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Poll: Display points on comments?
423 points by pg on April 14, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 301 comments
My goal in not showing points on comments was to prevent the sort of contentious exchanges where people (in this case literally) try to score points off one another. I feel like it has done that to some extent, but at a cost in other areas. So which do you prefer?

Here's the earlier thread about it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716

I prefer HN with points displayed on comments.
2376 points
I prefer HN without points displayed on comments.
1772 points



I think that not having points has some nice qualities, but it also feels like I'm being denied information that I find useful in reading/skimming a thread. I've noticed I find reading HN a lot harder while this has been in effect. (I've also noticed that I tend to unconsciously give numbers in usernames some weight when reading a comment. The same applies for the time it was posted.) One possible compromise would be to display either a number or simple graphic that approximates point totals instead of displaying them explicitly.

Also, I've been planning to write a longer blog post on the following, but given that I've had no time lately and am not likely to have any soon, I'll just float the idea here.

One idea I've had that I think might be interesting is dealing with upvotes or points in terms of logarithmic scales. That is, it takes one upvote/point to get a comment from 1-10, 2 upvotes/point to get from 11-20, etc. (Exact numbers would have to be scaled, of course.) I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going to make sure very few people ever read what I've written. An appropriately scaled log-scale system might make it so that really really good comments still get really really high scores, but so that others (which might have simply come too late in the discussion to be competitive on a raw-point scale) still get a chance at being seen.

(One related idea would be to make the point-approximating graphic log-scale even though the points themselves remain the same underneath.)


I don't care about total points per se, I care about the probability that I'll appreciate having read something. What'd be a good proxy for this is the upvote rate, roughly upvotes divided by views (or rather, a MAP estimate of the upvote rate as the parameter of a binomial distribution, drawn from a beta prior...). The upvote count system, and the logged upvote count system both have the problem that if comment A has been seen 500 times and has 20 upvotes, and comment B has been seen 1000 times and has 30 upvotes, A is probably actually a bit better than B. An upvote rate fixes that problem, and still gives you a useful indicator about which comments are worth your attention.

The issue with upvote rates is that they're likely to be relatively low, and arithmetic differences between low probabilities aren't useful, so we should really use the log upvote rate -- but people aren't good at dealing with negative numbers, so it should be mapped to color or size or opacity of some indicator symbol or something. Suppose you had just a little dot next to each comment, the opacity of which is 100 + k * <log upvote rate>. Suppose k=8; exp(-12) is like 6 upvotes per million views, so almost no comment's dot would totally vanish, but if you had a 5% upvote rate your dot would be at ~75% opacity.


I've made a similar suggestion a few times:

Leave the point system intact behind the scenes, as is.

Collect the set of comments with a positive score.

For threads with < N positive comments comments, don't show anything

When there are >= N positive comments, show a percentile rank within that set. In the event of a tie, assign both comments the higher percentile (ie. "92% of the positive comments in this thread have equal or fewer points than this comment)

My initial guess at N would be 10. Anything less and the percentiles are somewhat meaningless and not really needed, as it's easy to skim.

The benefit of this approach: It's now a relative scale. Down voting no longer means "I don't like this" it means "the majority of other comments are better than this one". The net result will be less absolute value points for the best comments, as they will stall once they reach 90+% and they will receive far more down votes. However, there is now a community incentive to collectively sort the comment set, rather than award points.


Well some ask HN threads could easily have one or two good answers which shuts down the thread. This would break the <n positive comments rule.

You could have <(n positive comments/total comments) as a work around perhaps.

---------------------------------- The thing is that all mathematical rules end up being terrible at specific edge cases which are better served by another set of rules. In my opinion, the best possible use of mathematical rules are ones which are simplistic and easy to follow. Leave the rest up to the quality of the community.

(There is a different set of changes to cues and layout, which control social/behavioral action - such as removing the vote count, which I am not targeting.)


The ordering of comments approximates this.

It would be nice if there was some way to re-nest comments, based on scores, while retaining their logical relationship (as replies). e.g. It could be done with lines or labels, but it sounds too messy.


FOLLOWUP thinking more on re-nesting, slashdot detaches high-scoring comments from their logical nesting (and you have to follow parent links to find the post to which they were replying). I think slashdot knows much of this - I wonder if it would be helpful for cmdtaco and pg to chat (even, a voting-site conference)... or is it still too proprietary/competitive?

Another way is too hide a comment if it has lower karma than a reply (using reddit-style [+] so it can be unhidden - or perhaps just omit it, and just use "parent" to see it).

The key benefit is that comments that only make sense as a reaction (e.g. criticism) to another comment won't be as interesting, and (hopefully) will get downvoted. This might lead people to change their voting behaviour, to also vote the parent up if they think it does contribute after all (it's a problem that interesting questions don't get voted up, only the interesting answers, because then it's lost down the page... and interesting questions should be encouraged/rewarded, IMHO). A downside might be that people will try to "win" the thread.

I really like this idea.

tl;dr: don't display parent if a child scores higher (still accessible by "parent" link), so they rank higher. Like slashdot.


The ordering is influenced by other factors, I guess either the post length or the average karma of the poster...

I've had several comments both older and with less points than others at the same level, but that were still above the rest.


The ordering is influenced by other factors, I guess either the post length or the average karma of the poster...

My understanding is that average karma of the poster influences it. I used to be more impressed but my average karma score has been as high as about 6 but most of the time sits somewhere around 2, give or take. One good debate where multiple comments of mine got substantially upvoted raised it that high and then it steadily slid (ie regularly changed if you checked it) until it was back down to around 2. Maybe other people have high averages that are more stable than mine but this experience has changed my view of average karma and made me somewhat less impressed. From what I gather, it's a moving, weighted average. It isn't the average across all comments for all of your history. I can understand the logic of that -- if average for all comments were used and you have been here forever and your comment quality has gone up, a million old comments that were never voted up could prevent you from ever seeing any substantial improvements in that area. But, like all such things, it's a bit of a game in some sense.


Yes, it's the average of recent comments, with the top and bottom discarded (pg said this somewhere or other). The averages of the top 100 (by abs karma) is interesting: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders (accessible via "lists", frontpage bottom).

BTW: edw regularly has amazing averages - all the avgs are much higher than usual now, I suspect because of karma inflation due to not seeing scores (this happened last time pg experimented with it).

And yes, it influences the ordering of ones comments. When I said "approximates", I really meant it. ;-)


For what it's worth, a year or so ago Reddit tried a statistical solution to the same problem:

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...

Not sure how effective it was.


The problem with this that I foresee is that it seems rather impossible to predict actual views of a comment. I heavily doubt that most viewers of the comment page will read most of the comments. So this will create a positive feedback loop that just creates a large divide between comments that (somehow, probably mostly arbitrarily) start off more popular than others; comments with high "rates" will be pushed to the top, and will be seen most of the time someone views the page, but comments with low "rates" will be pushed to the bottom, meaning they won't be seen most time a page is viewed, and so the estimate of their rate will be biased downwards.


I suggested a similar solution yesterday, but not by color coding the log(vote/views), but the log(votes/max votes in the thread).

I posted it as the discussion was about to fall off the first page, so here is it again for your reading pleasure :-)

---------------------

I have some suggestions that could help regulate the current issues. I'd change the way the karma is calculated in order to reward people who are consistently good rather than heavy posters. I suggest using the geometric mean of the post scores. As such, you wouldn't have to give a karma penalty to comment. A weak comment would reduce the karma automatically. I recommend the geometric mean since the scores are most likely Zipf-distributed. It could be calculated in the background as a running arithmetic mean of the logarithm of the scores, which shouldn't be too expensive. I'd display the karma not as an absolute number, but as color-coded rectangle. The color would be based on percentile of the score described above, or perhaps as a function of this percentile. The post count (or better, the post frequency) of the user could be represented as the length of the rectangle. You could then display this "badge" next to the user name in threads. Since it would be a continuous thing, it would not divide the comunity in have and have nots as the badge system introduced and retracted earlier. In order not to discourage people from posting, users below a certain threshold (say the 50th or 60th percentile) would all have the same value displayed. I'd also grant the various rights based on the basis of the percentile rather than based on hard numbers. Every time a new right is granted, users should get guidelines on how to use it, i.e. don't upvote based on agreement, don't downvote unless the post is offensive/shallow. Commenting in topics with little points could perhaps weight more than commenting in threads with a big score. This would encourage posting in less popular threads. Downvoting should cost karma. This could be implemented as a comment with a low score. You'd keep two counts: a post count and a downvote count. The karma would be calculated based on the sum of these numbers, but the post count would still be displayed. The value of a downvote would be calculated according to the number of post, otherwise it would cost less to people with lots of comments/votes. The karma of the voter may also be taken into account. The up and down votes should be weighted as a function of the karma of the voter. They could be implemented as a floating point number. Removing the number of votes per post prevents to detect a highly upvoted answer to a little upvoted comment. If the votes are weighted as described above, the vote count has little meaning anyway, but the post score could still be displayed in a meaningful way by using a color-coded system similar to the one described for the karma. I'd suggest two distinct scores log( comment score ) / log( highest score in the thread ) log( comment score ) / log( highest score ever at the time of thread submission ) Both of these could be calculated in javascript on the client. The real score could still be extracted with a browser extension, but I don't think it matters much. Making the first value relative to the max score at the time of voting would allow that value remains relevant as time passes, even if the community grows or shrinks. It would require to add a "max score" field to submissions, though.


log(votes/views of your comment) is better than log(votes/max votes in thread) because the latter puts people who post early in a thread at an artificial advantage, whereas log(votes/views of your comment) does not.


That's true but both approaches are not mutually exclusive.


I really, REALLY would like some way to distinguish 'excellent' comments from comments that are just rising to the top with higher point values.

a star, orange dot, bold title, anything.

that said I like HN without points.


Yes; there needs to be some highlighting of comments that are a few standard deviations above the average, otherwise they'll get lost in the noise, particularly if they are in child threads.

As it is, I find myself commenting less to replies on my own comments, because I'm not invested in furthering my argument - I can't see how many votes those replies got, so I don't know if I need to keep arguing my case.

(That could be a good thing or a bad thing; a good thing if I'm wrong, a bad thing if I just didn't express myself well to start with.)


Perhaps the length of the comment text can be factored into this heuristic. I mentally correlate lengthy posts as tending to be well thought out and coming from people with experience in the given area.

While a lot of insight can indeed fit into a sentence or two, it still figures to me that those who take the time to write long comments are probably contributing more to the thread than those who leave short replies.

Anyhow, it's just a heuristic that springs to mind.


With lengthier posts, I tend use the score to judge the value of the time to read them. Half a page with a high score may have more value that the linked article, whereas a low score may just be little information presented verbosely.


