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Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#81

Post by rory096 »

jonesetc wrote: post #59
pg wrote: post #2

I suggest another option: wait to see what it's like.

Even if it's just a test, it seems a reasonable scenario that just the test will cause permanent damage. I understand trying to promote better discussion, but this system is downright unwelcoming to any newcomers. When I registered to comment I thought the downvote restrictions were odd and I was willing to try it out, but if this was in place I'd have closed the tab and never come back. Maybe subject-matter experts…

As a (mostly) lurker who's quite wary of this change, I agree that stifling newcomers and longtime but quiet users could deprive the HN community of something real.

That said, Hacker News is a high enough quality forum that it could fare quite well for some time even if it completely cut off registrations. I don't think the experiment will be catastrophic by any means; though it'll undoubtedly result in at least some useful content never reaching daylight.

Of course, the fact that the HN comment sections are right now orders of magnitude higher quality than the internet at large is precisely why this change seems unnecessary. HN has long been- and still very much remains- a secluded mini-Reddit for startups and hackers. Doesn't that ethos almost demand the welcoming of newcomers?

EDIT: I wonder if everyone realizes the feeling of being excluded arbitrarily by karma count. Sure felt weirder than I anticipated while this comment was pending.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#84

Post by rando289 »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #56
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #16

It's worth comparing this poll to the one about whether HN should display comment scores: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 Only 38.5% of users were in favor of comment scores being hidden, but it was decidedly a positive change for the site.

> it was decidedly a positive change for the site. Was it? When things were transparent, there were no reason to upvote interesting trollish comments. Now they get blindly up-voted for being interesting. For example, consider this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7436401 About 5 facebook engineers are answering questions. They are of course buried by a meta discussion about whether facebook should use PH…

Agree. I'll add that the most frustrating thing to me is this: 3 comments in a row, are ranked as #1, #2, and #3. I end up reading crap, or not reading good things because that order tells me almost nothing. If I saw the scores, and they were 200, 5, 3, I could know to skip the bottom 2 if I wasn't very interested in the topic. If the scores were 200, 199, 198, I would be sure not to neglect reading #3.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#85

Post by vinhboy »

te_chris wrote: post #45
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #16

It's worth comparing this poll to the one about whether HN should display comment scores: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 Only 38.5% of users were in favor of comment scores being hidden, but it was decidedly a positive change for the site.

Prove that it was a positive change. If anything it's made parsing the comments harder IMO as the comment count provides extra context about how the community feels about the comment.

Your comment brings up a really great point.

Hiding comment karma actually took something away from the community.

If it added something. I did not see it.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#87

Post by mburst »

I'd maybe agree if the issue was dealing with comment spam.

The system kind of gives me the feeling of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I think it'll be much tougher to get to that 1000 karma threshold which will make sub 1000 users less likely to comment if their comments aren't actually getting posted. 1000+ users may also get bored of having to endorse other peoples comments. From what it sounds like it could seem like a job.

One alternative could be to only allow 1000+ users to upvote and all other users can only downvote comments. That way you still get your idea of having top karma users pick what everyone else reads. In either case I'm a fan of the Reddit model for all users.

There are lots of ideas that I think are dumb that still manage to do well so it'll be interesting to see. The free market will decide soon enough.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#88

Post by jonesetc »

brudgers wrote: post #78
jonesetc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's just a test, it seems a reasonable scenario that just the test will cause permanent damage. I understand trying to promote better discussion, but this system is downright unwelcoming to any newcomers. When I registered to comment I thought the downvote restrictions were odd and I was willing to try it out, but if this was in place I'd have closed the tab and never come back. Maybe subject-matter experts…

HN is like EMACS not WordPad. It has a learning curve.To some extent, HN is unwelcoming to new comers by design. It filters out people who want to behave to the same standards as the rest of the internet. To put it in perspective, your post would several standard deviations above the mean both in length and content on most sites. Would have written so thoughtfully and carefully a year ago?

Supposing that I was writing about something I cared about, yes I would have. Maybe that just means I already went through the learning curve on other communities though (vim -> emacs).

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#89

Post by jfoster »

amjd wrote: post #79
jfoster wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how a test might cause permanent damage? Keep in mind that it should be clear whether significant damage is occurring quite soon after it rolls out. (Eg. Whether comments are getting approved, rate of comments, etc.)

The thing is, this is a kind of change which makes it difficult to know the real impact since the users who would have a problem with it are the ones losing their voice (until a karma elite user intervenes, of course). That's one of the reasons most people are opposed to this.

Everyone can see pending comments, though. At a minimum, everyone has the potential to find out if there might be a problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/pending

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#90

Post by rando289 »

rando289 wrote: post #84
jcampbell1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was decidedly a positive change for the site. Was it? When things were transparent, there were no reason to upvote interesting trollish comments. Now they get blindly up-voted for being interesting. For example, consider this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7436401 About 5 facebook engineers are answering questions. They are of course buried by a meta discussion about whether facebook should use PH…

Agree. I'll add that the most frustrating thing to me is this: 3 comments in a row, are ranked as #1, #2, and #3. I end up reading crap, or not reading good things because that order tells me almost nothing. If I saw the scores, and they were 200, 5, 3, I could know to skip the bottom 2 if I wasn't very interested in the topic. If the scores were 200, 199, 198, I would be sure not to neglect reading #3.

Not seeing the scores also encourages hijacking visibility by replying to the top comment.

   #1 score 1000
      ->#2 score 5
   #3 score 800
We end up reading comment #2 before and often instead of #3.

Most really popular posts load 4-5 comments in reply to the actual post in the first page of comments. It's honestly ridiculous. I would really love to be able to collapse comment trees like on reddit, and even better if they aggressively collapsed by default based on their score.

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