To the people who think that comment points should not be visible:
How do you go about choosing which books to read? Do you read all of them, are you exclusive to specific authors, or do you depend on your peers to make suggestions?
I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
211–220 of 248 posts
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#212Earlier 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…
> For instance, I don't know whether your comment is something a lot of people agree on (it has a lot of upvotes) .... That highlights a major problem right there. I would hope that upvotes are for worthwhile contributions to the discussion. You (and others) seem to assume that they are for agreement. Different things. I would like to know whether lots of people think a comment is worthwhile. But except in the rare c…
While the two variables may be orthogonal for an individual, in aggregate they tend to be the same thing.
To illustrate starting with the most stark case- try to imagine a comment that 0% of HN readers agree with but that 100% feel is a valuable contribution. I can't, and the reason I can't is because usually when I encounter the "valuable but disagree" situation individually, it's actually me thinking "some % of other HN readers may share this misconception, therefore it makes more sense to respond than to downvote." or "I disagree with this, but I know most HN readers won't." Or, rarely, "I disagree vehemently, and feel obligated to make that disagreement known because the 5% of readers who actually agree really need to know why it's [dangerous/silly/misguided...]"
If the poster is the only one in HN-space that agrees, no matter how "thoughtful" (i.e., verbose, in that case; possibly like the comment I'm writing now) it is, it's not important. The fact that some percentage of readers agree* or may agree is what gives it importance. In aggregate I'd suggest that the number and ratio of upvotes to downvotes would match the importance as defined by the community.
In this context I'm using the word "agree" in a sense a little broader than usual. Instead of "I take that position to be my own"- an upvote is broadened to "I can see myself taking that position as my own after further reading/thought/experiment," and finally even "This line of thinking is attractive to the kind of people I like to have in this community."
Where things get muddy is when we take that even further and say to ourselves "Some percentage of people will take that position even though I will not. Therefore it is 'important' and I will upvote it." Kudos to the altruism and social empathy, but imagine if 100% of HN readers thought this way. A position that is shared by only 5% of the community would have the same number of votes as a position shared by 90% of the community, even pithy one liners and mean-spirited ad-homimems. In a more likely equilibrium, a percentage of people will do an "importance" upvote for an item separate from their agreement with a probability roughly equal to the number of people who actually agree with the comment (So, there's a 1 in 100 chance that I'll give an "importance" upvote on an item that roughly 1 in 100 people would agree with). That would keep the proportions more or less sane and only result in general karma inflation.
Whew, hopefully showed my point- aggregate agreement _is_ relative importance- even if the individuals agreeing and upvoting are not the same people. I could go on with a parallel line of thought for disagreement, although with slightly different results (it's probably a lot less likely that one thinks "While agree with this, it's not important." or "I agree with this and it is important, but x number of people probably don't agree with it so I'd better give it a downvote to be fair...") In fact maybe, the difference between the two sides is key to the bigger questions of site quality degradation.
So, to the bigger question: possible reasons for degradation that I've thought about and seen discussed so far-
* People trying to decouple agreement from importance and therefore end up trying to channel the thoughts of others, leading to inflation and biases in all sorts of weird ways due to a social instinct that is, by itself, very positive and healthy.
* The blind leading the blind (avalanching) that pg is experimenting with solutions to now.
* Scariest of all because the fixes are more difficult: The community, in aggregate, is not as valuable/smart/insightful as it was. This compounds the problem with the first point- What happens when some percentage of people (say, greater than 10%) genuinely find "You're a dirtbag" insightful? It trumps the other two points even if they're perfectly solved. What happens when 80% of readers thoughtfully proving comments turns into 30% of readers, with the other 70% just there to "learn" and follow the lead of the 30%?
The last point is the most difficult to solve, but there are several methods- there are tweaks such as the "only posts from old members" hack pg did, the green names for greenies, etc. Then there are more frontal attacks: Doing everything you can to lift the collective thoughtfulness and intelligence, and discouraging, sometimes via use of the downvote, comments that aren't worthy of the community.
With all three happening at once, the system becomes very difficult to understand. Some suggestions:
* Let your vote reflect your degree of agreement/disagreement, AFTER giving it some serious thought. Feel free to not vote either way and to post follow-up thoughts or questions instead first.
* Refrain from voting as an emotional reaction or indiscriminately to simply feel more a part of the community.
* Try not to take downvotes or upvotes personally.
* Never pass up an opportunity to try to crystallize your own thoughts and lift the collective intelligence of the entire community by responding with care, whether expounding or disagreeing.
* Never pass up an opportunity to downvote comments that genuinely degrade the intelligence of the discussion ("frist p0st", personal attacks, almost anything that is a single line and contains no wit...)
* (more I'm sure but this post is getting way too long)
EDIT: formatting
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#213Could we have a hybrid? We don't need to see the exact number... what if massively upvoted (100+ points) got a green highlight on the "link" URL, and massively downvoted (-10 or more) get shaded, like they already do?