I also want to suggest that it might be interesting to have some non-numeric display that still allows for the 'quick scan' that you mention.

I also dislike the lack of points because I find myself voting things down more than I would before. In the past, if something were at 0 or -1 points, usually I'd think, "They probably get the point." Now I find myself downvoting things that probably don't need one more down vote.


>>I also want to suggest that it might be interesting to have some non-numeric display that still allows for the 'quick scan' that you mention.

I agree with this, may be displaying a color coded dot in place of the comment score. The color can be computed from a log function of the score, and we only need a few colors to indicate the different types of comments without giving too much information away.


"One idea I've had that I think might be interesting is dealing with upvotes or points in terms of logarithmic scales. "

Ah, came here to say exactly this! The difference between 100 points and 120 points just isn't as interesting as the difference between 1 and 10.

Displaying something like floor(ln(points)) instead of points would be the way to go.


I think ceil(sqrt(points)) would be a better choice.


> I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going to make sure very few people ever read what I've written.

I hadn't thought about this, but you're absolutely right. I think having the numbers on other people's posts does facilitate gaming the system quite a bit more. I'd be curious to see what the actual distribution is on points/comment, which might inform efforts to implement a logarithmic scaling on the effectiveness of upvotes.

No matter what happens with having other people's scores, please keep the option to have our own scores displayed. Having feedback on what the community finds upvote-worthy is definitely helpful.


Isn't the ideal outcome of all this a site where the comment threads are worth reading in full instead of skimming?

If there are so many skimmable comments in a thread that not having points gets to be annoying because you have to sift...well, then the experiment has failed.

But if on the other hand there are just plain fewer comments, which does seem like a possible outcome in the mid-range, and those comments are of higher quality...well, experiment has succeeded!


Skimming allows me to draw my own signal to noise line in the sand which is important irrespective of however good the default signal is. I will never be interested in reading 204 comments about this topic however good they may be. I am definitely interested in reading the top 12 or so. This experiment is horrible.


I'd just rather have colour codes. Threshholds of 5, 10, 25, 45, 75+ or something along those lines.

Points trigger a certain response among some people. The ones that get sucked into WoW for example simply because they have this impulse of getting all the best gear. Works with points as well.


Relative Scoring

In that case, you might as well just have numbers, since you can correlate numbers with colors, at that point.

I would rather see colors indicating the "heat" of a comment. That is, its numbers, in relation to other numbers in the thread. In other words, you wouldn't have the following:

Blue == 5+ Yellow == 10+ Orange == 20+ Red == 50+

Instead, you would have:

Blue == average score in this thread/topic Yellow == 5% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic Orange == 10% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic Red == 20% higher score than other posts in this thread/topic

This would help provide a more meaningful context for what posts are rising to the top in that particular conversation and the highest would always rise to the top. The top 20% of comments would always be the top 20% of comments, even if the lowest scored comment in the entire discussion is +10 points.


To a certain degree you're correct. But it's not exactly the same. With colours you would get larger spans, whereas with numbers you get the immediate feedback. The difference in time is significant for addictive personalities. A second difference is that you don't know the spans, only that they exist, meaning that as the site grows the spans can be upped to keep up with the growing number of users.

Anyway... really like your idea :).

Was going to write something about colouring entire threads or sub-threads as interesting based on the total sum of points or something else compared to everyone else. Would certainly help finding interesting stuff to read in 200+ comment threads. But not too sure how it would work without being invasive.


Your example of a logarithmic upvote/point scale is wrong (it's currently a simple scale of multiplying by 10), and you might want to update it for clarity. I believe you meant it would take 1 upvote/point to get from 0 to 1, 10 upvotes/points to get from 1 to 2, etc.


Perhaps we could have a mix: top level comments have karma shown, but child comments do not. This way when quickly scanning for a good top level comment to read you have something to guide you, but for nested discussions karma is hidden to prevent contention.


I'm not sure how much I like this idea, but instead of just arbitrarily cutting things off at top level comments, maybe comment scores could be shown as long as their parent's score is shown and they have more points than their parent.

The idea would be to highlight any path through the comment tree where comments are strictly increasingly valuable. So, for example if someone asks a question and gets a really good answer, the scores on both comments will be shown. The score could even be shown on an even better reply to the answer. But if someone trolls the really good answer, neither the score of the troll or that of responses to it would be shown.

A further improvement on this might be to use a time weighted value (where newer comments have more weight) similar to that already used in comment sorting so that comments have a chance to gain value instead of being pitted directly against an already popular comment.


I think it's too soon to actually judge, as we're still in the "ick! change!" phase. Ask again in another week or two. Same for any other experiment you run in the future; unless it obviously and immediately fails, give it some simmer time. (IMHO, of course.)


It is going to take time for the second-order effects to develop.

The optimum writing style may change. When threads require more skimming it pays to write more skimmable content. The reading style will also change. None of these changes will happen overnight; it takes time, the way that learning emacs takes time.

So I agree: Let the experiment run longer. What is the worst that can happen? HN becomes an order of magnitude less popular? I liked HN when it was an order of magnitude less popular. ;)


>What is the worst that can happen?

Personally I feel I've lost a great news source as the work required to use HN is now much greater (for me). Obviously, as a community, losing my comments isn't going to be noticed. But this appears to be the way of things, first Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then HN, where next ...?

I see that the average comment score has been fiddled with too - mine was only 2.6 or so (but rising). I can't tell from it whether it's rising or not now.


I'm in this camp as well: keep it for a while and see how we adjust.

My initial reaction was negative. I found it harder to scan a long page of comments quickly. And I'm not sure why, but I also found that I'm more resistant to vote, either positively or negatively. Maybe because the site feels more static.

The one fix I would suggest is that having the arrows disappear after voting does not feel fulfilling. It feels like my vote has been lost. Switching to displaying the darkened arrow that I chose would feel better.

Or, if more voting was thought to be a good thing, you could display the vote count only afterward. I think I'd be more inclined to vote if there was some sort of 'reward' for the action. The previous reward was seeing the number change in whatever direction I wanted to move it, but receiving information about others would probably work too.


I worry that if people could see vote counts after voting, they would start voting purely to see vote counts, upvoting (or downvoting) a comment not because it deserved it, but to see how many votes it had attracted.


I agree. I was lost without the scores at first, but now I think it is useful not having them. However, I would like to see them after so many days/hours when the article is off of the front-page as it would be helpful when referencing older stuff and at that point I don't see any harm including it.


Ok, I agree. The poll voting is close enough that I think the best course is to wait a bit before deciding.


Have you considered showing the points on comment threads after a few days to facilitate search later?


You sound like you subscribe to the notion that the majority is right? Does this mean that the poll might decide the fate of the karma display?

This is of course an entire debate by itself - are the users right, or should they largely be ignored (cf. Zuckerberg and Facebook "controversial" redesigns).

It's always important to remember that the two choices are governed by factors that could be targeted individually and might change the experiences with either completely.


There are at least three problems with the current situation, that don't go away by 'getting used to' them:

- You don't know whether you clicked the right arrow

- You are forced to skim/read many comments to determine which ones are of value, where previously you may have chosen to skim a particular discussion for the best comments.

- You can't judge the quality of comments on a topic you know absolutely nothing about


If "the comments with the highest points" was isomorphic to "the best comments", we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.


I didn't get the impression that the upvoting of lesser comments, to the level of 'the best comments' is a primary concern? The mere existence of the comments is the major problem, even when they aren't upvoted?

In any case, I do think the set of 'the best comments' is usually a subset of 'the comments with the highest points' and especially in submissions with many comments/threads, the amounts can be helpful.


Since no one can actually see the points I just gave jerf on his comment. I would like to say ditto. I think its much too soon. Some times there are a need of comments like this one where I would rather just vote up then comment ditto like im doing now.

What about on ASK HN: comments we allow points and on articles, we don't? Just a thought.


The entire point of hiding comment scores is to allow people to judge for themselves how much a comment is worth – your expression of agreement is ruining that somewhat.


That could be another side effect - more "I upvoted" comments.


Whether you can see points or not, I would think "I upvoted" comments with little content would still get downvoted.

Although, one side effect might be: When you can see a comment is highly scored, a reader may think, "everybody gets this guy, no need to help him argue the point. upvote" Whereas when you can see a comment is lowly scored, a reader may think, "this is a good argument, I'll help carry it, upvote and comment". But when you can't see scores, making the call to upvote and comment, or just upvote is made only on the content of the comment. Whether that's good or bad, I'm not sure.


I have an idea, thinking out loud here - so bear with me:

Traditional point based forum systems provide a way for people to up/down any given post - but its a binary decision.

There are a range of factors that one may want to upvote/downvote a post based on. /. had an interesting moderation model by allowing a context selection along with the score - though this too had its limitations.

With respect to the implementation on HN, not showing the score changes the dynamic that we are used to, which is fine - but we sometimes need a contextual vote/filter to promote answers with links/content.

What would be interesting is if one were to post a link in the comment if we could vote up the individual link. So next to the links there were a score for that link -- this way - while we could vote the post author either way, if multiple posts contain links in an answer to a question, the community can vote on the links themselves -- which will aid in people who are seeking the answer.

Additionally, if we have a contextual label selection for posts, then the community can select the label that applies from a list - and the readers would see which applies.

This removes the numerical karmic judgement from the post, but allows for insightful, helpful, informative, opinion or other classifiers to be used.

Would something along these lines work better for us?


sounds like slashdot, without metamoderation?


I'm conflicted. As a (heavy) consumer of HN, not having the best comments called out to me has made it more difficult to parse, and not being able to sort searchyc results by points will eventually diminish its value as external memory for me.

As a producer on HN, I have noticed two things: one, the subjective self-assessed quality of the comments I have been writing since the change has been far higher than it was in the few months prior to the change. I've been quipping less and writing meatier, substantive, useful things (I hadn't stopped writing those, but there were periods of weeks where I had no comment longer than a paragraph and very few actionable bits in those comments). I do not know why this is -- it could be phases of the moon, totally unrelated to the interface change, for all I know.

I also note that my per-comment scores for meaty comments are higher than they've ever been, which may or may not be desirable. I don't care about karma, but to the extent anyone else cares about their karma relative to folks on the leaderboard, my anecdotal single-point observation is that winners seem to be winning at the moment.


I guess the effect here is that some people may be voting to what they think the comment is worth. So if you already have 50 point for a comment they would be thinking yeah that seems about right for the content provided in that comment I'll leave it without voting. Whereas without the points this effect goes away and the same person is likely to up vote you.

Not that I have spent a great deal of time reading comments since the change but I think I may be voting less, I guess there might be an effect there where subconsciously I am less likely to vote because I don't know what kind of an impact the vote is going to make.

