These seem great, but I truely think the biggest thing they could do would be add a line at the top of the page encouraging people to visit /newest. The content that actually makes the front page is somewhat random. I've seen the same thing posted several times, only to have the third posting be on the front page all day. Its also true that much of the content which does make it there is gamed by people who have their friends upvote. Getting more organic votes to new traffic would make that much harder.
Even just showing 2 or 3 items from /newest in a box at the bottom of the front page would encourage me to vote on them. Maybe only show it to a handful of logged in users with a nominal amount of karma to reduce any effects of it in promoting spam on the front page.
this site http://hkrnews.com/ allows you to see the article in an iframe so you can read comments and other headlines all on one page -- faster than clicking between tabs. You can also see the top comments easier by collapsing by clicking the icon
I prefer that HN doesn't say the score of other people's comments, it means you have more power to make your own mind up rather than the vote brigading or "piling on" that can happen on Reddit
I second that, at least have a score hidden functionality that hides the score of messages for a period of time (say 2-12 hours) and also ensure that the score cannot affect the color of the font during that time.
What about after one has made up one's mind, though? Then it could be interesting to compare what one think oneself, with what others think. Then, when one wants to do that, one could click the show-how-other-people-have-voted button, to find out.
It depends on how much granularity you desire I suppose. If you downvote and then see the post turn gray or see it turn gray a few minutes afterwards, that's feed back in a sense. Same for if a vote rises to the top in a thread. You get hints of how a comment does, just not a number. The uncertainty there gives you an idea of the communities feelings while not allowing you to split hairs "comment x in thread y has +4 while comment z in thread w (y!=w) has +3, let me down x to make it consistent with z (I hate x's guts anyway)."
I'm not sure a recent comments sidebar would fit the aesthetic of Hacker News. The HN software is currently storing whether you've hidden certain comment chains or not, so perhaps it could store what comments existed in what thread when you last visited.
Hmm. Not sure I understand this. How would this information be presented to the user? And would the computer somehow assume I've read all comments currently present on the page / in the current comment chain?
You could highlight the first comment of each new subthread, or have an option to collapse the threads down to that point. You could even have a single button that scrolls down to each consecutive new comment chain.
But it would probably have to be a lot more minimalistic than a new sidebar.
Ok, that sounds like the Chrome extension that adds "orange lines next to new comments since your last visit", mentioned in this comment (on this same page): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664187
A button to scroll down to the next unread comment thread sounds interesting.
> What if there was a button one could click, to find out what others think about a comment?
How would that be different from comments which reply to the comment? What someone thinks about a comment, when written down, becomes a comment.
Ah, but perhaps there could be special "annotating replies" which are hidden, and anonymous; they could be used to write things like "I downvoted this because ...".
A feature of these "annotating replies" could be that they are ephemeral; they disappear after, say 24 hours. Say, around the same time when a posting becomes ineligible for downvoting. If you access an old post, you woudln't be able to view that material; it would be gone.
This quality would discourage people from trying to carry
on discussion threads in the annotating replies. Also replies to annotating replies would not be featured: just one flat level.
> How would that be different from comments which reply to the comment? What someone thinks about a comment, when written down, becomes a comment.
Well, yes, the thoughts about the comment, becomes a comment — and then the upvote count, shows if many agree with those thoughts. (But not until after one has made up one's own mind, and then clicked the show-upvotes button. Then one can a little bit compare one's own view of the world, with what others think)
Re annotating up/downvotes: I think people in general wouldn't want to spend time explaining themselves, if they knew that what they wrote, would be "invisible" to most other visitors. Perhaps a few "kind hearted" people would explain why they downvoted, via annotations, but I'm thinking they'd be too few for this feature to be well-spent-lines-of-code.
I suppose that jump-to-parent-&-back can also be implemented as an extension.
I'm thinking it'd make sense with both highlighting new comments, + a recent comments list.
(If relying only on [highlighting comments posted since the last page load], then sometimes one will miss a few recent comments — because usually one didn't read all comments shown on the page, but the next time the page gets reloaded, [previously shown but not-yet-read comments] will no longer be highlighted.)
