You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction. The problem with vote counts is that two downvotes can start a cascade of reflex downvotes. Or at best, it won't get upvoted. When vote counts where active, this effect caused many instances where an excellent comment was found greyed out at the bottom of the page until a few smart HN folks with high karma voted it back up.
This is a minor detail that might or might or might not be significant. I personally don't see a lot of comments with negative votes that weren't deserved, but maybe you frequent other threads than I do.
On the other hand, I agree with the OP that not showing the votes has significant downsides. For instance, I don't know whether your comment is something a lot of people agree on (it has a lot of upvotes) or it has just been posted two seconds ago, and is thus the top comment. You won't know whether other people agree with my comment either.
This becomes even worse when it's a discussion about something like security - if someone posts a comment saying that you should always use md5 encryption and someone else replies that this is wrong and you should always use bcrypt which is right? I simply don't know, even though one of the answers may be obviously correct and the other obviously incorrect.
> For instance, I don't know whether your comment is something a lot of people agree on (it has a lot of upvotes) ....
That highlights a major problem right there. I would hope that upvotes are for worthwhile contributions to the discussion. You (and others) seem to assume that they are for agreement. Different things. I would like to know whether lots of people think a comment is worthwhile. But except in the rare case of polls, I'm usually not much interested in who agrees.
So as long as lots of people think in terms of agreement, I say counts can stay hidden.
This has been suggested before, but perhaps the ability to vote separately on "good/bad contribution" and "agree/disagree" would be a good thing. If nothing else, it might give the "agree/disagree" folks a way to express their views without affecting the sorting (which should be by "good/bad contribution", I hope most would agree).
I vote both "good contribution" and "agree" on your comment.
Your two metrics pretty much nail what I want to know to quickly skim a dense comments page. They don't even need to be numbers, a small graphical representation might work even better.
Just give my eyes something to lock on, from there I will likely read the sub-thread regardless of votes anyways.
The current state is awful. Just take this thread, with currently 180 comments. No chance am I going to skim even half of them to pick out the good ones. I read the top few, scroll down a little, and then quickly lose interest. - That's the new HN for me.
Most upvotes are going to be based on agreement, its simply psychological. We're more likely to even consider upvoting something if we agree with it. Downvotes on the other hand, have a detrimental effect such that we can stop to think if this actually deserves a downvote after we get the impulse. So even though ideally upvotes should be about adding to discussion, it's just not going to play out that way.
I think it's even worse: upvotes are upvotes, and the reason why someone clicked it varies. It could mean "I agree," "this was well stated and insightful" or even "I disagree and it's dumb and mean but so represents common sentiment that I think everyone should read this."
The symbol is a little triangle, and inherently says none of those things. People will click to mean whatever they mean.
Person feel obliged to register their opinion on some question. And upvoting appears the only acceptable way to do this (since "me too"-kind responses get downvoted quickly). So I think the ways to increase voting quality are: 1) allow to register user's agreement/disagreement with the post separately of the post itself (like another voting button), or 2) say in rules that you can't display your agreement or disagreement by upvoting. I think 2 is the best, since users will be forced to make sufficient contribution when they agree or disagree.
While the two variables may be orthogonal for an individual, in aggregate they tend to be the same thing.
To illustrate starting with the most stark case- try to imagine a comment that 0% of HN readers agree with but that 100% feel is a valuable contribution. I can't, and the reason I can't is because usually when I encounter the "valuable but disagree" situation individually, it's actually me thinking "some % of other HN readers may share this misconception, therefore it makes more sense to respond than to downvote." or "I disagree with this, but I know most HN readers won't." Or, rarely, "I disagree vehemently, and feel obligated to make that disagreement known because the 5% of readers who actually agree really need to know why it's [dangerous/silly/misguided...]"
If the poster is the only one in HN-space that agrees, no matter how "thoughtful" (i.e., verbose, in that case; possibly like the comment I'm writing now) it is, it's not important. The fact that some percentage of readers agree* or may agree is what gives it importance. In aggregate I'd suggest that the number and ratio of upvotes to downvotes would match the importance as defined by the community.
In this context I'm using the word "agree" in a sense a little broader than usual. Instead of "I take that position to be my own"- an upvote is broadened to "I can see myself taking that position as my own after further reading/thought/experiment," and finally even "This line of thinking is attractive to the kind of people I like to have in this community."
