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#72I completely agree. I don't have time to read every comment. I miss being able to skim to crowd-sourced, high up-voted comments.
These high up-voted comments are still exactly where they were before - at the top of the thread.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#73i can't even post anymore
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#74Nowdays I just don't read beyond the first few comments. Request to please bring back the upvote count.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#75You 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.
Would having a socket puppet just to peek at votes be grounds for banning?
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#76I feel the opposite - I'm learning more, because if I'm spending the time to read something, I have to think critically about it and do research sometimes in order to have a good interpretation. It takes more time, but it's real learning, instead of echo-chamber reading.
It's like it's gone from a cherry-picking exercise to an actual reading exercise. It requires more of a commitment, and it seems to keep the dialog on a more contemplative level.
We're all speaking about "seems" and "feels" here, so it's coming down to impressions (not to mention taste differences), but some ideas for measuring the effect:
- change in the "story point count"-to-"comment count" ratio
- change in average current (and future?) karma of the people who do comment
- change in average comment length
None of these is an objective measure of quality, but they do indicate "change" which might help Paul or whoever make a decision about whether that change was desirable.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#77I don't use upvotes to decide what I agree with, I use them to decide what to read in the first place. Hiding the votes means I can no longer skim through a thread to pick out the comments that are gems; I'd have to read all the bad comments too. And this means that reading comments here is no longer worth my time, so I don't do it. This is definitely not the desired effect.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#78Good comments are still put at the top. Mentally filter out the recent comments, and you should be able to see quite easily how "good" a comment is. I honestly don't see the big difference.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cognitiv…
But that's a great opportunity for the expert to step in and say something valuable in reply. The high upvote count of the "wrong" response will lead to your response getting more readers.
The fact is we're already half way bought in to this "social bias". Otherwise just get rid of the voting altogether. Get rid of karma. In fact, get rid of associating usernames with comments. But I think everyone realizes, even if they don't like to admit it, that social context provides some value, even if not perfect.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without some sort of vote indicator, it's hard to tell who has the most accurate opinion, except often in subjects like law, security, and seo where there are known experts that often chime in (e.g. grellas, tptacek, patio11). You assume that votes are a good indicator of who holds the most accurate opinion. My experience says that they are merely an indicator of who holds the most popular opinion, or who argues thei…
That's a very fair point. Unfortunately, when I don't know the subject matter at hand, social proof is pretty much all I have to determine good opinion from bad. Keep in mind that the title of this submission has to do with learning from HN, so that's the perspective I'm taking as well. If you don't know anything on a subject, the most popular opinion isn't necessarily a bad jumping off point for further research. I'…
You still have that rough idea of social proof in the comment ordering. Of course there's the occasional very recent comment sprinkled in, but I think the error this introduces isn't worse that popular, but slight wrong comments upvoted with herd-thinking.
I like it this way even for discovering new things, especially since the lack of comment points prevent my brain from going into autopilot mode. Trying to grasp new ideas without a concerning mind just doesn't cut it for me ...