Also with a thread like this one with so many comments, the votes can help guide you in what are the key takeaways without having to read the whole thing. In the same way the high voted items can give you some of the best stuff without having to spend hours trawling through many items. I guess in that way the changes effect those that want to get a quick hacker news fix around other activities more than someone who has a few hours to really go in depth on topics.


The searchyc concern is a good point. Maybe the points could start being displayed a couple of days after the comment was initially posted?


Points could also go into an invisible field, for the benefit of search engines. Then those hell-bent on seeing people's points could have their greasemonkey script.


That would immediately bring on a slew of browser extensions/userscripts that unhide them. Not sure if they'd be popular enough te negate the effect.


It would, but I don't think it would make enough of a difference.


In which case you might as well have comment points display as a user preference and save some processing cycles.


I think part of the explanation is that now people are focusing more on the usernames they recognize instead of the points that the comment already has.


Patrick, I have the same reactions. The points are good for parsing, but they are also good discipline in posting comments. Something that ultimately gets 1 point was probably was not worth posting anyway. Something that was downvoted was probably poorly worded to begin with. (Also you guys have a poor appreciation of Maine humor. Unfortunately my GF and my kids agree with you.) What surprises me is that you like anecdotes from decades past in SV.

Bottom line: keep the points so that some of us become a little bit better in our writing.


I thought it was working well without points until this morning.

With this ASK HN post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444709 ) about the best credit card payment method I would typically immediately go and look at the comment scores.

Because a vote for a comment is typically a vote for the thing being recommended.

It's really a "poll-like" question except it can't be a poll because the OP doesn't know the options in advance.

Other than that one problem though,I found I was judging people's comments more thoughtfully without the scores.


One other significant problem I have is that it breaks "comments by points" search on searchyc.com.


This is a genuine use-case, and worth considering.

Perhaps a hide-by-default policy, but each page has a link you can click to show points on that page. The extra manual step will mean that most people won't bother unless they have a need to. Just make sure there's no 'show points' setting in the user profile, otherwise the extra step is removed.


Without. The lack of points make me look closer at the content rather than group think of a post. Even if briefly, a brand new comment is at the top of a thread. Unless I read it there is no way of knowing the quality in comparison to other comments. Would be interesting to know if the average karma per post is going up/down for those that have been around for a while.


Anecdotally, my karma per post has gone way up. Either that, or I've had a lucky few days.

My guess is, when people don't see how many points a post has, they have no way to calibrate whether it has "too many" points or "too few".


I haven't seen much of a bump in my own karma coinciding with this, but I have noticed that I'm voting significantly more than normal.


I'm just the opposite ... I'm voting a lot less ... it seems the points do bias me but in a different way ... if something has a lot of point already, I won't bother to vote it up ... but if theres a really strong post and it has few points I'll immediately upvote it ...

I find it harder to read/skim comments now though ... because I'm reading every comment instead of getting the highlights based on the votes.


I've found that I'm extremely less likely to downvote. And in at least one exchange I've been more civil because it's less of a contest. I think it's a good thing overall but I REALLY miss the ability to skim more efficiently when I want to (I don't always skim but when I don't want to waste too much time it's super helpful).


I have noticed that my karma per post has gone down quite a bit (something that would normally get 7-8 upvotes is getting maybe 1-2 or none). I think it's an example of people thinking "well, someone else has probably voted that up and that arrow is just so tiny".

I'm of course assuming that my posts are awesome and deserving of upvotes, which they may well not be. :)


Agreed. I find that without the points, I am now reading comments more closely to determine for myself if a comment has merit rather than relying on the points and skimming.

Maybe having it as a configurable option would be best.


Agreeing here: I must admit that I used the display points as a crutch. My thought process was, "Hey, this has a lot of votes, it must mean that they have something (good|relevant|interesting) to say".

Now, I am forced to read a comment and ask "Do I agree with this? Does this deserve an upvote?" This is a great thing, and it may slow down my karma-giving, but in the long run, the data will be more accurate.


For years I listened to users complain whenever I removed something they were used to for the improvement of the whole endeavor. I have rarely encountered a user that was happier with less information.

Now I know how they feel.


Consider this: Facebook is remarkable precisely because no matter how big it gets, your experience with it is more or less bounded by your personal circle.

Points are a good proxy for user counts, and over the years I've become more and more aware of the number of people reading and judging. For me, at least, not seeing those points makes HN feel more cozy and private. With points I tended to chase after them rather than learning.

I suspect that this feature vote will be very close. I suggest weighting this vote by contribution of the voter (submissions and comments) rather than raw vote count. After all, this experiment is intended to increase the value of contributions.


What if that information is misinformation?

Compared to the actual value of the comment itself, the information conveyed in an upvote or downvote is rather small, and is always meta-information.

Now that there are so many people here who seem to have vastly different opinions from me on what constitutes a quality comment, I am actually quite happy not knowing which comments they have flocked to support.


Points should stay:

If a post has a lot of points on it, it's telling people that they should be paying attention. For instance, (and this may have been after the points disappeared, but the example still works) the other day when ioerror came into the thread that was talking about him getting harassed at airports. I don't know who ioerror is, but points allow people to call my attention to his posts, more so than just voting them to the top of the hierarchy.

I've learned a lot reading comments here over the last 3 years. Lack of showing points makes it harder to discern what I should pay attention to. A good comparison might be book reviews. If I get on amazon and search "iOS4 development", I'll get tons of results, but when a book has 200 5 star reviews, it helps me decide that that is the one I should read.

This is true even if the books are all free.

Don't get lost in the idea that everybody here is a seasoned veteran who knows everything about everything and can easily judge a post's merit based on its content. It's less true for me now than it was three years ago, but it was (and still is) helpful to be able to look to the community to help me know what I should be paying attention to.


"My goal in not showing points on comments was to prevent the sort of contentious exchanges where people (in this case literally) try to score points off one another."

I think a suitable compromise would be to hide for X days until most voting activity is over (reusing the threshold where downvotes are no longer available but upvotes still are might work). This would still meet your goal without the cost of information loss.

EDIT: I'd hate to give up lists like http://top.searchyc.com/comments_by_points and http://top.searchyc.com/users_by_average_points_per_comment .


The problem is I feel no feedback for voting, so I've stopped doing it.

If I could see the points after I vote I would probably vote even more than before.


I think this would be an excellent way to do it, for the same reason that many online polls don't show the votes until after you vote.


I upvoted you because you were negative and I believe it's a point worthy of consideration.

Is that ironic?


HN isn't only opinions. It also gives advice. How would you HNers who don't like points get advice in an area you know nothing about? What indicators would you use? Whatever sounds the best? Seeing a cumulative score of the opinions of intelligent users helps me.

Perhaps some of you know much more than me and don't need to learn anything. I'm not in that boat. HN helps me learn how other entrepreneurs think and what they think about areas that I'm moving into. This isn't reddit. This is a serious forum and seeing which advice gets the most upvotes helps me tremendously.


This is why I voted for points as well. When people put their site up and ask HN for feedback, you can easily see the most critical advice based on the points score. Without it, people have to start posting "I agree that's really important" underneath. Just like I have here.

Edit: Perhaps a hybrid option would be to just enable points for Ask HN's where people are specifically requesting feedback.


That's not a bad idea.

I think it'd be neat if whoever posts anything can choose whether to have comment scores display in the discussion thread, at least until/unless the community decides that one way is definitely better than the other (since opinions seem about equally divided right now).


[Summary]Comment points are a way of outsourcing BS detection to people with considerably more knowledge than me.

I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough in the fields covered within hackernews to weed out the genuinely sagely advice from the erudite crap. I learn a huge amount from coming here and I feel I have lost a tool which helped me judge what I needed to dig into and study and what is just todays kool aid/lie/misunderstanding. I hope they get brought back, even just as an option.


Whatever sounds best.

Someone who gives good advice who can't justify it, isn't giving good advice.

Plus, if somebody gives bad advice, other people are likely to comment and point it out.

I think there are some kinds of things where you really do need raw numbers (this thread for example), or "which front page is most aesthetically appleaing for my website," and those kinds of things can use polls (as this thread does).

EDIT: On second thought, after reading what some others have said, I think there really are some Ask HNs that could use comment scores (but I don't think all of them need it).


Note that, even without points displayed, you can gauge the relative points of comments by their order on the page. While very new comments can appear briefly at the top, the comments that stay there have high points.


Maybe making it a coarser indicator would give the best of both worlds... maybe a colored indicator (or grey dot) with color/darkness indicating how many upvotes.


This is my school of thought; it would be nice to know which are the hot comments. Previously you could skim through only the higher rated ones if you were in a hurry, but now you sort of have to trawl through masses of text to find the gems.

One idea i thought might help the whole points vs. no points situation is changing karma from being the total points over all posts to just being the average points over all posts, so then people will be motivated to create fewer high-quality posts to boost their karma, rather than just trying to saturate HN with lots of posts that nab a point or two each. (somewhat hypocritical maybe)


Yeah, I like Hacker News without numerical indications of karma, but some sort of idea of how popular a comment is could be nice.


Doesn't the ordering of the comments on the page fulfill that requirement?


Ehh, sometimes, but I've noticed that sometimes the system orders new comments with not a lot of karma near the top.


I am pretty sure that's based on the user's average karma.


With just this, it would be fairly easy to learn how many votes translate to what color, and you're back at square one. Maybe color as some function of upvotes on the comment and proportion of all upvotes (maybe only those comments at the same level in that thread)?


Particularly if it was relative to other posts in the thread, and maybe only after a certain threshold, so it doesn't serve as disincentive to posters who are just late to the party, but still allows users to quickly see the best posts.


Not to try and "King Solomon" it, but couldn't you make it a user profile option to display comment points?

Personally, I think it's better now that they are not displayed, but if it reverts back to displaying them, I'd be happy to just not have to see them myself, regardless if other's want to.


I don't like the idea that I'm not seeing the same stuff, and reacting to the same stuff, as other people. I like the feeling of a shared experience.

Honestly, I'd probably rather either have comments, or not have them, than have the possibility of turning them off in the preferences.


I agree. My vote goes to making it configurable, with a default behavior of not displaying points.


This sounds desirable to me too; if it were a poll option, I'd vote for it.


How about only giving the option to view comment scores to users of a certain age, or reputation?


Making an option is a tempting choice, but as always the devil is in the defaults. In the limit case you get things like Linux apps with umpteen million options, and still no one is happy.


Conceptually, I agree with you; but your HN profile isn't like setting up a Wordpress installation. There's a pretty minimal amount of things which can be tweaked.


It sounds diplomatic to let each group choose their preference, but what is much more valuable here is to learn what exactly those preferences are, and why they are held. If there were an option to let each choose according to their preference, then we could all quietly revert to our preferences instead of taking the opportunity to be confronted with a bigger picture.