Where things get muddy is when we take that even further and say to ourselves "Some percentage of people will take that position even though I will not. Therefore it is 'important' and I will upvote it." Kudos to the altruism and social empathy, but imagine if 100% of HN readers thought this way. A position that is shared by only 5% of the community would have the same number of votes as a position shared by 90% of the community, even pithy one liners and mean-spirited ad-homimems. In a more likely equilibrium, a percentage of people will do an "importance" upvote for an item separate from their agreement with a probability roughly equal to the number of people who actually agree with the comment (So, there's a 1 in 100 chance that I'll give an "importance" upvote on an item that roughly 1 in 100 people would agree with). That would keep the proportions more or less sane and only result in general karma inflation.
Whew, hopefully showed my point- aggregate agreement _is_ relative importance- even if the individuals agreeing and upvoting are not the same people. I could go on with a parallel line of thought for disagreement, although with slightly different results (it's probably a lot less likely that one thinks "While agree with this, it's not important." or "I agree with this and it is important, but x number of people probably don't agree with it so I'd better give it a downvote to be fair...") In fact maybe, the difference between the two sides is key to the bigger questions of site quality degradation.
So, to the bigger question: possible reasons for degradation that I've thought about and seen discussed so far-
* People trying to decouple agreement from importance and therefore end up trying to channel the thoughts of others, leading to inflation and biases in all sorts of weird ways due to a social instinct that is, by itself, very positive and healthy.
* The blind leading the blind (avalanching) that pg is experimenting with solutions to now.
* Scariest of all because the fixes are more difficult: The community, in aggregate, is not as valuable/smart/insightful as it was. This compounds the problem with the first point- What happens when some percentage of people (say, greater than 10%) genuinely find "You're a dirtbag" insightful? It trumps the other two points even if they're perfectly solved. What happens when 80% of readers thoughtfully proving comments turns into 30% of readers, with the other 70% just there to "learn" and follow the lead of the 30%?
The last point is the most difficult to solve, but there are several methods- there are tweaks such as the "only posts from old members" hack pg did, the green names for greenies, etc. Then there are more frontal attacks: Doing everything you can to lift the collective thoughtfulness and intelligence, and discouraging, sometimes via use of the downvote, comments that aren't worthy of the community.
With all three happening at once, the system becomes very difficult to understand. Some suggestions:
* Let your vote reflect your degree of agreement/disagreement, AFTER giving it some serious thought. Feel free to not vote either way and to post follow-up thoughts or questions instead first.
* Refrain from voting as an emotional reaction or indiscriminately to simply feel more a part of the community.
* Try not to take downvotes or upvotes personally.
* Never pass up an opportunity to try to crystallize your own thoughts and lift the collective intelligence of the entire community by responding with care, whether expounding or disagreeing.
* Never pass up an opportunity to downvote comments that genuinely degrade the intelligence of the discussion ("frist p0st", personal attacks, almost anything that is a single line and contains no wit...)
* (more I'm sure but this post is getting way too long)
Isn't that the whole point of discussion? Otherwise, all comments would only be contradicting their parent. The upvote count allowed us to balance disagreements (which usually need an counter-argument) with agreement, which don't need to re-iterate what has been said.
Now we get to have a lot of "+1" to counter-balance the criticism.
If we're speaking purely in terms of debate for purposes of Aumann-theoretic truth-finding, then there's many other things you can do to accede to someone else's point than by simply saying some moral equivalent to "Hear, hear!" For example, you can reinforce the parent post with additional justifications, or explore corollaries to its conclusions. You can provide an example if it's a generality, or generalize it if it's a concrete example. Someone I don't know saying "This!" about a subject I'm no expert on is just as informationally-empty to me as that same person posting a single-sentence "No, you're wrong." I see an opinion, but that provides me with no more basis on which to form my opinion.
