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Experiment: No Comment Scores

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Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#201

Post by Perceval »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #106
tumult wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ones near the top are some kind of product of age (more recent) and score (higher). By the way, the kind of skimming you're describing is what leads to mob voting :) People skim for the highest rated stuff, read it, then rate it up more. Plenty of good comments never get rated up, and people who say the most inflammatory stuff (or just make stupid jokes) get the votes early on and stay in the "lead" as it were, the s…

Repeat after me: you cannot have a system with points and expect people not to play games with it. Just accept it as a given and try to work around mob voting in other ways. Perhaps there is a way to make the system work against it's own mob tendencies. The entire point of using karma is that it means something -- it has value. Heck, I bet to some folks it has a lot of value. I'd further bet that it has so much value…

I agree. As an administrator on Wikipedia since 2004, I have to say that, while Wikipedia is not perfect, I do appreciate their skeptical stance toward voting. Especially where points matter and pseudonimity allows for multiple accounts, voting runs into awful problems. The Wikimedia foundation has codified some of their thoughts on the negative effects of voting here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Voting_is_evil

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#202

Post by hxa7241 »

As far as comment-scores are used to filter one's reading, there is an inherent contradiction in the system:

* the reader wants some filtering, so they can just read the good stuff

* the filtering is done by the readers, which requires they read more than just the good stuff

So the filtering can never be extremely effective, i.e. showing everyone only the good stuff, because then the filtering would not get done at all. I suppose it is a weakness in all public-contribution-based systems.

The work has to be done by someone. Perhaps there are other, better ways of allocating that work. A first thought: lower scored items appear stochastically -- lower score, less frequent random appearance. That might help by making it seem like there is less 'work' to do . . .

It seems the whole subject would warrant a fair amount of pondering and experiment (although it looks basically economic) . . .

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#203

Post by deutronium »

I kind of miss the lack of comment scores. I do think they allow me to be more selective about the comments I read, based on the wisdom of crowds.

Is there any chance we could have two style sheets, one in which they are hidden and the other where they are visible?

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#204

Post by adrianwaj »

adrianwaj wrote: post #85

I'd try out rounded percentage scores. Out of the total comment Karma alloted to all comments for an item, what proportion of this amount is contained within each comment? The issue here is that upon voting, you couldn't change all displayed comment percentages at once, it'd have to change on page reload. Also, it could be a rounded 1-10 scale. -- edit: would be good to reveal any comment score upon voting: gives an…

also - to make the score pertinent:

- either cap underlying comment scores at 50 points

OR

- instead of giving a percentage score for a comment's proportion of total comment points, rank comments in terms of lowest positive score to highest positive score: then give each comment a score between 1-10 by segmenting the long tail into 10 even parts. (the initial ranking may not even need to be used)

having no visible scores seems surreal.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#205

Post by 10ren »

unalone wrote: post #177
NathanKP wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit. That's assuming that the majority is right. If somebody gets voted down there is a pretty good chance that they were wrong, or even if they were right, they said in the wrong tone/manner.

"Pretty good chance." But here's the thing. What if they're not wrong? What if a bunch of people read the comment, didn't quite understand it, and then downvoted it because it already had downvotes? I know I act like that a lot while reading. I also see a curious downvoting pattern on those frequent incidents when somebody mass downvotes all my comments for some reason or other. I'll assume for argument that on avera…

"Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth.

The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that". Also consider pg's comment recently about "bogus" research, and how so many people then jumped on him. Actually, someone got sued in the UK for calling research "bogus", instead of factually and objectively calling out the problem with it. It's also in the HN guidelines to use neutral and factual language without connotations.

By observing myself, I've noticed that my interpretation of a comment is affected by the upvotes/downvotes on it. It's not surprising, given the experimentally confirmed tendency to conform in humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3).

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#206

Post by krschultz »

unalone wrote: post #195
dcurtis wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you? Why does it seem like you're angry all the time? I pointed out an observation. Your response used the word fuck and then called me lazy, which is extremely rude. Would you have said that to my face? This isn't personal, dude. I just get the same feeling now when scanning comments that I get when I am looking at products on Amazon and can't see the price.