I'm not so sure there is a bigger picture, just a bunch of people who each get different things out of reading/posting here on the site. Look at any of the comments on the articles about this so far, and you get the what and the why (people's reasons seem to run the gamut).

But let's postulate that we revert back to the previous system where comment points are displayed. I can't think of a reason why it would matter if I personally don't want to see comment points.


• I'd like to at least get some feedback when I vote, now my vote seems to just disappear into a black hole. Perhaps make the arrow orange after I click it (or simply a tick, ✔ voted)?

• It feels pointless to upvote the only comment in a thread, it doesn't affect anything unless more comments are posted (again, lack of feedback).

• I often can't tell if a comment is any good (e.g. an answer to a scientific question), points really helped here.


To reinforce your point, I just tried to upvote you in response to the scientific answers point, but I may have accidentally clicked downvote instead. I'm really not sure.

So, if so, I'm sorry.


With. [EDIT: oops, deleted half my post] If something stupid only has a couple of points in a busy thread, then I know there's no need to respond with a passionate denunciation of the obvious. Likewise, if something I disagree with has a ton of upvotes, perhaps it's me that's stupid and I should think carefully before starting an argument. Sure, it's flawed, but so's every other approach.

If you want to get real results, I think you need to start doing randomized trials of different users, showing karma to some and not to others to see whether it results in a change of behavior. Of course, you probably need to warn people about this in advance.

BTW, there seems to be a little bug wherein clicking on a comment or poll option no longer updates. I had to refresh to see whether my vote had taken or not, although the ▲ correctly disappears.


Yes, since I wasn't sure I was going to stop displaying points on comments, I just hacked the js for updating scores. Though frankly it never was an indication of whether a vote took.


I went back to the post where pg asked for advice on how to prevent decline of HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

To help along the thinking process here, as we digest our own personal experiences (each from a different subset of threads, I suppose, unless several participants here read HN exhaustively), let's think about those issues:

a) After the change, are mean comments less likely to be upvoted?

b) After the change, are dumb comments less likely to be upvoted?

c) What is the general character of highly upvoted comments after the change? Are comments with the highest number of upvotes after the change usually helpful, thoughtful comments, or flippant comments that don't gratify intellectual curiosity?

Over the next few days, it should be possible to look at some highly upvoted examples. The bestcomments view of HN content

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

still shows highly upvoted comments, although right now it shows them without explicit comment scores. How do those comments look to you?

P.S. There is a lot of speculation in this thread about how comments are weighted, how users gain karma, etc. As far as I know, except for possible details of the current experiment, the source code for this site in ARC,

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

which was mentioned in an HN thread a while back,

http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307128

tells any code-literate user most of the story about how karma is allocated and how users gain karma. (Please note that I am NOT a code-literate user here, not in ARC, and I have never attempted to reverse-engineer any aspect of the karma system here. I simply empirically observe what happens to my own submissions and comments after I submit them, which I can still do during this experiment by viewing my own followed threads.)


I seem to prefer HN without points because it forces me to actually look closer at the content instead of just skimming for the big numbers.


That doesn't scale.


Perhaps it's better if it doesn't scale.


Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't pay attention to others' karma scores that much. My own experience on Reddit and HN has shown that karma scores have more to do with early-entrant effects and brevity than the quality of the content.

Many of my best Reddit posts, in my personal opinion, are at 1 or 2 points, just because they got buried in huge threads. Whereas I have one-liners that took me literally 5 seconds to come up with and ended up at 100+.

If I were to make an automated system for judging quality of message board content, it'd be a function of text readability (grammar/punctuation, avoidance of overly-long "text wall" paragraphs), size, and user feedback. A 500-word post with 7 upvotes is probably more awesome and more deserving of prominence than a 10-word one-liner with 125 upvotes.


What is the use case for seeing the points on a comment anyway?

All you need to know is that the comments on the toppish are the best ones, and as you scroll down you can stop reading whenever you feel like it's gotten too bad.

I find that without points I'm definitely more focused on the content and are less likely to consciously / subconsciously groupthink.


Here's my use case: suppose there's a comment with a longish reply. If I see that reply has 120 points I'm definitely going to read it. But if I just see it as a sole response to a comment, there's a very good chance I won't read it (there being so many comments).


Use case for displaying points is that it allows you to get an idea of what percentage of the users on the site agree with the comment. I think that's really valuable. I'm often more interested to know what the masses think because it helps you understand the audience.


I thought people were supposed to vote up/down based on whether the comments adds/detracts value from the convo?


Me too, but from years of using this site and similar I find that to be untrue because even assuming everyone votes with this in mind, I don't think you can fully separate perceived value of a comment and agreement with the comment. If you strongly disagree with a comment, then doesn't that imply you don't see value in it? I think that line is ambiguous.


Could the same thing be argued for submissions as well?


This is a nightmare. Please end this. There are 201 comments in this thread at this moment. I am not interested in reading 201 comments about this experiment. I am however very much interested in seeing what the top few most insightful comments in this thread are. That is a very important signal. Right now I am feeling blind as a bat...


AFAIK, comments are still sorted by weight. Is it that hard to just look for the top (literally) comments?


Nah... Comments are sorted by score and freshness. On top of that it is a threaded discussion.


I'm aware of the sorting algorithm.

So, worst case, you'll end up reading a new comment with no votes and not know it. This is by design; fresher comments appear at the top so they have a better chance of being read, and up voted if applicable. Do your part and vote on the comments that you think deserve it, not the ones that everyone else does.

I don't see what a comment's score has to do with the structure being threaded: they're still in the same exact place.


I've been getting more upvotes since the scores were hidden. Maybe my comments were better, or maybe groupthink was holding people back, but either way, my karma has increased wince the scores were hidden, so.. I'm all for keeping it how it is. :-D

Seriously, though, I kinda like it without scores, because I don't get inadvertently suckered into voting to go along with the crowd (I try not to anyway, but sometimes it happens without thinking about it), while now I only vote if I feel the comment needs it (ie, the comment is very relevant and informative (up vote) or off topic/rude/irrelevant (down vote)).


I have been getting the same experience. I actually got my first three digit karma comment soon after pg made the change. And I have been here for more then 2 years now.

I think when there are visible comment scores people do not vote based on whether they like a comment or not, they vote based on whether a certain comment deserves the current karma or not. Thus, they are likely to downvote highly voted comments not because they disagree but because they think "this bastard does not deserve THIS much karma".


I've seen the same behavior on my comments, and I think I'm upvoting more. I think what happens is that people upvote a comment based solely on their own judgement of it. I know that sometimes if I see a comment that I think is good, but it's at say, 30 points, I figure "Eh, it doesn't need any more points." Now, I have have some idea if others have voted top-level comments up based on their placement, but I still don't really know it's score. So I make sure it gets at least my vote.


To echo the parent and grandparent of this, yeah, my personal experience of not showing comment votes has resulted in myself getting more upvotes and also feeling more engaged in voting on things.


Maybe you could have a color range indicating roughly how good the comment was? I like the feedback a lot the numbers gave but I think hiding the actual numbers would be a good thing so people don't play the numbers game too much.


Agreed. that way you can tell what is regarded as important without having the actual number influence you as much


I think, based on the small subset of threads I have sampled by a convenience procedure, that not displaying minute-by-minute comment scores avoids the cognitive illusion human beings suffer from called anchoring bias

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/anchoring.htm

and helps readers focus on the inherent worth of a comment. That's my general observation from seeing which comments are floating up or down in threads and which comments are graying out.


I prefer points on comments. I commented about this elsewhere:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444555

A couple reasons. If I am not totally familiar with whatever the original post is talking about, often the top rated couple of comments give me some good insight or jumping off points to look into it further. Again if this is something that is new to me, it gives me a hint that the poster(s) of these comments know what they are talking about as opposed to a comment rated at -3 which seems ordinary to me but maybe has a hidden agenda I have not seen. (An example of this could be a comment saying--and let's pretend I know nothing about domain registrars--"I recommend GoDaddy because they respect wildlife on a corporate level and have family friendly advertising." I know that is a crock but if it were about a Rails hosting company or a feature of node.js I would not.)

I respect the HN community and have learned a lot here. I generally trust their judgement and I have found if a comment is rated highly, it most likely adds a lot of value to the discussion. (Unlike on reddit where the top couple comments may be a clever joke or inside reference to the community--but that is okay because I read the two sites for different purposes.)

Sometimes I disagree with the highest rated comment(s) and sometimes those comments have a bunch of replies from other HNers stating their agreement. I then see my opinion is in a minority and maybe I re-examine it or stand firm and make a comment to the contrary. Basically it is a nice guide in my perusal of this site. It is not absolute but I like to use it as a reference.


I'd recommend adding an "Undecided: let the experiment continue" option.


I'm late to the party so I doubt this will be read by many. I just want to say that I've found the experience in the last few days without a displayed score really interesting, both as a reader and a commenter.

My voting decisions in the past were based on the metric "How many points does this deserve?" If I found a good comment with 0-3 points, I was sure to vote up, and if I found a bad comment with 4+ I was sure to vote down. Normal comments or comments that had scores that were roughly where I thought they should be would be ignored.

I'm generally relatively sparse with the votes, but I've been voting a bit more actively since the counters were removed, and as someone whose voting habits are dictated by the score, it's been really interesting to go "blind" for a while. At the very least, I'd like to see this continue for a while longer, and perhaps finally wind up as a configuration option that each user can toggle based on his/her preference.


I think no comment points is fine, but in the case where there are no points I think you need to have a more accurate comment ranking system on the page. While having gravity to pull comments down is perfectly reasonable when points are displayed (because users can still look at the points and pick out old but valuable comments), without points the most important indication of comment quality is based on the ordering on comments.

Also, perhaps it would be useful to still display comment points in single-view? It would prevent eye-balling a comment, but would still allow you to view a comment score with a little extra effort.

I am aware this could provide preferential treatment to comments already on the top of the page but with the influx of new users the most important thing to prevent is a deluge of mediocre comments, not necessarily the dearth of exceptional comments.


I am glad that pg managed to remove the karma display while making it clear what comments are below 1 karma, so you don't downvote someone beyond what is reasonable.

I also get the impression that it's affected the discussions for the better.


You know, I hadn't noticed before but now that you mention it, the conversation is more pleasant lately. I can't understand why though.


One thing I don't understand (I'm relatively new, I guess): are comments in a thread sorted according to upvotes?

If they are, my vote is for without points, because then I can still skim, but I won't have these numbers to focus on.


Ordering depends on age and votes. I.e. new comments and top comments are sort of interleaved.


That doesn't help for long nested threads.


I think it would be a good idea to keep it for another week or two so that we can all get used to it first.