We had publicly visible comment scores, years ago. They generated flame wars: people would compare their scores to the scores of other comments, feel outrage, and start meta-discussions about the scores.
Even today, if you follow 'dang and 'sctb (whose comments are the informal moderator log of HN), you'll see a significant chunk of their work is just reminding people not to go on and on about being downvoted.
I don't think public comment scores are coming back and I think the quality of discussion is improved without them. There's an interesting phenomenon here about the quality of discussion versus the convenience of consuming comments; it may be that the site is better for participants without the scores, but better for consumers with them.
I have fewer opinions about the first two suggestions. But it's worth keeping in mind that HN has some design limitations that also serve as brakes on runaway discussions. For instance: after a day or two, it's hard to hold on to a back-and-forth debate, because the threads aren't especially easy to find. Notice how HN has no feature to alert you to someone having responded to your comment. Reddit has that, and it's a disaster; it's like the badge on Slack that psychologically coerces you to read chat room messages you don't really care about, except on Reddit there's also an implied demand that you write a new comment to respond. Yech.
I often want to see the newest comments on a thread (I find myself CMD-F searching for "minutes ago"), but I worry that making it trivially easy to do would have similar effects, of encouraging people to monitor threads waiting for comments to jump on. I have to force myself not to do that sometimes on threads where I have a lot of opinions about the subject.
I'd love to see a Trending section added. Something in between the front page and New sections.
I often rely on comments to determine whether I want to read an article, but the New section has none.
The front page on the other hand, is like fishing. A new post 'catching' there is rather random. Paginating to 2nd 3rd etc is then a mismatch of popular older topics and falling newer ones.
I want to see newish posts with a few comments, but not so popular that it's on the front page, and not so old that I've likely already seen it before.
Put a VERY brief outline of the key parts of being a good contributor to the HN community in the post input box as a reminder. Remind me what good content here is. Have an AVOID line right above the add comment button. Remind me if I should reply more than once with different parts of relevant discussion if there are a few points that should each have their own reply from a parent post/article. etc.
Also a link to HN formatting near the add comment button would be nice.
These suggest look good, especially the first one. I like to view and comment on rising posts and can really have a hard time figuring out what's changed once a post reaches 100+ comments.
I use Hacker News Enhancement Suite on Chrome which helps a bit but there isnt an equivalent on mobile.
That one looks beautiful (i.e. the live demo, https://vue-hn.now.sh/top). (Personally I don't want to clone & modify it — I've built something in React.js already.)
I wonder how the contents at HN is licensed. Is it Creative Commons or ... what is it. I'm surprised HN let people pull the data via an API but don't clarify under what license the data is available. (At least I cannot find it.)
— You don't happen to know anything about this? I suppose I can email HN and ask. (Here I found the API announcement: http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api — nothing about any content license)
This is me, as a "normal" user of HN, not reading this article because every time I make any critiques of HN I'm down-voted or told I just don't get the community. But to those of you who engage, I wish you the best of luck.
Who cares about being upvoted or downvoted on Hacker News? There are no guidelines or standards for voting, so there's no context to glean from it, unless a comment gets voted into near obscurity (those are usually objectively bad.) Karma is a meaningless number that tells you little about the quality of the person it's attached to.
This forum is full of programmers, designers and UX engineers. There's nothing wrong with criticizing the site's layout or interface, that's a sign that you actually care about it.
As I noticed - it forces newcomers to stay away from reddit style commenting, also it moves down uninteresting and boring comments so that you can skip to read the bottom lines.
I recently had about a dozen old posts silently downvoted without comment because I linked to a wikipedia article about marginal utility which apparently deeply annoyed an ideologe.
So the de facto workings of the site make me wear downvotes with pride.
Me too! If my comment is up-voted then down-voted then up-voted then down-voted, I know that I've said something that people have different thoughts on, and I know I hit on something. Other times I get down-vote, down-vote, down-vote, just like I thought I would, and am totally happy to take that hit. I put out such comments sometimes knowing they go against the HN grain, and consider the karma-cost as my way of giving back to the community, keeping it honest.
I would recommend getting rid of downvoting altogether.