This keeps the content from being so quickly judged, but eventually shows strong content that has been upvoted by hundreds without bias.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Get rid of karma. In fact, get rid of associating usernames with comments. These two things are very different. I'd be all for getting rid of karma, but usernames provide identity. I.e. when evaluating someone's comment it would be good to see other comments they've made that might provide insight into their biases. 1) username insight into what you think over time 2) karma insight into how popular your comments ar…
> usernames provide identity.
No the don't, they provide a social signaling function that can be just as powerful as a vote count. When a "popular" name is attached to a post it gets read more closely and frequently voted up. If HN users were truly interested in letting the "quality" of the content stand on its own then comments would not have names attached to them and the content would truly stand on its own.
> when evaluating someone's comment it would be good to see other comments they've made that might provide insight into their biases.
In other words, let the popularity of a username influence the visibility of the content. If you are suggesting that people (including yourself) actually go back and check out user comment histories with any frequency I think you are mistaken.
Karma is not just popularity, it is also a measure of perceived authority and insight that a comment provides to a discussion. The consequence of losing this signaling function may not have decreased the quality of the comments, but it has certainly decreased the utility of the comment sections at HN.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#215When I first started reading HN I learned a TON very quickly and everyday about completely new stuff, and was able to do so because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes. And yet the founder of HN said 25 days ago that there is a problem with HN, "the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 He summed up the problem by saying "Th…
To be totally honest with you I haven't noticed much of a change in the overall thread quality at all, except that I feel like I'm missing half the picture. The community has definitely felt some growing pains, but it is absolutely not clear that hiding comment scores has helped.
Looking at the best comments page, no I don't think it looks particularly better (or worse) than it did a few months ago.
On that best comments page, look at how many of them are on threads (including this one) asking to bring scores back.
When pg put it to a vote, more people wanted to see them than not.
Since the community was the backbone and validity of the voting system, by taking away the visibility voting system we are taking away quite a bit of faith in the community. If we don't think the voting system is valuable for viewable scores, why is it valuable for sorting the threads? Adding to the fact that a significant majority wanted them shown, it doesn't really seem like we've got a lot of faith in the community as a whole. And if we don't have faith in the community, doesn't that mean HN is kind of dead and we just don't know it yet?
I don't think it is, and I think the upvote system is imperfect but worked much better than nothing. And maybe exact scores aren't what we need, but just sorting the comments isn't enough.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#216When I first started reading HN I learned a TON very quickly and everyday about completely new stuff, and was able to do so because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes. And yet the founder of HN said 25 days ago that there is a problem with HN, "the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 He summed up the problem by saying "Th…
Without the score being displayed I simply can't go through the hundreds of comments that get displayed on HN every day. It would be perfect if I could, but I don't have the time and wonder who has. Yes, displaying the votes supports groupthink, but it's better than the current solution, which is throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#217When I first started reading HN I learned a TON very quickly and everyday about completely new stuff, and was able to do so because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes. And yet the founder of HN said 25 days ago that there is a problem with HN, "the decreasing quality of comment threads on HN." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 He summed up the problem by saying "Th…
You're missing that even if both popular + insightful get upvoted, you can still use this as a prefilter, look at the high upvote counts, and dismiss that which is mean. It's how I used the system. Right now we just get pages an pages of text with little in the way of friendly direction if you don't have time to examine all the commentry.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#218How come this post is not in the first page after 8 hours while the following post for example still is?
Joel Spolsky: Lunch (joelonsoftware.com) 275 points by alexlmiller 12 hours ago | flag | 175 comments
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If we're speaking purely in terms of debate for purposes of Aumann-theoretic truth-finding, then there's many other things you can do to accede to someone else's point than by simply saying some moral equivalent to "Hear, hear!" For example, you can reinforce the parent post with additional justifications, or explore corollaries to its conclusions. You can provide an example if it's a generality, or generalize it if it's a concrete example. Someone I don't know saying "This!" about a subject I'm no expert on is just as informationally-empty to me as that same person posting a single-sentence "No, you're wrong." I see an opinion, but that provides me with no more basis on which to form my opinion.
But agreeing and disagreeing aren't the whole of discussion, either. The posts I enjoy the most on HN are neither of these—instead, they're just comments on the subject of the article, but with the ideas of their parent commenter serving as an additional jumping-off point for whatever tangent they find themselves on. When I think of something that's valuable to the discussion (and therefore deserves upvotes), I think of the parents to these posts—the ones that cause people to spin off tangents in all sorts of directions; those are what I want to see more of here. On the other hand, the expression of purely normative opinions, whether through the voting arrows or through long-winded sermons that still simply amount to "Yay!" or "Boo!", is something I want to see avoided altogether. I can form my own opinions by reading the facts in the discussion and doing research on them, thank-you-very-much—and if I don't have time to do that, then I shouldn't think I have time to form an opinion.
Re: I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count
#220How come this post is not in the first page after 8 hours while the following post for example still is? Joel Spolsky: Lunch (joelonsoftware.com) 275 points by alexlmiller 12 hours ago | flag | 175 comments
"Ask HN"-types posts (i.e. without a link) are heavily disadvantaged. They take more upvotes to get to the front page, and fall down faster.