The advantage I can see from not having points is that I spend more time actually reading the comments and not be influenced by the majority here.

The disadvantage is that I lose a bit of information when there's a comment with scientific content in which case I like to look at votes to see if it's correct.

I agree with some people to show the points in topics that are more than 2 days old...


I was for not displaying points initially, but after a few days of using the site in this way I'm for displaying the points again. The strongest reasons are:

1) It is harder to scan for good content. 2) Even if I want to read everything, when my knowledge about something is too weak to evaluate the real value of a comment, I can no longer use the wisdom of the crowd to make an idea. 3) Sometimes to resonate with a comment like a question like "Please can you point me to the source code?" the best thing to do is to upvote, so that it is easy for people willing to reply to evaluate if the effort is forth it. There are many instances of this case.

So all in all it was better with points IMHO even if there are advantages without points.


I like HN without comment scores, because it avoids the bandwagon effect, also username biases become more important that the actual content, BUT comment score do solve an important problem, to highlight the quality of a comment, in a threaded discussion.

Solution - May be instead of say "37 points", mark it in a range, (say "20-50" points), to give some idea of the comment quality.

   OR
Even better, Show the percentile range for the comment, within the thread. (Say "80-90"%ile comment, would be better than a "40-50"%ile comment.)

   OR
Grade them ("A" - "E") for the thread comments.


"With", simply because I'm often too busy or lazy to read entire threads and just want to see the "best" comments.

I'd be okay with hiding the numbers but having some other indicator which could accomplish the same goal.


"Without," because the lack of points on this comment has led me to have to think through my objections to it. Rather than, e.g., noting that it has a smallish number of points and so therefore my opinion is already shared by the community and I don't need to say anything.


Ironically, I'm actually voting much more than before; perhaps because I'm reading more comments in depth, perhaps because I can't feel like a comment already has its "proper" score. Either way, I like the new way. (Perhaps show points after a few days or weeks, though.)


I prefer HN with points displayed on comments. 1168 points

I prefer HN without points displayed on comments. 989 points

Ah, welcome my creatures of the night. You have brought victory after a close contest. Seriously, it is interesting that early evening USA saw an almost perfect 50-50 split (384-382 at 9pm PST), but as daytime moves west across Asia towards Europe, there's been a strong trend towards points.

Paul, this might be worth exploring in more depth, breaking out by age or timezone for example.


It could be that people who are working during the day prefer HN with points so that they can skim (since they may not have enough time to read fully).


I think the bigger problem is that highly rated comments below the first comment are pushed out by replies to the first.


I'm not sure. I definitely prefer to read with points on. I find it hard to skim a comment thread now, and I have no idea what the community thinks of particular points of view.

As for what it does for the community there hasn't really been time to judge. I've seen a lot less of the usual suspects coming in saying the same the things they always say because they know it'll be highly upvoted.

Could there be a keep it for now option?


For what it's worth, I think it's been a big improvement. It forces me to focus more on the content of individual posts, it's made me more careful with my own allocation of points, and--I know this this fuzzy and subjective--I think it's improved the quality of discourse. Which ultimately is the only metric that really matters here.

Maybe that's just a temporary thing; people change their behavior when they know they're being observed. But I'd urge you to keep it for a little while longer.

I like the idea of a more coarse-grained system, perhaps one that uses font weight or shades of grey to emphasize and de-emphasize certain areas of the conversation, weighted perhaps towards the dialog around a particular comment rather than the comment itself. Perhaps over time that would come to suffer from the same problems as the last system. But hiding the algorithm allows you to readjust it before people have the chance to reverse-engineer and game it. Numerical point systems are useful sometimes, but they tend to activate humans' incentive structures in some really negative ways.


I think it's great. It makes people slow down and consider the discussion instead of being guided by those who have seen it earlier. That reduces the impact of the first-to-vote.

Essentially, it makes each vote more independent.


I think a poll isn't the best way to decide this issue. After all the problem you're trying to fix is the greater number of low-quality comment, i.e. those who provide low-quality comments outnumber those who provide high-quality comments. Thus, it is not unreasonable that the low-quality commenters would select the option that enables them the most.


Ideally, I'd like the voting history - both upvotes and downvotes in a little sparkline (or at least the %). That can tell me more about the comment than upvotes alone.

If there will be no points on comments, it would be very beneficial to have some kind of indicator on the comment that it has 2-3 std deviations of votes above the average comment on the thread.


I think HN would do well to look at how Slashdot scores its comments.

Especially, I think having a few pre-defined tags that people can give is very useful, and in many ways a lot more useful than votes. Votes, as many people have noted, are often off the cuff, and I'll give a +1 without too much thought. Calling someone insightful? A troll? I'm going to think about that a little harder.

So the big thing is increasing the average amount of time people spend before voting. Some AJAX trickery would be a little strong-armed. I think focusing on finding ways of filtering content that are more descriptive is a better direction to go. (Being more descriptive, I think, is the only way to force people to be more discerning.)

Though I don't mean to suggest precisely Slashdot's system. The tags should be carefully chosen. "factually incorrect" would be a nice one to have. (And is a little less insulting than "troll," making no assumptions about the intentions of the author.)


Often, when the discussion is related to the field I'm not knowledgeable in, the points are very useful to me.

Simplified example: if I know nothing about security, but I can see that the comment "Emailing passwords in plaintext is wrong" is heavily upvoted, and "Emailing passwords in plaintext is not an issue" is downvoted, it helps me learn things.


I kind of like the feel of the site since, but I don't love how hard it is to wade through comments now. Have you considered collapsible comment threads, ala reddit or slashdot? I know this place doesn't want to turn into either, but as the comment volume goes up it seems like a better and better idea.


Yeah, I'd like this as well. When a long top-voted thread goes off on an obscure tangent, it's often hard to find the start of the next major thread because the indent levels are so small.


I think a bigger question is how do you create order when a thread gets to 100+ comments like this one. I personally get lost and stop reading comments on long threads. But there's a wealth of good conversation going. It just gets harder and harder to pinpoint them as comments increase.


I think it would be useful to see the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes instead of the total score (or possibly a percentage instead of a hard number). That way, you can see whether a comment is at -2 points because it's bad, or if it's at -2 points because it's controversial.


I totally understand why the karma is kept hidden, to avoid herding votes, but I also really miss the access to the HN community barometer. I placed great value in the information contained in those vote tallies, and it hurts to have that taken away completely.

A compromise would be for voting to be disabled on all threads after x days, with vote tallies being displayed at that point.

If you guys want to fancy it up, you could have a button at the bottom of the page that says, "OK, I'm done voting now, please show me the tallies", and the voting buttons would disappear, and tallies would appear in their place; and you'd only have to keep track of x days worth of user thread status flags before you can purge the data.

Also, the vote tally could be displayed for a post once you've voted on it.


I immediately liked the change. I realize now that in addition to evaluating the comments I was reading, I was also evaluating the readership's collective response to the comments. It makes for better reading to only evaluate one thing at a time.


Mini-poll: Has everyone noticed how polls don't get very many upvotes? Many of them tend to get a ton of actual poll "votes", but not upvotes. I have always felt like if you are going to vote for a item you should give the poll a vote as well.


It's been said a few times on the thread but I'm not willing to read the entire thing just to upvote rather than comment. Here is the problem:

It's been said a few times on the thread but I'm not willing to read the entire thing just to find the nuggets among the blather. Here is the problem:

It's been said a few times on the thread but I'm not an expert on everything and I'm not willing to halt my day and gain the background to fairly judge the veracity of every comment on the threads I'm interested in. In fact, I'm fairly likely to miss a counterintuitive point or chance to think deeper.

Was this comment too verbose? I don't know because I only skimmed it while I was reading this enormous thread.


I think a user content generated community where huge number of people participate needs an explicit feedback system. We all want to learn from the good sources and filter out what aren't worthy and we need a way to distinguish them. If you think the point rating system isn't good, it doesn't necessarily mean we don't need it.

Here is my suggestion: How about we use the absolute points to rank a comment in a different scale, such as if a comment collects enough a number of point, it will be ranked as 1 star, then 2 stars... and so on. In this way of rating, we not only get what we want but also not to follow "group thinking" as someone said in this thread.


I felt the way you have put the comment in various shades better. The algorithm already sorts out what comments should float to the top. If people feel an answer is incorrectly placed, they can vote on it to fix it.

Point scoring: yes, it is a problem. HN "feels" somewhat nicer.

Further, there may be different reasons a comment may have been voted up:

1. The comment voted up is considered relevant

2. The reader agreed with the sentiment.

3. The comment was irrelevant, but was humorous.

Similarly, a comment may have been voted down because:

1. The comment was irrelevant.

2. The comment was relevant, but the reader disagreed with the point of view.

3. A polarising comment may end up with a net score of 0, but it is actually very relevant.

4. The comment was relevant, but was delivered in a brusque manner.


If points count, then I want to see them.

But there's a bigger problem, as long as points matter for anything: Early comments, even fairly inane ones, have an overwhelming point advantage over late comments, even fairly good ones.


I like comments without, I find myself focusing more on what's being said than skipping over folks with significantly less comments.

I've read criticisms about not being able to quickly/easily filter out top comments (which I care about, too). But there might be other (better?) ways of achieving that without reverting back to scored comments. For example, coloring/annotating comments that cross a certain threshold (either an absolute number, or relative to the other comments in the post). The advantage of color is that it becomes easier to visually filter out highly voted comments.


The solution is simple: display capped votes.

- 'good' results get shown for the cap, and from experience on other such sites, upvotes slow down once it hits the cap anyway - 'bad' results show as well, as someone already said, sometimes a comment needs to be downmodded to oblivion, other times it just needs that slight rebuke and you don't want to downmod more.

Caps of +/-10 are enough to point out 'this comment is worthy of more attention', and will help avoid that problem where a popular opinion draws a hundred upvotes where a mere insightful opinion draws only a score.


I mostly like no points displayed, but with one exception - comments that provides information you are unsure of trusting or not, and there hasn't been replies to it yet. (eg. scythe's recommendation on domain registrar [1]). In order to have better information on the post's trustworthiness, I had to click on the user's link. I guess we'll need to wait to see how much other nuances for this no points display.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445061


How about showing comment points after a set period of time? I can see the value of not showing points on current submissions, but I was frustrated when I was trying to skim older topics.


I think you're on to something with this.


I think some of my posts have received more upvotes without points than they would have with points displayed. I wonder if in general there has been more total upvoting without points, as people are simply expressing appreciation or agreement rather than trying to move posts toward a "fair" score (something I've done in the past).

It's difficult to say whether that's a good thing. Since the poll numbers look pretty close so far (though it's only been ~15 minutes as of this writing), maybe it should be an option.


I vote to remedy imbalances:

  valuable && low points => upvote
  valuable && high points => read, no need to upvote
Does anyone else do this?