Downvoting is overwhelmingly used as a means to express disagreement and enact censorship (by reducing visibility), with no regards to the substance and quality of the actual post. I think this is a poisonous feature, that will eventually turn HN into yet another echo chamber if left unchecked.
Either flag a post for being off-topic, inappropriate or adding nothing of substance to the discussion, or reply with a counter argument to express disagreement to well-written posts that deserve it (AFAIK, with flagging, unlike with downvoting, users are held to some level of accountability and are liable to losing their flagging rights if they flag posts indiscriminately). The ability to silence opinions different to your own with minimal effort and no accountability can only hurt the quality of discussion here, in my opinion.
I disagree. It's very useful to remove the comments of spammers, trolls, and the like. Another common reason to downvote is to stop the tide of noisy comments, such as meme posts, which feel increasingly prevalent on HN.
A more exemplary argument might be to imagine hypothetical responses to your post:
"I agree."
"I disagee."
"Fuck you."
"lol"
"¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
I think you'd want to downvote something like that. Nobody wants to waste their time reading it.
I think the number of times I've missed a valuable comment due to downvoting is probably far less than the number of times I've seen garbage posts. We might disagree on the value and merits of each approach, but I'd prefer a high signal HN, even if it makes it a bit more of an echo chamber (hypothetically).
Actually I currently believe that the downvote should be split into three different votes:
1) Disagree. Just shows disagreement. Doesn't affect comment sort order.
2) Bury. So one can move "Me too" and "Thanks" comments downwards. Ignored if there are any like votes (so people cannot use the Bury vote to censor others).
3) Unwanted. Only available to trusted core members & staff. The Unwanted vote reduces the post author's karma, & moves the post downwards. It is used to shape the contents & nature of the forum: via the Unwanted vote, the staff can create an echo chamber, if they want to. Or an open-ended tolerant forum, if they want to.
That might be an improvement, but I don't think it would be better than simply removing downvotes.
1) What's the purpose of this? If it makes no difference, what is it there for? A honeypot to catch throwaway downvotes?
2) Slightly better, but if a comment is hit with some of these before any likes, it might never be seen by people who would like it, which is just as bad as the current downvote system.
3) The staff can already do this, right?
Just get rid of downvotes. Let good comments be voted up, and truly bad ones (i.e. spam or rule-violating comments) be flagged. If someone disagrees with something, but not enough to rebut it, then so what? Deny them the effortless censor button. Or at least make downvoting reduce the voter's karma, so that downvoting has a cost.
1) Many disagree votes (in comparison to Like votes) result in a warning text above the post: "Many people disagree with this comment". Then, if you read the comment and agree with it / like it, you'll know it's important that you also read the replies, so you'll find out why others disagree. — This is how it looks (scroll up a tiny bit to see the "Many disagree" warning): https://try.effectivediscussions.org/-6#post-14
( Another purpose with Disagree is that, well, I'm curious — I want to know how many people like or disagree with something. Imagine that a friend of yours makes a speech and you're listening. Afterwards, when you've formed your opinion about what s/he said, I imagine you'd find it interesting to know how many of those listening, agree or disagree with what s/he said in the speech. )
2) Yes that's a problem. There can be a grace period before Bury votes take effect. E.g. 10 people must have read a comment, before Bury takes effect.
3) You mean they can downvote already? Yes, and they should still be able to do it, so this vote is (still) needed.
> "If someone disagrees with something, but not enough to rebut it, then so what?"
Many disagree votes tell the reader that there's likely a good rebuttal among the replies, so it's important to not just trust the comment because it sounds convincing — it's important to continue reading the replies.
> Many disagree votes (in comparison to Like votes) result in a warning text above the post: "Many people disagree with this comment". Then, if you read the comment and agree with it / like it, you'll know it's important that you also read the replies, so you'll find out why others disagree. — This is how it looks (scroll up a tiny bit to see the "Many disagree" warning):
I think you are being overly optimistic. Seeing a warning that "many people disagree with this" will mostly fuel bandwagoning and dogpiling. This is what happens, e.g. on Reddit and Ars Technica, where heavily downvoted comments attract more and more downvotes, even if the comments are entirely reasonable. All it takes is a few initial downvotes and the snowball starts rolling.
