I think this is very nice because karma isn't really worth anything and comments that are popular still get to be seen without the mob mentality to vote them up
Experiment: No Comment Scores
31–40 of 327 posts
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have noticed things changing around too. I hear there is this thing called a "dev server"...
I usually do development on my local machine, but for small things like this I use the server's repl.
Nice. I wondered why things were changing quickly but there were never any page load errors.
I don't trust myself not to kill my app with a live REPL :)
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#33I think this is very nice because karma isn't really worth anything and comments that are popular still get to be seen without the mob mentality to vote them up
I think karma was an incentive for people to contribute comments. You might not be getting sex or money, but you are getting that feeling of creating something other people like.
Now you don't really know if people like your work or not, so why bother contributing?
(I know why: "because someone is wrong on the Internet!" But it is nice to get some karma too, :)
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#34Ah, I love change! Though a smart hacker can make a model that takes into time and position of a comment to predict the comment score?
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#35I didn't realize how much I was affected by the comment ratings until they went away. Commencing cognitive restructuring.
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#36I didn't realize how much I was affected by the comment ratings until they went away. Commencing cognitive restructuring.
"Commencing cognitive restructuring."
Indeed. Interesting how fast the brain adapts. I just caught myself looking at the total score and trying to predict which comment is getting upvoted (since I see the total increasing). And I don't even care about comment score!
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#37i have to admit that i would equally like to see this happen for content submissions.
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#38Does anyone else find their eyes constantly scanning to try and find the score for each comment? I wonder if this means that I rely too heavily on the comment score? It's amazing how such a subtle change can reveal something more profound.
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#39And here I was, thinking firefox was screwing up the JS. I guess this should improve the quality of discussions a lot, since a lot of people tend to just skim the few comments at the top. Not displaying the comment scores might make them read more.
I don't think this'll stop people from just skimming the top. But, it will stop them from finding those highly rated comments hidden by a low rated parent comment.
Which brings us to an interesting point: Shouldn't comment threads be sorted by the total votes for all comments in that thread???
Re: Experiment: No Comment Scores
#40Wow, this interferes with key elements of my system for voting/commenting on HN. Here are some things that don't work now:
* If a comment is sitting at 1 or 0, I'll try to avoid downvoting it unless I really think the comment subtracts value from the site.
* If a child is attracting more votes than the parent, and I think this is because the child commenter didn't comprehend what the parent was saying, I vote to level out the comments.
* If I see a comment sitting in negative territory that I feel should only be a 0 or 1 because it wasn't that bad, I'll upvote it even if I otherwise wouldn't have.
* If a thread is already dominated by a couple of high-scoring comments, relative to its age, I'm less likely to post a new top level comment. My feeling is that if a good comment just sits at the bottom because it arrived slightly too late, I've only added noise to the thread. The lack of visible points makes it much harder to gauge how a new comment will 'compete' on the thread.
* If the scores indicate that something is being widely misunderstood, I might comment where I otherwise would not have to try to restore sanity.
Of course, if this change were to stick, it would alter the character of the site, and we would all develop new voting and commenting systems. I can already tell that this change magnifies my tendency to vote with an eye toward reordering comments rather than voting on each comment in relative isolation.