Unless I am mistaken, there are two changes: a) no points display and b) no downvote arrow for many of us. Both are good.

There used to be many responses triggered by consternation over downvotes. This way, most people can only upvote iff they resonate with the comment, without the possibility of jumping on a bandwagon (or trying to derail one)

Suggestion: Moving the comment box to the bottom would nudge people to scan the thread before responding, duplicating, etc.


As current poll results indicate we're torn.

On one hand, skimming the comments to see which are worth it to read is now denied. On the other hand, discussions seem to have improved, and more focus is on a comment's content and less on community appreciation of it, which makes an individual voice stand out more and not be drowned.

I like HN without comments, I just wish there was a way to tell which comments the community appreciates more, at a glance.


The consensus points I'm reading are:

I miss knowing whether a comment will be good and worthwhile to read or not.

I miss the points because I use them to search/filter/etc.

I'm being more thoughtful in reading comments because I don't have the points anchoring or influencing my opinion.

I'm being more thoughtful in the comments I write.

On the whole, it's sounding like the change is bad for individual users, but good for the HN ecosystem in general.


How about separating "quality" and "agreement" into separate scores?

While it complicates the interface, it would be much more useful for both authors and readers. It naturally leads to measuring controversy - the most interesting comments would be those with high quality and mixed agreement. Having a sense of HN's opinion would direct posts towards areas of maximum contribution. It would also re-direct some of the pile-on upvoting from low quality but obvious/funny/mean/etc. comments, so they could drop down the page despite having some appeal.

Some example cases: a) I may agree with the snarky comment that calls out someone's obvious mistake, but I can simultaneously downvote for snark. b) I may disagree with someone's analysis of the iOS vs Android market battle, but I can now register my disagreement while acknowledging that the poster made a good point. c) I made a comment that came off as means-pirited, though that wasn't my intent. The quality downvotes are an unambiguous message, which I can't just write off with "I guess HN disagrees."


Side-note: Many users vote, or withhold votes, based on some sense of what the comment "should have scored." Awarding karma only for quality votes allows the reader to register assent/dissent without running up the score. There's a frequent problem where the first comment builds momentum just by being first; this change would at least partially address that problem.


My biggest complaint of the recent changes is that it appears to have broken the hckr news Chrome extension, which added new comment highlighting. For me this is one of those features that I never knew I wanted, but now that it is gone I can't remember how I browsed HN without it.

As for the point displays, I want them to be there, but I think HN will be better off without them displayed.


Perhaps this is a good thing. I consider it like this.

I well understand the idea of downvoting to express a response towards ugly, trolling and irrelevant comments. By downvoting, responders show trolls that their attitudes are not welcome.

However newbies such as I are often too scared to ask our questions, or to comment on something of interest, or indeed to contribute in any way, for fear of someone more experienced coming along and downvoting us.

As a system of control, to weed out the unhelpful while promoting helpful discussion, karma points were initially a useful tool. High karma scores indicated a valued contributor to the site.

However once the mindset of points farming settles in, as I suspect it has done here, the contribution ceases to matter in the rush to acquire more points, leading to a drop in quality and this competitive points scoring obsession. Delusion replaces reason and desire to contribute.

Doing without the points scoring could go some way to redirecting the focus on the items and the discussions stemming therefrom, rather than on the karma farming.

And that is my opinion.


One thing about points its I can pinpoint the "best" or most controversial comment quickly - if you can do that other way, for me its fine.


I prefer without comments, but would like some mechanism by which comment scores affect layout. It is often now difficult to process a large discussion, as high signal and low signal replies are indistinguishable.

For instance, having predefined threshold for collapsing to a title (5, 10, 50) or deep shading for >= + 10 comments would be very helpful in processing a large discussion.


without comments? :)


I generally support not displaying points on comments. But I did run into a case where it would be useful to have some sort of feedback on a series of comments (even if it's just dots or some other non numerical indicator).

I was reading a recent post on the open-sourcing of some of Greplin's Lucene and Bloom filters code. sigil made a comment asking about performance based on how they implemented prefix matching. Then nostrademons responded[1]. When points were displayed it was trivial to get a consensus of whether the community agreed on the performance assessment or whether it was dubious/questionable. Since points are not visible I can't rely on the consensus of the community to help verify or make a decision. Instead I just have the posts and order of the posts. Which, of course, isn't necessarily bad. But has taken away my ability to use the HN community's consensus as verification.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444585


I voted for with points, but I think there really should have been a third option.

The main reason I like points is it helps tell me what comments are worthy of me spending time to read when a story has 50+ comments.

So without points, I think you still need a way to show what is valuable and worth reading for the most popular stories. There are a couple ways to do this.

One option would be to personalize what comments are deemed important to me. For instance if I go and up vote pg comments, then when I go to another story and theres a pg comment it should give me a mark to let me know this comment will probably be of value to me. Another user might visit the same story and down-rate your comment because they don't like it. Thats fine, in the future, your comments probably won't be displayed prominently for them in this case.

This moves away from the group-think mentality of what is valuable to an individuals preference, which I think is more valuable and provides a less contentious exchange platform.


As long as there are points, and comments are sorted by popularity, not showing the points, I don't see how it can mitigate the problem of people trying to game the system.

If it is somehow measurable who is trying to do so, in obvious way, in some automated way and if this activity is at a level that affects the rest, then the user could be somehow penalized off that karma gained. Nevertheless this is democracy, so I would only expect this behaviour being penalized only if it really affects other in some measurable way, so that the community could approve penalizing users who are trying to advantage of lack of automated moderation.

The contrary could be done i.e. instead of penalizing users who are suspectable in such behaviour, preferably award recursively to each comment in the same thread more points, therefore the commenters who are 'legit' are awarded. Therefore, add a category of comment points named 'HN ponts' which are awarded automatically by the system.


Seems like it could be made either a) easier to read / skim through comments ---with points shown, or b) easier to cast a fair vote, and thus contribute to HN ---with points hidden.

Thinking of it this way, maybe we should have two different modes--- ‘quick reading’, with points shown and voting disabled, and ‘contribution’, with points hidden and voting enabled.

Wait, I know it complicates things a bit, but it makes sense. Look:

- If you do read everything carefully and don't rely on crowd's opinion, then you don't need points anyway and you can well contribute to HN by voting justly. Use ‘contribution’ mode.

- If you usually read HN in a hurry, thus you shouldn't be tempted to vote. Use ‘quick reading’ mode.

The weakest point here is changing mode. Don't know how frequently people switch between ‘skimming’ and ‘contribution’ mode while reading HN… If not often, then maybe it makes sense to place a switch on the user's settings page. (Maybe with contribution mode disabled for noobs.)


In 2000, having a guestbook on a website where you can post a message anonymously was the norm, spambots did not exist.

in 2005, the ability the reply using an account was the norm, where replies could be rated 1-5 (slashdot and the rest).

In 2010, upvoting messages by giving them points was the norm, which Digg started and Reddit perfected.

In 2015, labelling posts I think will be the norm. Users will get the ability to associate posts with labels, such as insightfull, funny, interesting, firstpost, nonsense, et cetera. Every post will get it's own tagcloud, the labels being associated a lot being bigger.

The problem with upovoting is that you only classify posts using a numeric value. A numeric value can only express a limited classification. It does not say anything more specific then "bad rated" (<1), "not rated" (1), "somewhat rated" (>1 <6), "good rated" (>5 <20), and "awesome" (>20). Other then that, it does not say anything useful.


Whether displayed or not, the points never really contained any useful information about the quality of a post. The ability to dispassionately evaluate an argument solely on the basis of whether it is logically consistent, based upon a reasonable interpretation of fact, and skillfully written without letting your personal biases enter into the evaluation is a skill that most people (sadly) do not possess. The reality is that most people will upvote posts that agree with their own worldview or appeal to their sense of humor and relentlessly downvote any viewpoint they personally disagree with, even when well-presented and logically consistent. Comment points only provide information about what is popular. Groupthink virtually guarantees that the point system is incapable of distinguishing between useless garbage and expressions that are both heretical and true.


I skim through the points, both on stories and discussions to decide which ones to read. As the size of the community has grown, I believe, probably mistakenly, that the points are more closely related to domain names on submissions and user names on comments, rather than the quality of the comment.

I tend to read some comments based on user names, irrespective of the points, for a few users, raganwald being one, primarily because I have read pretty much everything he has written and find it interesting more often than not. Even in cases where his comments has garnered few points, I have found the comment worth while. So I can understand the tendency to up vote comments based on user names.

Having said that, I vote for display of points and the hiding of user names. I would like comments to stand up for themselves rather than for the user posting the comments.


I think it would be useful if the points were shown after a time delay. Throughout the day, I visit the same thread a dozen times and follow the discussions. It would be nice to gauge what the general consensus is by seeing the comment points upon the 3rd visit or so..

But to answer your poll, I voted for them to be hidden.


I really miss the points. I know it's superficial, but it added a form of engagement that is gone now.

What I don't understand is anyone getting worked up about the points one way or the other. To me it's just a meaningless, harmless, and somewhat fun diversion. Yet so many seem to take them seriously and get bent out of shape if they don't agree with people's votes. What difference does it make? Oh no, my post is light gray now! Oh no, a less than brilliant comment has a high number next it! Really? Just take a deep breath. It doesn't matter.

Despite all the grumbling, HN is still one of the best places to find interesting and intelligent discussions on the web, and despite the occasional flukes, votes are generally a good indicator of which posts in a long thread are most worth reading when there's limited time. I say don't fix what isn't broken!


For the case where scores are used to measure agreement: a special kind of vote comment (like polls for submissions), to express agreement/disagreement.

A checkbox for whether you want your comment to be voted on, or evaluated. This is displayed, so HNers know how to treat it. A "poll" comment doesn't count towards karma


I think your first suggestion touches an important point - it may be useful to consider the different reasons people vote on comments, which I believe are broadly:

a) they agree/disagree with the opinion stated in the comment

b) they accept/deny the factual accuracy of the comment

c) they feel the comment does/does not contribute to the overall discussion; in my experience here, this seems to be heavily influenced by a) and b)

and possibly

d) they like/dislike the person posting the comment

I find the scoring useful for cases b) and c); in case a) I've found the absence of scoring more useful as it gives me more space to think about my reaction to what's being said, and not just follow everyone else. Case d) is trickier - I don't think many people would agree to hiding account names as well but I think it would be an interesting exercise!

So, perhaps it would be helpful to categorise the voting a bit? Accurate/inaccurate, agree/disagree, contributes/doesn't? Of course, there is a usability trade-off.


It's a nice improvement. There is nothing worse than writing a thoughtful comment and then seeing someone write a snarky reply that got more points than the thoughtful comment. It just causes bad energy.

