Experiment: No Comment Scores • Hacker News Board

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#171

Post by NathanKP » Sat, Sep 26, 2009, 2:19 PM UTC

unalone wrote: post #166

dcurtis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how sometimes online stores won't tell you the price of something until you add it to your cart? Hacker News feels kind of like that now. Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality. I feel kind of lost.

Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality. Fuck that. Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying and form your own opinions? That groupthink is just going to naturally turn out better than forcing every member to think about what they're reading? For the longest time, HN has become more and more "accessible", at the cost of a lot of intellectual discussion.…

somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit.

That's assuming that the majority is right. If somebody gets voted down there is a pretty good chance that they were wrong, or even if they were right, they said in the wrong tone/manner.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#172

Post by unalone » Sat, Sep 26, 2009, 2:20 PM UTC

billswift wrote: post #142

frossie wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting - I manfully tried for a bit, but my interest in voting seems to have evaporated with the numbers. Like tc, I often vote to "balance out" as much as to "join the mob". My prediction: comment voting will drop precipitously.

My response is different. I find I'm voting more, without being able to "balance out" I am now tending to vote up more than before. I'm also downvoting more, though that hasn't changed as much as the upvoting.

One thing I don't like: The graying out of comments at 0 and -1. Your comment was gray when I came across it, and now that comes across as a very significant visual for judgment. I don't think a single voter should have the power to gray something out before anybody else has read it.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#173

Post by unalone » Sat, Sep 26, 2009, 2:22 PM UTC

camccann wrote: post #161

araneae wrote: post #152

I actually expect that posts may become more extremely negative than they used to. At some point, you become sorry for a person with a highly negative comment; or at least I do. Sometimes I upvote comments that are negative because I think that the downvotes are unreasonable. Now there's no way for others to provide a check on the immoral downvoting behavior of others.

It seems that negative-scored comments still start to gray out, so you'll be able to upvote something you think has been unjustly penalized. What you won't be able to do is aim things toward a desired positive score, such as downvoting a one-liner joke with 100+ points that you wouldn't downvote if it were at 20 points or less.

It'll be curious to see, then, if those one-liners get even more massively upvoted, or if the reaction towards them becomes something negative.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#174

Post by unalone » Sat, Sep 26, 2009, 2:24 PM UTC

j_baker wrote: post #54

I notice that nobody here is playing devil's advocate, so allow me. What was wrong with the site beforehand? Sure the comments have a mob feel to them sometimes, but that's just something a social anything app has to deal with. Over all, I like the comments on HN much more than say reddit or digg by far. Plus, I've never seen a community that responds so well to criticism as this one does.

Social anything apps don't have to turn into mobs. Twitter's not a mob. Facebook's not a mob. Most large forums don't turn into mobs. In fact, forums, because they don't allow for comment voting, usually are much better against sensationalist postings because you understand every post is a user's opinion and not the vox populi.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#175

Post by moe » Sat, Sep 26, 2009, 2:24 PM UTC

mechanical_fish wrote: post #163

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel your pain. I don't think I like the new system that much. At least so far. I'm used to scanning comments as a way to determine which articles to read. Postings with a lot of comment action usually indicate something emotionally appealing. Once I go to the comments section, then I filter by score, only looking at comments above a certain threshold (depending on how much time I have). I usually try not to commen…

This is precisely the problem. Without some idea of what earlier readers think of the comments it is much harder to skim. The top-level comments presumably rise and sink based roughly on their karma (though the algorithm also seems to have other considerations, like momentum). But what of the second-tier comments and below? Ripostes are often where the action is. I might find that I'm reduced to skimming for names th…

Amen.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#176

Post by icey » Sat, Sep 26, 2009, 2:28 PM UTC

unalone wrote: post #168

Confusion wrote: post #146

Earlier 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.

I'm in a similar boat to Confusion on this one. I don't care about elegance; if I make a comment and then someone shows up with 2 sentences that basically say "You're an idiot. Obviously the answer is X." then context is important. Without knowing what the score is, I'll probably disregard the comment because I obviously disagree. However, if my comment has 1 point and the responder's has 50 points, then I know there's a pretty good chance I'm wrong, and know to go investigate.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#177

Post by unalone » Sat, Sep 26, 2009, 2:29 PM UTC

NathanKP wrote: post #171

unalone wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality. Fuck that. Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying and form your own opinions? That groupthink is just going to naturally turn out better than forcing every member to think about what they're reading? For the longest time, HN has become more and more "accessible", at the cost of a lot of intellectual discussion.…

somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit. That's assuming that the majority is right. If somebody gets voted down there is a pretty good chance that they were wrong, or even if they were right, they said in the wrong tone/manner.

"Pretty good chance." But here's the thing. What if they're not wrong? What if a bunch of people read the comment, didn't quite understand it, and then downvoted it because it already had downvotes? I know I act like that a lot while reading.

I also see a curious downvoting pattern on those frequent incidents when somebody mass downvotes all my comments for some reason or other. I'll assume for argument that on average I make useful, relevant comments. When new comments that I make get downvoted, there's about a 50-50 chance that the next person to come along also downvotes the comment, even when it's a good one. They see the other person's downvote and it reenforces in their mind that there was a good reason the comment was being downvoted. The ones that get a reverse upvote, however, then soar upwards.

I had made one comment a few days ago that go downvoted such, then for a while hovered between -1 and -2, with very little differentiation. Then it hit 1 again, and within a few hours had hit up to something like 16. That's a pattern that I see a lot. People are less willing to upvote a comment that's grey than they are to upvote something solidly in the black. That's a flaw.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#178

Post by unalone » Sat, Sep 26, 2009, 2:31 PM UTC

johns wrote: post #81

huhtenberg wrote: post #42

Why not hide the usernames as well then and let the comments be judged purely based on their content ?

I bet that would lead a lot of people to start using signatures. No thanks.

Perhaps we could assign IDs to posters? The first commenter in a thread is A, the second commenter is B, so that each new thread gives users a new identity.

The problem with that is that anonymity leads to trolling.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#179

Post by skolor » Sat, Sep 26, 2009, 2:32 PM UTC

tc wrote: post #62

pg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting patterns showed a lot of users voted to get a comment to what they felt was an appropriate score: they wouldn't up- or downvote something unless they felt its current score was too low or high respectively. But if comment scores aren't displayed, you won't need to anymore.

Hmmm... I always considered that a feature rather than a bug. Only voting when the scores looked "wrong" was an optimization. How do I decide when to vote now? I have a feeling I'm going to settle into a pattern of voting to reorder comments and that I'm going to vote less overall.

I always did the same thing, and I (so far) have been up/down voting far more. Instead of keying in on a specific score I feel appropriate for that comment, I'm keying in on just the three options: Up, Down, No change. Without having a visible score, I am no longer constrained by "If I up/down vote this, it will take it out of the range I want it to be in". Instead I'm just up/down voting as I want to.

Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores

#180

Post by chaosprophet » Sat, Sep 26, 2009, 2:33 PM UTC

NathanKP wrote: post #169

chaosprophet wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which brings us to an interesting point: Shouldn't comment threads be sorted by the total votes for all comments in that thread???

That might make sense but it could still mean that a long, pointless, off-topic discussion would rise to the top, above other shorter, succinct comments that might end up buried at the bottom.

I believe the shorter on-topic comment would be voted up more than the off-topic thread (unless ofcourse, the off-topic thread involves a sparky issue like Micheal Arrington).