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Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#151

Post by BrandonMarc »

lbotos wrote: post #39
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #16

It's worth comparing this poll to the one about whether HN should display comment scores: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 Only 38.5% of users were in favor of comment scores being hidden, but it was decidedly a positive change for the site.

As a fun aside, the other day a coworker and I noticed that HNsearch actually shows comment scores when you view per author: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sillysaurus3#!/comment/forever/pre... (I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but interesting none the less.)

Shh, now they'll turn it off!

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#152

Post by fragmede »

Gormo wrote: post #149
fragmede wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MetaFilter does that, and doesn't seem to have problems with quality of discourse. What also helps the level of discourse at Metafilter is moderation to the tune of showing up in threads, deleting comments, and saying "knock it off" when things get particularly bad.

Sure, but that's done on a case-by-case basis, when things actually do get out of hand; it's not a universal, preemptive moderation system that's built right into the structure of the site.

Can you imagine the outcry if it was revealed pg goes into threads to delete negative comments about him?

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#153

Post by tripzilch »

rando289 wrote: post #90
rando289 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I'll add that the most frustrating thing to me is this: 3 comments in a row, are ranked as #1, #2, and #3. I end up reading crap, or not reading good things because that order tells me almost nothing. If I saw the scores, and they were 200, 5, 3, I could know to skip the bottom 2 if I wasn't very interested in the topic. If the scores were 200, 199, 198, I would be sure not to neglect reading #3.

Not seeing the scores also encourages hijacking visibility by replying to the top comment. #1 score 1000 ->#2 score 5 #3 score 800 We end up reading comment #2 before and often instead of #3. Most really popular posts load 4-5 comments in reply to the actual post in the first page of comments. It's honestly ridiculous. I would really love to be able to collapse comment trees like on reddit, and even better if they ag…

Some simple comment auto-collapsing logic (like Reddit has, it's nothing magic) would actualy be "the simplest thing that could possibly work", a lot better and more straight-forward than adding yet another (third!) layer of voting to the comments.

Also I agree that hiding scores was not "decidedly a positive change", for the reason rando289 points out, among other things. It's just so useful information. Sure it changes the way people deal out votes, but in the end it's all about how the posts are sorted, not the individual points, and I doubt the sort-order will change much (and if it does, whether it'd be worse).

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#154

Post by tripzilch »

paulrademacher wrote: post #48
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #16

It's worth comparing this poll to the one about whether HN should display comment scores: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 Only 38.5% of users were in favor of comment scores being hidden, but it was decidedly a positive change for the site.

Is there a follow-up poll showing that it's "decidedly a positive change"? :-)

According to rkuykendall-com, that actually was the follow-up poll, held after the change was implemented.

So no, it was not widely regarded to be a decidedly positive change.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#155

Post by tripzilch »

jfoster wrote: post #91
jonesetc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant it to go along with the rest of the paragraph. I think you'll see people turn around at the door with this policy. I would have.

That's certainly a possibility. It would show up in HN's metrics. (perhaps not visible to you and I, though) On the other hand, you might also see more people coming in the door. What if this makes conversation on HN so much better that more people want to get involved? The one thing that is certain with the new system is that if your comments are abusive, they will probably not get endorsed. Perhaps at first they wi…

> protesting 1k+ karma users

well, I'm going to voice my concerns and complain about it, but I'm not going to sabotage the system out of spite. that's childish.

> but eventually anyone who is endorsing poor quality comments would likely lose the ability to endorse.

If that happens it'll be because some invisible moderator has a different idea about "quality comments" than I do.

If it happens, I will lose the ability over endorsing puns.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#156

Post by tripzilch »

pg wrote: post #2

I suggest another option: wait to see what it's like.

You mean like we tried and waited to see what it's like to have invisible comments?

You even held a poll[0], the outcome of which was the majority didn't like it, but you left everything as it was anyway.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#157

Post by dchichkov »

chippy wrote: post #136
dchichkov wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a chance that YC had already crossed the threshold of not being money-hungry and now is in the community-building mode. And if not. Oh well. Anyone who matters is likely to be intelligent enough to detect company bullshit/groupthink and this would be the end of it.

There is no such thing as the threshold of "threshold of not being money-hungry and now is in the community-building mode". What on earth is that idea from? Is it a capitalist view, that if you becoming immensely wealthy that your wealth confers benefits automatically on society? I'm curious. Y Combinator is not turning into a charity or a non-profit. How does that make logic? It's primary intention is to make a prof…

Even if you'd drop completely selfless motives out of the picture (rich and eccentric folks sometimes fancy these and in particular this hackernews site seems to be pg's pet project), as far as I understand it, the long term success of YC as a business depends upon the long term success of Bay Area / Silicon Valley. If this is indeed the case (and if they don't need to squeeze every cent out of ppl right now), they may as well be in the 'community building' mode.

The original post had said "how critical public messaging and perception is to that business". Hmm. In my opinion, what is somewhat critical to them (business-wise) is this upcoming 10B DropBox IPO. Everything else doesn't look that critical to me. I doubt that a change to a comment system here can have any observable interaction with the IPO process. So I doubt that 'enforcing groupthink on a news company outlet' is critical to them and that it was it. Just pg working on his pet project seems more like it.

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