I like how points are shown only for each user's own comments. This way it's a competition only with one's self.


I'm not in a YC startup, and I don't seek to start one. So take it with a grain of salt... the tone here has been better in the short time without points.

I think some of the personality types that YC attracts do poorly in a civil discussions where there is a (public) competitive element.


More importantly than hiding points, I think names should be visible on mouseover only. There's truly no need to see the username before reading the contents; rather, you should look to see who wrote a particularly good comment after having read it.


Make the display of points optional. I find them useful in finding comments to look at on long discussions. I use upvotes to signal interesting comments, but I rarely do it on comments that have large upvotes. Now I am inclined not to upvote. I guess to remain consistent, I should upvote comments only at the end of the discussion.

I find that I miss the points on other sites, why couldnt they have a way to uplift comments so I could see through the cruft.

pg, while you are at it, could you fix the size and spacing of the up/down arrows. I never downvote. When I accidentally hit downvote, I have doubalely penalized the commenter, once for the downvote and once again for the upvote I intended to give.


I'd like some sort of indication of which posts are exceptionally high scoring. This would let people skim the comments if they aren't going to read them in-depth anyway, by signalling that maybe this one comment thread is actually a worthwhile read.


I find this interesting given the discussion yesterday about transparency about salaries.


Even if the difference only amounts in cosmetics, I still would prefer HN without points displayed on comments. Hopefully though, it will place an emphasis on the message--you can always intuit its popularity by its position.


I'm sure it's been brought up before, but what about only displaying comments either above or below a certain threshold. For example, hide the points on a comment once it's above 4.

Or show points after someone has upvoted or downvoted a comment?


Asking people what they want isn't necessarily the best way to give them what they want. Remember the Henry Ford line, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses." PG has mentioned this before as well in response to requests for UI improvement on HN. I don't remember the exact words, but people were saying things like, "If there was any other site that had the quality of HN and better UI, I would go there," and PG's reply was that the reason the was no site that had the same quality and better UI is because he spends time worrying about quality instead of worrying about UI.


Oddly the point system went off when I hit a karma of 250, making me think I was being punished in some way. Great to see that isn't the case.

Honestly, there are sometimes WAY too many comments to wade through, and I feel that comments with higher points have been vetted by the community, so I tend to focus on them. This isn't the case when there are just 10-12 comments, but with over 70 comments, the point system can be helpful.

To remove the system is to imply that the community can no longer be trusted to handle the sometimes contentious exchanges on their own. I hope that hasn't become the case.


Upvoting a comment should signify that I agree with what the author is writing, not that I want that comment to have more karma points. I don't care how many upvotes a comment gets if the people who are upvoting it are not people I agree with.

It would be more helpful if there was a lingering effect to agreeing with someone instead of just giving someone a karma point increment. Lets say that I upvoted zzyzx's comment, and based on that upvote, I am able to see a thumbs up on other comments that zzyzx upvoted, indicating that people who I agree with, agreed with that comment.


I would prefer if HN would let me configure if I want to see points or not.


Beware the results of polls such as this. Any time change is introduced, we know that some people will naturally react negatively. When asked what they prefer, people will often give an explicit response even though their "espoused theory" may differ greatly from their "theory in use": http://www.lopn.net/TheoryofAction.html

Not to say these polls aren't valuable, just take them with the requisite serving of salt.

EDIT: In the interest of full disclosure, I strongly support the new "no display" points.


Hmmm, both options do seem to have their pros and cons in the current layout of the comment system. You may want to keep displaying comments without points but also try splitting the comment section into two parallel parts: A "Top Comments" column on the left side and a "New Comments" column on the right. This will highlight newer comments at the top longer and may encourage more readers to comment and reply to those while still showcasing the top comments of a story on the opposing left side for those who wish to skim real quick.


My gut reaction is to keep them, but I think that's just because I don't like change.

If you do decide to drop them, it might be nice if something different was done for the time-displaying. I keep thinking the minute count in the comment header (pg 22 minutes ago | link) refers to points (pg 22 points [random text] | link). I still feel like jerf's comment (9 minutes ago) has more points than skennedy's (4 minutes ago), even though I know it's not actually true.

Although I'd probably get used to it within a month--it's just an annoying thing during the transition.


Give it another week or two. Then poll again. It's too soon to conclude, both for people who may take time to get used to it, as well as people who don't visit HN that often (but still regularly).


The majority will likely state they prefer to see points, because people will systematically underestimate the (negative) influence the data have on their decision making, much like people cannot accurately estimate their own ability to drive cars with above average skill.

Paul, in making the judgment, if even a third of voters think points shouldn't be displayed, it is a strong indicator that that's the right thing to do, because there is no countering cognitive bias that would cause people to state that they want less information.


What about an experiment? PG could take a few dozen people he wants to be exemplars for the community, pick some semi-popular articles before and after the change, and ask the test subjects to rate which article had better comments. For best results, only pair people with articles they haven't read.

Myself, I didn't even realize how strong the group-think effect was until the comments were turned off. It feels like there's more substance now, but I might just be reading more closely in the absence of loud communal signals.


The problem HN is facing is a human-interaction problem of which hiding or showing points on comments won't solve. Sooner or later, problems with user experience will come about one way or the other.

I saw some other post about the Whirlpool Moderation forum (http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/wp_modfaq) and thought the transparent moderation policy they have is pretty amazing. PG et al should at least research it and consider implementing something similar.


I blogeed about it http://oonwoye.com/2010/09/25/angelgate-dave-mcclure-and-re-...

summary is below.

    Vote count should show up only after the discussion is no longer ‘hot’ (say after a day). So people are not unnecessarily influenced by the upvotes by others


    No down voting: So people will not lose karma just for having an opposing view. Not gaining, is not as bad as losing


I've been noticing that the poll tilts in favor of the highest comment on the page. 'Without' used to be slightly ahead when edw519 (for example) was on top; now that a post more in favor of the points is on top 'with points' is nearly 100 points ahead.

I guess that in some ways it's hard to be completely unbiased.

As for my own opinion, I want to echo that no points are fine as long as we see some sort of gradation of quality. Maybe just >10, >50, >100 is necessary. It doesn't have to be too complicated.


I'm going to toot my own horn: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hahhhdmfdgfiehpg...

I prefer them hidden until I don't want them to be hidden. It makes sense to hide them prior to voting, but I do like to see them sometimes - either after I vote, or on the comment's "link" page. But getting rid of the first, default display is nice once you get used to it.


If I were you, In a few cases (10%) I would include random fake points to see what happen. Someone who has 2000 points showing as 20000 or 200 to see how the HN crowd react.


I agree with the goal in not showing points. I think it works and the benefits outweigh the costs mentioned by others.

The quality of comments on HN has increasingly suffered from people behaving like in hives. Let the content of a comment decide if you agree, not the number of others who agree with the comment.

Similarly, let the content of comments in this thread have a say in the future of not showing points on comments, not just the number of votes for or against it.


I use HN to hear about news and read interesting articles, and also to occasionally engage in conversation. Points on comments have absolutely no bearing on being able to do that, so I didn't even notice at first that they were gone.

It is handy to know the points of your own comments, which can help you adjust your behavior to fit in with community expectations -- but we haven't lost that ability, so I'm not even sure what 'cost' this poll is referring to.


Why not stop rendering HN pages in tables with inline formatting and render the page as a semantically structured document with a default style sheet. This will allow others to come along and restyle the site as they see fit. Don't like comment points? hidden. Post score is less than -4? hidden.

I personally don't understand the reasoning behind using tables as formatting and inline styles on a site whose content generally includes articles about web development.


The question about comment points is "do I think HN works better if comment points are hidden for all users", not "do I want to see comment points myself".

And to the second point, HN is PG's experiment with the programming language he's developing and the community for his company more than an example of modern web design. The point is probably that tables were quicker and easier.


I'm asking a different question.

Rendering a page as a semantically structured document won't remove the ability to globally disable a feature. (In fact, I would argue that it would make it easier.)

It's fair enough that pg does whatever he likes... no one can argue that point.


The points would make sense if I could sort by upvotes received for a comment. As long as that is not the case, I prefer it with comments displayed without points.


I think that visible point counts make it clearer what the norms of the community are to newcomers and reinforce them for other users.

Comments that fail to attract points (but are not downvoted) send a clear signal that something is not right. +1 would be an appropriate HN score for borderline snark, for example, that adds some insight, but doesn't aid the tone of the discussion. This sort of subtle signalling is lost when points are hidden.


On the upside, I spend a lot less time looking at the HN comments. I used to scroll down, looking for insightful comments within otherwise low-ranked threads or in a sea of trite comments. Now, I can't distinguish them, so I don't even look past the top-ranked reply and the top comment or two.

Not having points displayed has probably given me ten minutes a day of my life back :-) Though I can't say that I prefer it that way.


Without points, I mostly just read posts from users whose comments used to show a lot of points. Without points, that list only gets smaller for me.


HN doesn't want either comments-solely-for- or voting for agreement or disagreement. Yet that is what a lot of people want to express. Perhaps it is more useful to have agree & disagree buttons, and the comments interest value is the total votes in either direction. Offensive/troll comments could still be flagged to separate them from comments which are largely disagreed with.


PG, can you tell us if hiding the points has reduced the number of up/downvotes being given globally on the entire site? (IOW, has karma growth across all users slowed down noticeably?)

My personal feeling is that I don't click the upvote button nearly as often as I did before.

When the tally was displayed, my vote had an instant visible effect. Without that small gratification, voting feels less meaningful.


I thought I would hate not seeing points on comments, but I find it's been very refreshing. It's much rarer that I find myself annoyed at the number of people who have upvoted something stupid or ignored something insightful. I still see the points on my own comments, which is the important part.

My vote: definitely continue hiding the points. It takes focus away from the content.


I love seeing what other people in the community find interesting. Points let me see not just the comment, but how others felt about it.


I desperately need to know what the Hivemind thinks!


One benefit of points displayed that is totally lost is the ability to compare the points of a comment with the /replies/ to it. This lets me get a general idea at a glance if a commenter was mistaken or incorrect or misinformed or whatever (this happens for example when a thread has one comment and one reply, and the reply has 100x more points than the comment)


What I used the scores for most was to know when to stop scrolling down when a story was highly commented. I would figure that if there are 100+ comments chances are any threads that start with an initial post < 10 are safe to skip.

Now though, I have very little info as to where I can "safely" stop. (Though I know I've gone too far if the font starts fading!)


I quickly scanned for another reference to this, but didn't see anything - pardon if a duplicate.

It seems that you can vote for both options. After I voted, the other choice still has the 'upvote arrow'. I didn't try to see if it worked since I don't want to vote for the other option.