> Another purpose with Disagree is that, well, I'm curious — I want to know how many people like or disagree with something. Imagine that a friend of yours makes a speech and you're listening. Afterwards, when you've formed your opinion about what s/he said, I imagine you'd find it interesting to know how many of those listening, agree or disagree with what s/he said in the speech.
Actually, no, that would not be interesting at all, because it's entirely meaningless. On the Internet, you can always find x people to disagree with y. It means nothing without knowing who those people are and why they disagree. More importantly, just because a "dislike" button has been clicked a certain number of times doesn't mean that that many people have read, thought about, and disagree reasonably with the comment. It's just as likely that it's a thoughtless, knee-jerk reaction or that it's a form of retaliation for some other comment.
> Yes that's a problem. There can be a grace period before Bury votes take effect. E.g. 10 people must have read a comment, before Bury takes effect.
That can still be abused. Just don't bury anything. If it breaks a rule, flag and delete it. Otherwise, let it stand on its own merits.
> You mean they can downvote already? Yes, and they should still be able to do it, so this vote is (still) needed.
No, I mean staff can flag and delete posts, etc.
> Many disagree votes tell the reader that there's likely a good rebuttal among the replies
No it doesn't. It tells the reader that a certain number of HTTP POST requests have been made. It means nothing.
If there's a rebuttal that's better than the comment it rebuts, let it be upvoted.
And I think you're being overly negative :- ) I think there are lots of places on the internet, where people are friends and want to help each other and are honest.
I'm getting the impression that you think that by default, people mindlessly copy the behaviour of others, and don't spend any time thinking themselves. Perhaps contact their friends to downvote a comment. And that they try to game the system & cheat, and fight with each other and want a revenge.
I don't think that happens as often as you seem to think.
— For example, I think downvotes here at HN works fairly okay, and at StackOverflow and related sites. They're not perfect, but better than nothing IMO.
Also remember that all the Disagree vote does, is to show that many disagree. It doesn't hide the comment. So in the cases it gets abused, it won't matter much, in comparison to here at HN or Reddid, where it can be used to censor.
Just curious, this account of yours shouldn't be past the downvote threshold, I'm curious if you have a higher karma account elsewhere? The "anonymous" one you refer to?
The other account has lower karma (< 40). So I don't know exactly how downvotes work here at HN, but I've read a bit about how other people say they work (i.e. gray out the comment + reduce the downvoted user's karma a little bit).
Agreed, the arrows engage the moral brain and encourage rationalizing emotional gut-feelings. Up is always a metaphor for righteous and pure, heaven-like; down is contemptible, hell, punishment. No sense in fighting these deeply ingrained metaphors with rules and reminders, it doesn't work.
> I think this is a poisonous feature, that will eventually turn HN into yet another echo chamber if left unchecked.
Given that the downvoting system is about as old as HN itself, I'm reminded of the story where someone tried to warn Voltaire about his coffee consumption by saying that coffee was a slow poison, to which Voltaire replied "It must be very slow."
Downvoting currently sure is broken. An hour ago, when daring to suggest the Russians might actually be responsible for the DNC hacks, everything I've posted for the last week silently earned a down vote.
And while I don't particularly care since this is junk account and its not my website, I imagine it could be interesting to someone.
Seems like it would be easy enough to disable voting on comments that are a few days old, or on stories that are no longer being visited.
I would suggest disabling voting from profile comment pages, to avoid voting on comments without reading their context, but this is Hacker News, and it would be trivial to script that...
Perhaps so, I did not screenshot the posts of the last week. Certainly scores that were very positive yesterday are now negative. And certainly it began immediately after a post to wikipedia's marginal utility page which apparently disturbed someone's ideology. And it seems to have been aggravated further by this[1] post.
But perhaps this is desired result. Either way the issue is no longer interesting to me.
Not sure about what you're saying about last week's comments but I have experienced a day or so after a less popular comment I receive downvotes on other comments after that for what I consider less controversial comments. Could be selection bias. What I usually see though is that upvotes and downvotes tend to average to where they would have been otherwise even in those cases overtime. I just miss out on extra karma I suppose :)
