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Experiment: No Comment Scores

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Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#291

Post by jacquesm »

unalone wrote: post #209
10ren wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 wha…

I think the problem is not so much with the choice of words as it is in the company in which you choose to use those words.

I swear a lot, I grew up in a fairly rough area of a big town and it took me some self control to get rid of it.

It's not that I mind, it is that other people mind, and the use of it in 'polite discourse' is therefore discouraged, there are other ways to express exactly the same thing without chancing stepping on someones toes. In general, if every third comment on HN would contain swear words we'd have to start calling it 4chan, and I'm sure plenty of people - including me - would leave.

That says noting about your freedom to choose whatever words you want, but you have to be aware that you are changing the atmosphere in a non subtle way by your choice of language.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#292

Post by johnnybgoode »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #285
camccann wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or troll first (why you'd want to do that I don't know, but some might) At least on slashdot, the "troll"s are sometimes, in their own way, funnier than the "funny"s (if only because of not involving overdone /. in-jokes).

I'd go so far as to say that I'd enjoy reading jokes and one-liners the folks here have to say about the news. We've got some really smart people that read HN. I bet their jokes are hilarious. But that's only sometimes, not all of the time. If there could be a button for turning jokes off or on (or sorting by funny) then it'd be a hoot to see the site in that asepct., In short, I don't think it's a human behavior pro…

> I'd go so far as to say that I'd enjoy reading jokes and one-liners the folks here have to say about the news. We've got some really smart people that read HN. I bet their jokes are hilarious.

I agree. HN, while of course useful in other ways, seems so humorless to me. I understand that some HNers are paranoid about HN turning into Slashdot or Reddit, but it would probably be nice sometimes to have a more community-like feel, even if it were totally segregated from the "real" HN.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#293

Post by jparise »

cvg wrote: post #265
pg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps this is just me, but doesn't red seem counter-intuitive for a positive score? I think we're conditioned to think red is bad and green is good. Could this dot be changed to green? Also, could you put an alt or label on that dot with something like "over 5 votes" or some other descriptive text? A bit more accessible.

I'd stay away from red and green and go with orange, to match the header color. These dots shouldn't map to any specific connotation; they're just visual indicators.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#294

Post by mechanical_fish »

moe wrote: post #267
pg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The dot adds visual noise (just as the redundant "by"). It might be worthwhile to try and map the color code onto the arrows. Red up arrow instead of red dot could serve both as highlight and as "stop, don't click me".

I really don't think that coloring the arrows is going to be a good idea. That will carry entirely too much meaning. People will think the red has something to do with the button and will be confused.

I also suspect that you haven't thought this through. Try mocking up a page full of red arrows instead of red dots. Even without doing so myself, I predict that because the arrows have twice the area of the dots you'll find that it looks far more cluttered.

Meanwhile, my bikeshedding alarm is flashing. ;)

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#295

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#296

Post by jurjenh »

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?

Seems like a lot of people have their own specific ideas to how they may want comments sorted / listed.

How hard would it be to allow people to implement their own version of the ranking function and then have the comments passed through that. Store the function in each person's profile, make them visible, and more importantly, make them share-able (like an app store?) so you can see which functions turn out to be most popular...

There's a giant can of worms there safety-wise (people running their own code on your server ?!?!) and unknown loading effects (nothing to stop people writing infinitely recursive loops...), although that said, it didn't stop you with viaweb did it?

Also haven't looked at the news.arc code recently so not entirely sure which part could be customised...

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#297

Post by jrockway »

pclark wrote: post #257
pg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why is it other people's job to decide what is and isn't good?

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#298

Post by mechanical_fish »

jurjenh wrote: post #296
pg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seems like a lot of people have their own specific ideas to how they may want comments sorted / listed. How hard would it be to allow people to implement their own version of the ranking function and then have the comments passed through that. Store the function in each person's profile, make them visible, and more importantly, make them share-able (like an app store?) so you can see which functions turn out to be mo…

How hard would it be to allow people to implement their own version of the ranking function and then have the comments passed through that?

Harder than you think, I expect. You're proposing to do a custom query, of arbitrary, user-chosen complexity, for every single page view.

Moreover, the result will be of dubious merit. Individualized filter functions screw up conversation. That's what's wrong with conversation on the rest of the web -- people all read blogs, but nobody reads the same blogs, and people encounter the blogs in arbitrary order, and some blog entries are more out of date than others, and the result is like trying to carry on a conversation with a bright but slightly deaf time traveler who is probably a troll.

We have a distributed, personalized version of HN comments: They're called blogs and RSS feeds. The quality tends to be higher. Your personal filtering options are much more numerous and powerful. And they're just not the same thing. Otherwise I, for one, would be writing for my blog instead of posting on HN. Lord knows it would be better for my career.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#299

Post by mechanical_fish »

njl wrote: post #286
pg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really, really like the basis of this idea. But the more I ponder what you're trying to solve, the more I think you should provide scores weighted within the discussion. Perhaps, the quintile a comment is in. Use a bar that adds segments and shifts from one non-judgmental color to another. I wouldn't bother showing anything below a threshold of ten comments on a single link. Otherwise, your piling-on problem return…

Well, twelve hours ago or so I suggested the quintile idea. So I feel qualified to vehemently disagree with myself. ;)

On second thought, the problem with the quintile idea is that it presumes that every thread has an equal distribution of valuable contributions, middling contributions, and lousy contributions. But we don't want to rule out (e.g.) the possibility that an entire thread might be great and that every post deserves a dot.

Moreover, the quintile idea retains aspects of the piling-on problem: A sufficient quantity of super-upvoted comments will push other worthy comments out of the top quintiles.

Finally, quintiles are just way too complicated.

So I'm prepared to believe that I was wrong twelve hours ago. I like the threshold idea. Especially because the threshold can be tuned. If 5 isn't enough it can be turned up to 11 by a well-meaning moderator, acting at the appropriate time.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#300

Post by pg »

johnnybgoode wrote: post #276

I'm seeing dots for some comments instead of the score. It looks like gray dots for comments with a high score and red dots for comments with a very high score. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the change to some extent? Edit: Sorry, it looks like this was explained after I had loaded this page. Still, this seems like a partial reversal. Also, this story is at #16 on the front page and really should be at #1 consid…

I've been experimenting with various ways of indicating high scoring comments. At the moment I use an orange dot after the time.

At one point I tried giving all comments initial dots, and turned them red when the comment had a high score.

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