Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HN comments are underrated

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 383 posts

Re: HN comments are underrated

#101

Post by tptacek »

latch wrote: post #32

Removing the vote count was a step back. You end up with highly positioned comments that are factually wrong and no way to weigh the corrections made in replies. If you saw that a comment had 20 votes, but a reply had 500, you'd have something to go by. If nothing else, they could show the relative score of a reply to its parent.

The vote counts weren't removed to make the comments more comprehensible or the threads easier to mentally rank. Their removal may very well have made those tasks harder.

Vote counts were struck because they were causing fights.

Paul Graham decided to risk sacrificing a little bit of comprehensibility in exchange for some extra civility. I think the tradeoff has worked very well --- especially because incivility crowds out comprehensibility anyways, so that almost anything you do to make a thread more civil will have the knock-on benefit of making it easier to read.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#102

Post by mafribe »

panic wrote: post #100
throwanem wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discounting someone's opinion on the basis of skin color and economic circumstances rather than content, for example.

A person's background is what forms their perspective on the world. That background and perspective affects the content of their posts. You can't separate the two things so easily.

2+3 = 5

Re: HN comments are underrated

#103

Post by tptacek »

dancek wrote: post #29

I think HN needs a way to easily find the top comments. There are absolute gems deep in discussion threads, but you'll need to spend a lot of time reading to find them. Hence, it's very nice of Dan Luu to list some of his favorites. The top root-level comment for each comment page is obviously easy to see, but good comments deeper in the comment tree are easily lost. Would be great if e.g. the top 5% voted comments o…

Dan and Scott recently added a "favorites" feature that you can see if you click the timestamp for a comment. Saving a comment to your favorites publishes it in a list of favorites on your profile.

I think they're not especially happy with how this feature is working out.

But I also think they're very close to a version of the feature that would work quite well:

* The "lists" page on the site should include a list of users that have "favorite" comments (at least until the site has so many users with favorites that the list is too long to make sense) with links to their "favorite" pages. This seems trivially easy, and would help bootstrap the feature.

* There should be a master list, linked perhaps on the top of the page (maybe replacing the useless "comments" link) to a list of the most-favorited comments.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#104

Post by tptacek »

DanBC wrote: post #50
qb45 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear there was a way to show top voted comments but I can't find it now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

The problem with /bestcomments is that it's based on votes, and thus does not in fact track the best comments.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#105

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

Semiapies wrote: post #95
50CNT wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that it's interesting that there is an etiquette developing on when which XKCD is appropriate.

Well, here. It's still popular on Reddit to be the first to post an "obligatory" link to a vaguely relevant xkcd. Here, that usually gets downvoted fast.

I do it sometimes, but only if the XKCD is actually highly relevant. As a result, I've actually never gotten downed for it.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#107

Post by nabla9 »

zazen wrote: post #65
nabla9 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

".. the measure of a healthy organization is probably the degree to which negative thoughts are allowed. In places where great work is being done, the attitude always seems to be critical and sarcastic, not "positive" and "supportive". The people I know who do great work think that they suck, but that everyone else sucks even more." ­­-- Paul Graham

This may very well be true in organizations where the sarcasm exists in an established context of mutual respect (or at least, the knowledge that you'll have to keep working with the other person). But it's very different when total strangers communicate by text over the internet: sarcastic comments breed aggressive replies, and threads degenerate into arguments very rapidly. I think good conversations online need mo…

I have noticed in HN that well justified critical comments without hostile tone are faced with aggressive tone if the subject is some new hot technology.

The underdone seems to be "say positive things", not say intelligent or insightful things.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#108

Post by AlexB138 »

blt wrote: post #47

I think the culture of rejecting joke-only comments is significant. I love a good joke, but so does everybody else. Rewarding jokes would have a major effect on the signal/noise ratio.

Agreed. The quality-death of many forums I've been a part of came from the onset of users posting joke responses becoming the norm. One joke amid 100 comments can be funny. One quality comment amid 100 attempted jokes is banal and mind numbing.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#109

Post by cronjobber »

> when people make comments that aren’t just reasonable sounding but are actually correct, those comments tend to get upvoted

For a while, I found that on pages with lots of comments the most interesting ones were to be found at the top––and, buried between actual dross, at the bottom.

That might have changed, I don't see it that much anymore. But that could be a side effect of something even less desirable. I think some people may have started flagging whole articles when the discussion has "too many" comments they dislike. I can't prove this, of course.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#110

Post by novaleaf »

wfeui3 wrote: post #71

I lost faith in HN crowd when hyperloop started. California can not even replicate 40 years old TGV, but somehow it will build space-like technology for fraction of price. And than there are politics. Entire world should accept millions of refugees. But SF is different, and should not even host 400 homeless who arrive every year.

"Not in my backyard"
Post reply on HN