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I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
201–210 of 248 posts
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed (if you don't like short comments like mine, bring back the vote count and I'll happily upvote the parent)
Whereas before this would have gotten downvoted, but there is now no meaningful way to communicate your agreement than to leave a comment.
I like the chain of comments more than an up-vote.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#203I don't understand this. I have no problem discerning good quality content and comments from bad quality. I just read stuff. It sounds intellectually lazy and quite possibly self-defeating to rely on the trivialities of other people's votes to determine what is important to YOU.
After all, what is important to ME or not important to ME has nothing to do with what's important to YOU. The fact that you have stopped learning anything on HN, as you put it, has to do with YOU and not ME. So, don't blame the lack of votes. I wonder how you can get along in this world where you have to evaluate things at face value. In the "real world", there aren't point values and upvote/downvote nonsense on things.
I hope HN gets rid of the point system altogether. I'm sure I'm in the minority.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#204Perhaps pg should set a point where the points are revealed, but additional voting is locked out (but not comments)? Perhaps 24-48 hours after an article is submitted? Then provide a link to those articles as they decay into that group for people who really need point confirmation to catch up on what the rest of the community thought?
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#205You 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.
I hate this assumption that everybody on HN is stupid. We're not. HN is one of the smartest communities on the internet. I'm not saying that everybody here is completely immune to what you're talking about, but this isn't digg. We're not just going to heap on the downvotes because we're trying to follow the pack. In fact I've found the opposite to be true; HNers seem to be really good about correcting downvotes. Comp…
I agree that we're smart. That's why I think we can all read things. Points add little value to a good comment, or detract substantially from a bad one. If you don't have time to read, you shouldn't be participating in an active forum like this.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed (if you don't like short comments like mine, bring back the vote count and I'll happily upvote the parent)
Whereas before this would have gotten downvoted, but there is now no meaningful way to communicate your agreement than to leave a comment.
Why do you need to communicate your agreement? I receive no benefit from knowing that you, as an individual, like something.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#207Here's a thought: maybe it's time to close HN. That's right, close it down. PG said all along HN was a production experiment for Arc, so maybe it's time to evaluate the hypothesis and conclude the experiment.
All this hand-wringing about 'the community' and signal/noise indicates the membership has outmanoeuvred any means of wrangling it into some pre-conceived notion of 'quality'. For better or for worse, the thundering hoards of the internet have arrived and are drowning out the elitist clique. If that is bad for everybody, then it's time to shut up shop.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whereas before this would have gotten downvoted, but there is now no meaningful way to communicate your agreement than to leave a comment.
Why do you need to communicate your agreement? I receive no benefit from knowing that you, as an individual, like something.
Isn't that the whole point of discussion? Otherwise, all comments would only be contradicting their parent. The upvote count allowed us to balance disagreements (which usually need an counter-argument) with agreement, which don't need to re-iterate what has been said.
Now we get to have a lot of "+1" to counter-balance the criticism.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a minor detail that might or might or might not be significant. I personally don't see a lot of comments with negative votes that weren't deserved, but maybe you frequent other threads than I do. On the other hand, I agree with the OP that not showing the votes has significant downsides. For instance, I don't know whether your comment is something a lot of people agree on (it has a lot of upvotes) or it has j…
>> or it has just been posted two seconds ago, and is thus the top comment. you can always see how much time has passed since that comment was posted.
Then you go back and read the source so you can try to run through the calculation backwards in your head to estimate, relative to the surrounding comments' timestamps, what the score might be based on its position?
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate this assumption that everybody on HN is stupid. We're not. HN is one of the smartest communities on the internet. I'm not saying that everybody here is completely immune to what you're talking about, but this isn't digg. We're not just going to heap on the downvotes because we're trying to follow the pack. In fact I've found the opposite to be true; HNers seem to be really good about correcting downvotes. Comp…
I agree that we're smart. That's why I think we can all read things. Points add little value to a good comment, or detract substantially from a bad one. If you don't have time to read, you shouldn't be participating in an active forum like this.
Do you also apply this logic to books in a library?
How do you choose which ones to read? Do you read all of them?
I think if you don't have time to read all of the books and judge them on their merits, then you shouldn't be participating in an activity like reading books.