I'm an art student who is very rarely angry and doesn't think swearing indicates emotion. I also believe that it's better to have to spend time thinking about what to read, how to spend your time, than it is to be offered an easy way out that risks devaluing what people are saying. (I further believe that being called lazy usually isn't an insult.) In person, I'd probably be doubly critical. Don't think of it as rude…

That explains why you have so much time to read all the comments.

I don't have time to read all the comments so I'll look at the greatest hits. You can find the conversation based on the kharma scores, both positive and negative. If someone says something -4, it might be worth reading because it got such a reaction out of people. But a bunch of 1s and 2s on an old thread are noise that aren't worth reading.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#207

Post by unalone »

krschultz wrote: post #206
unalone wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an art student who is very rarely angry and doesn't think swearing indicates emotion. I also believe that it's better to have to spend time thinking about what to read, how to spend your time, than it is to be offered an easy way out that risks devaluing what people are saying. (I further believe that being called lazy usually isn't an insult.) In person, I'd probably be doubly critical. Don't think of it as rude…

That explains why you have so much time to read all the comments. I don't have time to read all the comments so I'll look at the greatest hits. You can find the conversation based on the kharma scores, both positive and negative. If someone says something -4, it might be worth reading because it got such a reaction out of people. But a bunch of 1s and 2s on an old thread are noise that aren't worth reading.

That explains why you have so much time to read all the comments.

What, that I'm a student? Reading comments doesn't take that long. As I said above: Fifteen minutes at most? And that's if it's a seriously long thread. Most threads are five minutes' skimming at most.

If someone says something -4, it might be worth reading because it got such a reaction out of people. But a bunch of 1s and 2s on an old thread are noise that aren't worth reading.

Not necessarily. Perhaps somebody made a brilliant comment, but only after people were done reading. In any case, that hasn't changed now: Top-rated comments appear at the top of the thread, same as always. So if you want the most "valued" conversations, read at the top.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#208

Post by mhb »

blogimus wrote: post #87
wglb wrote: post #21

But don't votes also give feedback to the commentor? I have used this to learn what works within this community and what doesn't. Now, I only know by approximation to my total karma, or if i am bad, that I turn gray.

You can still see the votes on your comments by looking at your comments history.

And that's awkward - maybe even unusable. It takes you out of the context of the discussion.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#209

Post by unalone »

10ren wrote: post #205
unalone wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pretty good chance." But here's the thing. What if they're not wrong? What if a bunch of people read the comment, didn't quite understand it, and then downvoted it because it already had downvotes? I know I act like that a lot while reading. I also see a curious downvoting pattern on those frequent incidents when somebody mass downvotes all my comments for some reason or other. I'll assume for argument that on avera…

"Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth. The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that". Also consider pg's comment recently about "bogus" research, and how so many people then jumped on him. Actually, someone got sued in the UK for calling research "bogus", instead of factually and objectively calling out the problem with it. It's als…

"Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth.

There's no such thing as a democratic theory of truth. The truth isn't something that can be voted on. Does God exist because more people believe in Him than believe in a secular universe?

The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that".

"Fuck that" obscures nothing. It's a concise way to say what I wanted to say. I could have said "I disagree", which takes twice as long to say and sounds garbled. I think there's a place for the word "fuck": It's for saying something very clearly and quickly when there's no need for delay. So, "Fuck that" doesn't have connotations. Not in the way that "That's shit" does, or even "Fuck you".

Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3).

I agree completely. As an aside, it's interesting right now watching my comments just in this thread. Once they hit 0 and turn grey, there's a lot of turbulence and they hover around there until they go black again, but the comments here that are in the black have quite high scores. That reinforces my belief that reading a grey comment biases you to think it's a bad comment. So in my mind, the threshold now where a single voter can grey a comment is too low. Setting it to -2 means there'd have to be a three-vote discrepancy between ups and downs, which I think sounds about right.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#210

Post by proee »

The Hacker News community should decide if this featured is enabled (maybe a poll post).

Having you just take this away on a whim because you felt it "might" be better is pretty poor taste in my opinion.

It all most feels like papa Apple just rejected an iPhone app because they didn't like the "feel" of it.

Please bring back the comment scores ASAP. I can't envision myself staying round here without them ;-)

At a minimum, give me the option to turn it on for my own viewing pleasure.

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