It's a really good idea, but it kinda feels awkward.
I see nothing awkward about it. It just makes you upvote and reply to the most thought provoking and insightful posts rather than the ones with the highest counts.
Experiment: No Comment Scores
241–250 of 327 posts
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#242I'm now experimenting with changing the function used to rank comments. I'm hopeful this will both help users find the good comments on a thread, and solve the problem of good but late comments getting stuck at the bottom of the page.
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, comment rankings also serve to verify the correctness of my thoughts about the article or a previous comment. I believe this is completely normal and reflects the ability to doubt yourself. The fact that I initially think a story or comment is valuable, does not mean it actually is valuable: I may be wrong. As there will usually be comments reflecting different sides of the issue, I need to know what the comm…
That implies you trust the community more than you trust your own judgment. If somebody refutes you elegantly, then you should look into their refutation regardless of whether or not the refutation has many points.
To me, the points are a way for other readers to signal agreement without needing to clutter the thread with dozens of "me too" comments. A score of 50 gives a comment the force of many voices, but it compacts those voices into two efficient bytes.
Sure, it's a noisy signal because scores don't just indicate agreement, but the context usually makes that clear. If a factual claim is up- or downvoted, it usually indicates that people believe the claim is true or false. For analysis or opinion, it may have to more with whether the comment is insightful or thought-provoking.
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#244This change might improve voting, but it decreases the value of that voting.
I'll stipulate that the voting might be more "fair", if that is a goal. I'm not sure it should be. It might make the "game" of getting high karma more fair, but I'm not bothering with or bothered by that game anyway.
On the other hand, I can no longer use the results of this voting to help me skim a conversation. I want to know what everyone else found most valuable, without having to read through every comment on my own. I can't do that anymore. This completely breaks how I use HN.
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#245One Idea I've had for fixing this problem is to weight the value of a click based on position on the page. The further down on the page, the more weight its gets. Therefore the most popular topic at the top only get marginally incremented as people read it first and decide its worthy. On the same note, if an article is waaaay down at the bottom, and someone's taken the time to read it and likes it, then it should get…
That is a good idea. I will see if I can figure out an easy way to do that. It may be enough just to make the time decay on comment scores faster.
Update: I wrote a new function to rank comment threads, and it's being used now. Seems promising.
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#246This new system saves me a lot of time by making HN less attractive.
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#247This new system saves me a lot of time by making HN less attractive.
That could be good, if it did it by removing bad attractions.
Some controversial threads with large numbers of votes were starting to feel like fights that attracted a crowd of onlookers. Those are very engaging, certainly, but it's probably better for both fighters and onlookers to have less of them.
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Top-rated comments appear at the top of the thread" True, but often times the top comment will not be the highest rated, but the reply or subsequent replies below the comment will be rated higher than the orginal post, but the entire thread gets moved to the top because of that. Now I have no way of knowing that. [edit] I also have no way of knowing when the MAJORITY of readers are disagreeing with me. Up votes/down…
I officially dislike disagreeing with somebody without explaining why. That's not what upvotes and downvotes were meant for. They're meant to maintain commenting relevancy by downvoting irrelevant comments. It's a brilliant idea dashed by the fact that most people would much rather downvote things they dislike and call it "democracy".
Oh, I agree with that. I rarely downvote, and if/when I do I always leave a comment. It's more the opposite that I'm talking about here.
Someone may not down vote my comment, which, say, has 7 points. But they may leave a reply that is argumentative to my comment. With this new system, I can only see that my comment has 7 points, but I can't see that the counter-point reply to it may have 34.
The fact that many people are agreeing with the counter-point to my comment is significant, as is my inability to see that.
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#249Please, don't think HN is big enough to justify this change (I wish I could downvote you! :).
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#250This new system saves me a lot of time by making HN less attractive.
That could be good, if it did it by removing bad attractions. Some controversial threads with large numbers of votes were starting to feel like fights that attracted a crowd of onlookers. Those are very engaging, certainly, but it's probably better for both fighters and onlookers to have less of them.
If you're trying to prevent the wrong sorts of attractions, you might also try it on a selective basis. For example, if a thread hasn't received a vote in the past hour or day, or if a user isn't logged in and can't vote, you could continue to display the votes in that thread.