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Experiment: No Comment Scores

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#251

Post by blasdel »

pg wrote: post #242

I'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.

The ranking changes you just made completely eliminated whatever mental model of thread dynamics I had left. It's not clear that you understand the degree to which you're playing with fire here.

A 'good but late' comment won't be seen by anyone anyway, due to your front page ranking algorithm that prevents even the most active threads from spending long enough on the front pages.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#252

Post by blasdel »

pg wrote: post #247
tyn wrote: post #246

This 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.

The solution to that is to make the vote scores logarithmic.

Removing information helps nobody.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#253

Post by snprbob86 »

njl wrote: post #244

This 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…

Maybe the issue is just the absoluteness of the scores. Behind the scenes, unbounded numbers are fine, but when presented to users they cause a tendency for gaming. I propose a follow-up experiment:

1) Keep the absolute scores secret

2) Continue graying out down-voted comments

3) Do not show any numeric indicator for conversations with less than N comments (I'd experiment with N near 10)

4) When the number of comments is greater than the threshold, show which percentile the comment is in for the set of positive comment scores in that thread.

This way, when you look at a comment you don't think "Does this guy deserve more points?", instead you think "Is this comment better than 75% of the other comments here?"

I think this would improve voting AND increase the value of that voting: people would have the right frame of mind when voting and the UI will present an easier value to determine how worthwhile it is to keep reading.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#254

Post by mechanical_fish »

sgk284 wrote: post #240

I love this idea, but it should really be initially implemented as a kind of A/B test. Simply choose half of the UIDs at random and always show them the comment score, and don't show it to the other half. Track which comments are upvoted most when their score is visible versus when not (there are many other metrics to use as well). It should be pretty easy to determine how much groupthink plays into voting. I suspect…

On the one hand, I completely agree with the scientific merit of your suggestion.

On the other hand, showing different HNs to different people doesn't exactly strike me as community-building behavior. I think it would make the site feel even more like Temple Grandin's barnyard, with us in the role of the cows. Will my species behave better if we design the floor like this? Will that tweak to the algorithm prevent us from starting fights among ourselves? Oh, no, a gathering of more than twelve people -- we'd better build a robot to break those up.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#255

Post by [deleted] »

blasdel wrote: post #252
pg wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The solution to that is to make the vote scores logarithmic. Removing information helps nobody.

[deleted]

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#256

Post by pg »

njl wrote: post #244

This 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…

Ok, comments over a threshold (currently 5) now have a red dot prepended to them. Is that better?

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#257

Post by pclark »

pg wrote: post #256
njl wrote: post #244

This 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…

Ok, comments over a threshold (currently 5) now have a red dot prepended to them. Is that better?

I don't think it's clear what the red dot means. The issue with removing scores is I can't speed read only the "good" comments. Can you make the top n% of comments stand out somehow I wonder?

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#258

Post by mixmax »

pg wrote: post #256
njl wrote: post #244

This 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…

Ok, comments over a threshold (currently 5) now have a red dot prepended to them. Is that better?

Better but in no way perfect. The problem is that the dots don't convey enough information to accurately skim a thread for good comments. In a thread with more than 200 comments a binary value simply isn't enough.

The problem could of course be solved by showing the points...

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#259

Post by scott_s »

pg wrote: post #256
njl wrote: post #244

This 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…

Ok, comments over a threshold (currently 5) now have a red dot prepended to them. Is that better?

It should probably be scaled to the number of comments in the thread, or to the average score in the thread. Any static threshold will be easier to hit in the threads with higher traffic, and too many threads with a red dot adds to the noise.

The other side of that is that threads with very little traffic don't need as much meta-information, but there's an in-between.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#260

Post by lucumo »

pg wrote: post #256
njl wrote: post #244

This 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…

Ok, comments over a threshold (currently 5) now have a red dot prepended to them. Is that better?

What do the grey dots mean?
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