Is this intended? I never noticed on any other polls, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention.


I like without points, but would still prefer some way to know the quality of the comment. Maybe some visual indication (both color and a symbol maybe) would help. Then we would know a comment has been rated higher than normal. Set a cutoff small enough to be useful in smaller threads (like 5 or 10 points), and leave it at that.


Without. I don't want to have to read the whole comment thread to get the HN Zeitgeist.

What if it was an option? Or better yet, something like "Hold Ctrl to see comment scores", or "hover here to see the score for this comment", etc.?

Seeing comment scores is massively valuable to the way I consume HN -- skimming the article, then reading the top-rated 2-5 comments.


Hopefully not adding to the noise, but wanted to specify my opinion beyond the simple Y/N of the poll. I like not knowing the precise point value, but I do agree - especially for large threads - that it is nice to have a way to quickly scan. I think that some sort of color coded could work, as several of the other posts suggest.


I voted up both as a sort of "abstain". At first, I hated it. Now, I think I might like it. It's stopped me from voting comments up and down so much but I think, perhaps, it discourages the wrong sort of people from voting but the right sort of people keep on doing it anyway. If that's true, it could be a big win.


I'd prefer an experiment in 2-axis voting. The up/down karma points need not be displayed per comment, but the new right/left agree/disagree totals would be intended-to-be-displayed-per-comment. More details here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445476


I feel like part of a firehose when commenting on this thread, but I'll quickly add my 2 cents:

How about showing points for top level comments (those whose parent is an actual posting). Any derivative comment has no visible score. This would help me parse the high level topics while still deflating most of the flame wars.


I want points gone, but I want something more generic to take their place to filter out useless comments. The ordering doesn't work because 1 - it often doesn't differentiate between a 50 point comment and a 2 point comment, and it doesn't handle useless comments which is a child of a popular comment.


Sort of unrelated feature request (is there a better place feor this?): a small piece of JavaScript to warn before you submit a title that starts with a number between 3 and 15. There are about five articles on the front page right now that break the "remove useless numbers" rule.


Hey! If you're going to turn off points in comments, please make it a preference. I enjoy seeing them.


How about, display a discretized form of points? -- e.g. high, medium, and low, with unknown thresholds (that may be changed through time or whatever).

Can still use them as a heuristic for filtering, but the details and possibly divisive aspects of worrying about minute differences are hidden.


A better way to do this experiment would be to have half of threads show comment scores, and half not.


There seems to be significantly more downvoting going on now. Worthwhile, constructive comments are being downvoted to the bottom of the page and I know that I personally am having very old comments downvoted for seemingly no reason whatsoever. What is going on?


Show HN and Ask HN are two good reasons why we need comment points. Comment points provides raw data to know how many people agree/disagree, like/hate a technology or topic.

In a post with 100+ comments, the points makes it easy to parse the various threads and conversations going on.


I'd be most interested to see whether hiding the scores changed voting behavior appreciably. Do stupid comments get upvoted more or less? It seems like that's the ultimate test, much more than whether people prefer it after trying it for a few days.


No one will probably read this, but please, please, please bring back the points score. I've been working on a hacker news crawler that rolls up facts about comments (user centric trends, etc) and without the points it will be very much limited.


While I appreciate the idea of logarithmic scales and other advanced formulas for accumulating points, how about a simple threshold for displaying the points on each comment? For instance, no points are displayed until a comment is +5 or -2?


It would be good if the data/information were at least available somewhere, such as through an API.

I must admit that as somebody studying social science of the internet, and interested in data in general, I might not be your typical user, but still...


I hate not seeing it, which is why I think it's important to keep hiding them for a while. I find that I actually judge a comment by how I feel about it, rather than what the community feels about it, which is nice.


How about if points are hidden for the first 2 hours or so after a story is submitted? This way initially there wont be any bias on the comments, and eventually we can see the comments that are the most meaningful.


Well, if you could at least do a "display:none" on the points, at least hackerbrain would show the points. I'm sure those points are used by derivative sites during parsing. Can you please put them in the html?


I'm starting to think I like it better without comments. Although if without, then I'd prefer those dots that showed up for a couple of hours on frequently upvoted comments. I really do like a skim option.


Perhaps make this a configurable option and keep them hidden by default?


agreed

i prefer browsing hn w/o comments since it lets me better evaluate each comment in an informational rather than social context.


What about this: Star the top X comments (configurable setting in user profile). I don't care how many points any comments have, but I do care about reading the best comments in a thread.


One thing I'll say is that if 'without points' is kept, please change the arrow UI. It's now impossible to tell if you accidentally downvoted someone.

I like it sans-points over-all though.


On my android clicking on links highlights them for just a split second. It's a feature I've been very glad for in the past few days.


On my android clicking on links highlights them for just a split second. It's a feature I've been very glad for in the past few days.


It seems people who don't want points displayed are trying to evoke a feeling.

I want points for one reason and one reason only. So I can tell which piece of advice people agree with.


I like it better without. I prefer not having the herd effect/anchoring effect of points pre-affecting my judgement of someone's content before I even read it.


For the same reasons (presumably) as leaving the scores off comments, might it have made for a more representative poll to hide the scores on the poll options?


People are social creatures. Things displaying votes are more likely to get upvotes. Without the display, the better comments are likely to get upvotes.


Having a bit of aspergers I am seldom able to interpret feedback.

HN has been such a shelter of safety for me because of the clear (in comparison) and immediate feedback.


What is the algorithm that determines where a comment ranks in the hierarchy from top to bottom? It appears that there is more to it than just points.


I think it's based on your karma average, total karma, and popularity in that thread.


I use the points on the comments to sift make a quick decision whether I should read a particular comment.

As a compromise between your goal of people scoring points, maybe a scale might be good?

For example,

0 - 100

100 - 300

>300

Edited: for formatting


Ideas

-Display points after one has upvoted/downvoted a comment

- Have a quota of votes in any thread so a user has say 5 votes to spend in a new post (may increase with karma)


When I'm skimming comments on a front page post, name and points help me zero in on things I'm more likely to find interesting or useful.


for years i've been very impressed with how well the original approach worked, and I tend to get downvoted a lot, being a bit of a troll now and again. I don't oppose a new approach, but I do think it is on the hook for compelling evidence of improvement. hacker news has aged well in the same way that the constitution has, considering Internet time.


Show me comment points after I've reached a karma threshold. If I have 2000 karma points, then comment points show up for me.


I prefer HN with points initially hidden, but displayed after a while. This way ratings are not as susceptible to group think.


It would have been funny if no one could see the point total for the options on this poll itself.


When will we get our points back?


Maybe hide them on a story view and show them when you click the permalink to that post?


I notice that my eye gravitates to longer comments now. That's probably a good thing.


I personally find that seeing the points by comments allows me to see interesting comments while I am skimming over a thread. I wouldn't mind having points hidden if there was some way that the most commented on threads or most popular threads appeared closer to the top of the story.


Only display points when logged in. What about that?


That is the worst of both worlds. The purpose of hiding points is to remove the bias they create. Showing them to people who are logged in leaves the bias intact while needlessly hiding content from people who can't vote anyway.


Why not making it an option?


I prefer without


Wow, vote even at 500 to 500.


I think the scores should appear to a user after (A) that person votes, or (B) 24 hours. Keeping the karma hidden to a user until he or she votes is, IMO, a good idea.

I'd actually argue for keeping the text color the same at 0 or -1, for the same reason.

I don't know that these "contentious exchanges" happen in practice. I remember that a year or two ago, there was the discussion of whether people with high average ratings deserve to have their names appear in orange, and my thought then was that making a fetish of karma averages discourages nested discussions, since root-set comments can end up at 20+, but 6th-level comments, no matter how insightful, are unlikely to get more than a single upvote.


I think this is perfect. Reveal after a vote so that the vote isn't biased by the points, but you still get to see where your opinion stands with the audience.


Why would you care if the community agrees with you? And if you assign value to what the community thinks, why would you want that information displayed for everything, not just stuff you have voted on?


I didn't say I cared if the community agrees with me, what I said was that it would be nice to know how many people agree with me. Slight distinction, but it matters.

Truth be told, I don't care about agreement, but it is interesting to measure general sentiment about topics, and without a point value, it's hard to gauge.


By "opinion" I assume you refer to "what I find relevant" rather than "what I agree with"...?


I'm not even sure there's value to having the score appear after any period of time, though very little disincentive to have it appear after voting. Since HN is, on the whole, a time-wasting avenue for me, I rarely look at things older than a day anyways.


I think the scores should appear to a user after (A) that person votes

What stops people from voting just to find out the score?


Perhaps a view votes button would solve this.


Stop groupthink. Please don't show points on comments.


My problem with showing the point score is that it can lead to a share of the score being due to popularity rather than quality. Some people will uprate comments that they might otherwise consider too marginal to uprate, if they see that everyone else is uprating that comment. More commonly, moderators are also readers and will only want to read the highest valued comments if they are short on time, and then these become the only comments that they issue any ratings for.

Even without point scores, a comment's relative score can still be inferred from the system floating high-scoring comments to the top while comments with negative scores are displayed in a shade of gray. Readers are given hints to what the community currently considers valuable, but moderators have to read the comment to be sure.


I'd prefer no visible "karma" at all. Karma should define a comment's placing in the thread/a posts' placing on the main page - nothing more. No user karma.

Also no user nicknames - if we had a truly anonymous discussion culture there would be more interesting discussions and people wouldn't be afraid of posting controversial opinions.


Also no user nicknames - if we had a truly anonymous discussion culture there would be more interesting discussions and people wouldn't be afraid of posting controversial opinions.

Perhaps. However, anonymity also tends to bring out the worst social behaviors. And if everyone was completely anonymous to that degree, you couldn't figure out if you were consistently being harassed by a particular individual or if all the snarky comments aimed at you came from different people.

Peace.


What would be an interesting experiment would be no points and no name displayed. Let the comment rise or fall purely on its own merits rather than the rep of its author. It seems to me that some people need only to cough to get karma


Count this as a downvote. :) If I see an apparently braindamaged comment from patio11 or RiderofGiraffes, I at least reconsider whose brain is damaged, mine or theirs?


There are quite a few people here who are suggesting pg make it an option. While that would make everyone happy, it wouldn't solve the problem; people who vote based off points will continue to do so.


after removing the points on the comments, my comments bashing HN or Apple stopped being a consistent -1 to 3~7 (i post when the thread is already late)


For some who wants to quickly go through the comments, it would be good to go through those comments which has more points. They are the most valuable comments and worth reading.


50/50 so far. I guess it's up to you Paul!


Why not allow the user to choose?


Why not let the person who submits the article decide whether or not comments are visible for that thread?


I just voted for the poll option with the fewest points. I like rooting for the underdog.




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