Celebrity, or meritocracy? With comments, that's the ultimate question.
See, when Joel writes a small piece of advice for B2B sales ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223 ), knowing the background he's coming from, that advice get a disproportionately higher weight both in my mind, and my upvoting-finger, than Random J Commenter.
And Yes, I am implying here, that Random J Commenter doesn't know shit about B2B sales. With his advice, the most action I can take is careful, small-scale controlled experiments, 2 times out of 3 blowing right to my head. Because Random J Commenter's infosource is not the real world, but rather techcrunch, or, more likely, other Random J Blogger.
The other aspect of this, is user-based browsing, which I tend to do a lot (following 10+change HNers, and looking where they comment -as opposed to the stories on frontpage / askHN). This also gives them point leverage -after all, this way I see only the things they care to comment about.
The single most important observation I take from the above two, is that neither of these are the kind of shallow things PG is remarking in his articles -both are meritocratic worth of value provided by these "celebrities".
It just happens, that business knowledge is distributed disproportionately.
The problem is that you really don't know who Random J Commenter is. That person could be a more successful and more knowledgeable person who just happens to NOT want to be a celebrity. There are plenty of smart people who simply don't want to play the popularity game. That doesn't make their input any less valuable.
Additionally, in my opinion, you are going to find more success in following tangential ideas from someone successful. You aren't going to duplicate what pg or Joel or any of those guys have done. The real value comes from intelligent people discussing tangents to some idea or theory. And if popularity is disproportionally rewarded to the thought behind the discussion, then the result will be less contribution to the site.
I also do user-based browsing. It's a dumb heuristic for finding good comments, I know. But I don't have a better algorithm that won't waste much time.
It used to be that that found good comments. It still sometimes does, but now it finds highly voted comments, which although correlated positively, is not the same thing.
Sounds like you meant that in some kind of snarky way, but absolutely yes. A thousand times yes.
I could care less about brand, whether from commenters or famous people in titles. Just give me good content. I don't come here to join some kind of fan club, either for authors or commenters.
And of course the reverse is true. We have folks purposely downvoting based on authors or commenters. Which is just as whacked.
No snarkiness was intended. I was agreeing and expanding your comment. Nothing irks me more than seeing a very insightful discussion between "high profile member" and "regular user" and seeing a drastic difference in the point total of the comments when they are equally interesting. People should upvote content and not commenter.
I don't think there's a single high-karma user on this site that disagrees with this point, or a single high-karma user on the site that wouldn't like it better if comment scores were invisible except to their owner.
The site also needs to do away with the leaderboard once and for all, and, in a perfect world, make it hard to find out how much karma another user has.
Seeing my own karma has absolutely made my writing suit HN better (I'm a lot meaner elsewhere). It's a valuable signal. I wouldn't wine if I got docked, or if karma went log-scored or something like that, because it's absolutely true that high-karma users also get an automatic point boost, but I'd rather not lose the signal.
I'm a relatively new user of this site, and I neither know, nor care who these 'high-karma users' are. I don't recognize the names and thankfully HN doesn't highlight their karma count next to their profile link here. I didn't even know there was a leader board and don't want to see it.
I don't scan the comments as much as others probably, but when I do, I prioritize by a few things: Those that include links, and when I have the time, those that are lengthy, since often those can be from people who had a lot to say and you can tell by the tone of the first paragraph if it's worth your time.
I love the egalitarian nature of the system that doesn't single out new users who might just as well have valid points to make.
I'm not sure which aspect of my comment you were referring to, but I don't think there's data to back up the suggestion that the majority of the visitors here fetishize karma count and care greatly about it.
They care about learning something new, being intellectually stimulated and sometimes just being entertained, but given the limited way that karma is exposed, I'd be surprised if the average user goes to any great length to find out the karma count of a comment poster.
You can probably take my word for it on this one; if it's remotely possible we can end this branch of the discussion on that note, or on agreeing to disagree, I'd be happy for it.
Would you (or others) be interested in a small browser extension to strip other people's points from display? Safari / Chrome, as FF is pretty different, and I've done a bit with Chrome.
I may have to make it, now that I think about it. It'd probably change my voting habits a bit. Especially if I also removed the usernames until after I voted... flatten the playing field, so to speak, while still identifying like-minded people.
Amazing how people project their own mood onto internet comments. Sorry about that.
Thanks for the explanation.
Yep, I'd much rather read a dozen guys that nobody knows that help me out in life and help me make terrific changes than become pen-pals and an expert on the top 17 people in the tech industry or on HN. This herd mentality stuff drives me nuts at times.
You know, I also feel that people should own their comments, but something as simple as hiding the name until the mouse hovers over the pseudonym would prevent a lot of abuse. It's not like we all have to become anonymous. I think the board just needs to take steps to prevent automatic up or down voting. There are lots of solutions to choose from.
The problem with celebrity in this field is that very frequently celebrities are known more for their personality than they are for the things they say. You have the Asshole, the Motivator, the Snarky Sassplant... etc. They become famous not because they're intelligent or say smart things — let's face it, almost every person in this community is bright and most of them are well-spoken, yet plenty of them still struggle for recognition — but because they adapt a certain tone that's instantly and comfortably recognizable, so that when we see their name we can sink ourselves into whatever's expected of their writing without having to put in too much effort.
The celebrity writers always have a certain personality. Whether it's John Gruber or Paul Graham or Dave Winer, they've established exactly what sorts of things they're gonna talk about and how they're gonna talk about it. When we see their names, we know what to expect. Whether it's a good post or a shit post (and everybody has some of each), we still feel like we got our click's worth and are satisfied with that.
If I had a choice to see a new DaringFireball essay or another essay, completely unknown, completely at random, I'll probably go with the DF one. It sells me a certain level of quality, a topic that I usually am interested in, a writing style that I very much enjoy. The unknown essay might be more valuable or relevant, but I'm not as instantly willing to give it a chance.
...unless, of course, the author makes an effort to grab me, by titling his essay provocatively or writing in an entertaining style. But then once he finds success with that method, he's not going to want to drop the shtick and risk becoming unknown again. He'll continue with it. At a certain point he'll become a celebrity poster. Then we're back to dealing with the same old shit as we did before.
Part of the problem is that HN displays us both POINT VALUE and USER NAME before it even gives us the essay. There is no way to read a comment without seeing the author and the point value before hand. So we're unavoidably biased before we see a word.
I agree that there's a problem, but I don't think that celebrity is it. If you took away the comments' scores and removed the names, I could probably still tell if they were made by high-karma members.
I think the problem is that the way they think and post is more in line with the majority of users on here. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with that. I think the problem is that we (like any other group of people) tend to focus more on "I agree with that comment" and less on "That comment is insightful and brings a fresh perspective on the issue whether I agree with it or not". I wish I could say that I'm innocent of this, but I'm just as guilty of supporting my own point of view as anyone else is.
Don't get me wrong, some of these articles are very good, but way too many people vote up celebrity instead of content.