211–220 of 327 posts
Any chance we can see scores when we're looking at our own comments section? Often when I notice a bump in my karma I look at my comment threads to see what was so popular.
Ok, now there should be scores next to your own comments. Better?
On the same note, if an article is waaaay down at the bottom, and someone's taken the time to read it and likes it, then it should get a good solid bump. This will create a "bubble effect" and allow those treasures that are buried deep down in the comment land, to rise to the top and even accelerate as more users find out and rank them.
This essentially is a formula to equalize the comments and give them a fair playing field as they battle for the top most position.
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Who are you? Why does it seem like you're angry all the time? I pointed out an observation. Your response used the word fuck and then called me lazy, which is extremely rude. Would you have said that to my face? This isn't personal, dude. I just get the same feeling now when scanning comments that I get when I am looking at products on Amazon and can't see the price.
I'm an art student who is very rarely angry and doesn't think swearing indicates emotion. I also believe that it's better to have to spend time thinking about what to read, how to spend your time, than it is to be offered an easy way out that risks devaluing what people are saying. (I further believe that being called lazy usually isn't an insult.) In person, I'd probably be doubly critical. Don't think of it as rude…
True, but often times the top comment will not be the highest rated, but the reply or subsequent replies below the comment will be rated higher than the orginal post, but the entire thread gets moved to the top because of that.
Now I have no way of knowing that.
[edit] I also have no way of knowing when the MAJORITY of readers are disagreeing with me.
Up votes/down votes has always been a way to express yourself without commenting. If it's not visible, it's not as expressive, nor is it as rewarding to the commentor or the voter. I officially dislike this.
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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…
I may be off base here, but perhaps HN isn't being designed to make skimming easy. Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content, and then voting on that content, is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding. PG wrote an essay which discussed the 'fluff principle' at work in other voting-based aggregator communities, in which the most superficially sensational content usually rose to the top,…
If you think that the secret to encouraging engagement is to flatten out the structure of the information, and ask everyone to read everything in order to discover the influential, popular, or insightful bits...
... you desperately need to read The Paradox of Choice:
http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000...
There is nothing engaging about thirty screenfuls of undifferentiated choices. When presented with that, I'll just leave. If I wanted a firehose of undifferentiated, recent, quality content, presented in a way which made it very difficult to nucleate a conversation or form a community, I'd be using Google Reader.
[EDIT: Incidentally, if not illustratively, I should point out that I haven't actually read the entirety of The Paradox of Choice myself. I listened to the author lecture about it for an hour in a podcast, and I started to read it, and I appreciated the concept, but I felt that the book kept repeating the same point too many times and I had other uses for my time... ;]
One Idea I've had for fixing this problem is to weight the value of a click based on position on the page. The further down on the page, the more weight its gets. Therefore the most popular topic at the top only get marginally incremented as people read it first and decide its worthy. On the same note, if an article is waaaay down at the bottom, and someone's taken the time to read it and likes it, then it should get…
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"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…
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I'm an art student who is very rarely angry and doesn't think swearing indicates emotion. I also believe that it's better to have to spend time thinking about what to read, how to spend your time, than it is to be offered an easy way out that risks devaluing what people are saying. (I further believe that being called lazy usually isn't an insult.) In person, I'd probably be doubly critical. Don't think of it as rude…
"Top-rated comments appear at the top of the thread" True, but often times the top comment will not be the highest rated, but the reply or subsequent replies below the comment will be rated higher than the orginal post, but the entire thread gets moved to the top because of that. Now I have no way of knowing that. [edit] I also have no way of knowing when the MAJORITY of readers are disagreeing with me. Up votes/down…
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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.
Surely the content is the best indicator of context, class, and quality? If you feel lost, perhaps you were relying too much on others to judge an opinion for yourself?
Since most people don't have infinite reading time, people use a heuristic to work out what's worth reading and what isn't, and upmods are a reasonable, if fallable, heuristic to use. I've just come back from an 8 hour shift at a warehouse, and I'm not going to bother reading all the comments - it's simply not going to happen. Sorry if that offends people, but I'm tired. I'm going to miss out on the the good comments because I don't have time to read all the comments.
Secondly, upmods smooth out discussion by preventing redundant comments and people repeating the same point ad nauseum. While this might be perceived as "groupthink", being able to separate a fringe viewpoint (even if they're not necessary wrong) from a popular view is an extremely useful heuristic, because the prevailing opinion is often (but not always) more likely to be a reasonable and reliable answer.
I have a feeling that most people actually practice these heuristics in real life too. Given finite reading time and the contents of all books in history, most people read books that others people have recommended or are popular.
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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.…
More importantly, though, the discussion itself was about the poster's demeanor. In all other situations, downvoting isn't an accurate measure of sentiment toward the post, because voting mixes such things as agreement, clarity, obnoxiousness, and humor ratings, weighted differently for each person, into one opaque integer. However, in this case, when a person is voted down for [obnoxiously] arguing that they aren't obnoxious, and the parent is voted up for arguing that they are, in fact, obnoxious, the score really only has one meaning, in both cases: how much people dislike the poster. This is an exceptional situation; I never would have argued "by comment score" otherwise.
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If I'd just said Fuck that , absolutely! As it is, I went on to add a whole ton of details. Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site. Really? When you're spending 30 days flying around on a plane and sleeping in airports, I'd imagine you're the one with more time to waste. The top comments on HN are still the highest-voted ones. Read however many you want befo…
Who are you? Why does it seem like you're angry all the time? I pointed out an observation. Your response used the word fuck and then called me lazy, which is extremely rude. Would you have said that to my face? This isn't personal, dude. I just get the same feeling now when scanning comments that I get when I am looking at products on Amazon and can't see the price.
"Who are you? Why does it seem like you're angry all the time?"
Which is an angry, personal remark.
The word "fuck", not directed at anyone, is not important. Personal attacks are.
If you don't like unalone's style, ignore him, don't psychologize him. Personally I appreciate the fact that he wrote substantive on-topic comments.