Please delete this
Never mind
1–10 of 11 posts
Re: Never mind
#2[deleted]
Re: Never mind
#3This is a really weird way to look at conversations. Clearly your comment was useful, because you said what a lot of people were thinking, and prompted a very helpful explanation from a subject matter expert. Had you stayed silent, rayiner might not have felt any need to comment, and everyone would have been worse off.
Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.
Re: Never mind
#4Sites like HN have made me realize it's actually more or less impossible to tell if a given argument is well-founded unless you have first-hand experience in the domain. Most people don't have experience in most topics, so upvotes were quite susceptible to "reasonable seeming" yet incorrect arguments.
Re: Never mind
#5This is a really weird way to look at conversations. Clearly your comment was useful, because you said what a lot of people were thinking, and prompted a very helpful explanation from a subject matter expert. Had you stayed silent, rayiner might not have felt any need to comment, and everyone would have been worse off. Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.
Exactly. Moreover, comment scores do not capture information about truth values, and displaying them would seem only to encourage people to confuse them with something which does. It doesn't matter whether 'rayiner's comment has a higher score than that which prompted him to write it - what matters is that both the erroneous interpretation and its correction by a domain expert are there, publicly visible, for anyone to read and evaluate.
If anything, I'd argue that it's almost more worth going the other way, and hiding scores on one's own comments as well. I don't really know what purpose they serve.
Re: Never mind
#6HN is not meant to be a karma competition. The cream will float to the top.
Re: Never mind
#7This is a really weird way to look at conversations. Clearly your comment was useful, because you said what a lot of people were thinking, and prompted a very helpful explanation from a subject matter expert. Had you stayed silent, rayiner might not have felt any need to comment, and everyone would have been worse off. Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.
Exactly. Moreover, comment scores do not capture information about truth values, and displaying them would seem only to encourage people to confuse them with something which does. It doesn't matter whether 'rayiner's comment has a higher score than that which prompted him to write it - what matters is that both the erroneous interpretation and its correction by a domain expert are there, publicly visible, for anyone…
>I'd argue that it's almost more worth going the other way, and hiding scores on one's own comments as well. I don't really know what purpose they serve.
I've never thought of that idea. I think I like it!?
Re: Never mind
#8This is a really weird way to look at conversations. Clearly your comment was useful, because you said what a lot of people were thinking, and prompted a very helpful explanation from a subject matter expert. Had you stayed silent, rayiner might not have felt any need to comment, and everyone would have been worse off. Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.
> Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.
Exactly! This is why I upvote people I'm arguing with.
Re: Never mind
#9This is a really weird way to look at conversations. Clearly your comment was useful, because you said what a lot of people were thinking, and prompted a very helpful explanation from a subject matter expert. Had you stayed silent, rayiner might not have felt any need to comment, and everyone would have been worse off. Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.
Exactly. Moreover, comment scores do not capture information about truth values, and displaying them would seem only to encourage people to confuse them with something which does. It doesn't matter whether 'rayiner's comment has a higher score than that which prompted him to write it - what matters is that both the erroneous interpretation and its correction by a domain expert are there, publicly visible, for anyone…
>I don't really know what purpose they serve.
Ego.
Re: Never mind
#10Inevitably comment votes are going to reflect common thought patterns including misconceptions. Even though this is susceptible to groupthink and gaming, HN has pretty strong antibodies in that area, so I think it's less of a problem than the timing issue.
In short, the worst bias in HN comment scores are that early comments get exponentially more votes than late comments. It would be nice if later posts could get a boost to their upvotes to incentivize late contributions, and help better ones float to the top even after the conversation has died down a bit.