But agreeing and disagreeing aren't the whole of discussion, either. The posts I enjoy the most on HN are neither of these—instead, they're just comments on the subject of the article, but with the ideas of their parent commenter serving as an additional jumping-off point for whatever tangent they find themselves on. When I think of something that's valuable to the discussion (and therefore deserves upvotes), I think of the parents to these posts—the ones that cause people to spin off tangents in all sorts of directions; those are what I want to see more of here. On the other hand, the expression of purely normative opinions, whether through the voting arrows or through long-winded sermons that still simply amount to "Yay!" or "Boo!", is something I want to see avoided altogether. I can form my own opinions by reading the facts in the discussion and doing research on them, thank-you-very-much—and if I don't have time to do that, then I shouldn't think I have time to form an opinion.
Then you go back and read the source so you can try to run through the calculation backwards in your head to estimate, relative to the surrounding comments' timestamps, what the score might be based on its position?
That's quite brilliant. How about up, down and abstain buttons and if you click any you get to see the vote count and you're done voting. It will encourage voting, remove the social proof influence and give the option to abstain.
Perlmonks.org does this. They only show you vote counts for nodes you've voted on. It always seemed effective to me -- I'd vote on comments I thought were good, and after I voted I'd see what their vote scores were.
If you choose to run that script then you're choosing to not vote at all (assuming votes can't be changed, which they can't now.) Which means you can't contribute to the "social confirmation up/down vote pile-on" problem either. So that particular problem would remain solved.
That defeats the entire point of having people vote who know what they're talking about.
I watch my karma on reddit and HN very closely. It is very rare that I get reflexively downvoted as a result of initial voting, and when it does happen, I mention it and clarify my post and almost always see it even back out.
Oh, are you one of those pathologic "Edit: Downvotes? Really?!?" karma gamers on reddit that seem to feel entitled to upvotes? I think that sort of meta-entitlement karma-whoring is extremely annoying. I get a little chuckle when the person playing that game makes the edit within the ninja-edit window and is missing the edit-star on their comment. Of course even on HN even with the hidden points, you see your own comment points, so feel free to go ahead and play that game here. Or just pretend you're being abused by the ignorant hordes. It's pretty easy. Nobody knows if you're actually negative here anymore.
Edit: Downvotes? WTF? I'd like to know who downvoted this. At least post some constructive criticism.
I'm a karma gamer for being disappointed when rational opinions are downvoted by people that make incorrect assumptions or whose opinion get in the way of a good discussion?
I didn't really ask for your judgement, but since you've taken it upon yourself... I don't "game" karma. The few posts that I've editted here to inquire about downvotes have usually resulted in a further discussion supporting my point, or at the very least opening up further discussion about areas of contention. As it often turns out, no one had bothered checking the child comment below me that said "No you're wrong because of [obvious statement].", when in reality it turned out that actual evidence or a simple screenshot proved my stance.
If I edit my post and point this out and inquire as to why people downvoted me without supporting their position...
That's me "gaming karma"? That's a sad stance. I should just let people say that Chrome 11 lacks H.264 support when a very simple test and very minimal amounts of research prove otherwise? What would you have me do, but edit my post and plea that people take a second to research what they think they know rather than just recalling the infamous blog post that was on HN for a week discussing a phase-out of H264?
School conditions us to care about numbers assigned to our work so it's an easy trap to believe numbers on comments represent correctness or truth. When things are graded incorrectly it's only natural to want to object. I feel the number more as readings of my ability to communicate effectively in the medium with the audience. I wouldn't take low scores personally as a reflection of your skill or domain mastery.
This is the third post on HN that has had massive numbers of people saying that they use the karma for posts to judge for correctness and to add relevancy to the posts. I have stopped reading many comment threads because comment volume is simply too high and I have no filter. It's not so much that I need the ego as I get aggravated that false information is spread to anyone.
It's been suggested before, but the actual problem here is that the functions of the up/down arrows are overloaded and used differently on other sites. Some people use them for correctness, some people use them for entertainment.
Personally, I think admitting defeat on the UI is the best option here. The arrows should become essentially placebos. Separate the mechanisms for rewarding insightful comments. Perhaps something more like the "thanks" mechanism in some forums where there is a scarcity to the votes--each user is allowed only 5 thanks/day whether they use them or not. The limit could be seniority based. But if I was running the site, I would leave the arrows and just give up on re-educating the masses to use the arrows differently and move on. It's a battle that cannot be won.
This makes me sad. I always thought that part of being a good user on HN was submitting feedback via comments and voting. To imagine that there are users out there who don't consider this a community, and want only to leech off the useful information contributed by others, is saddening.
In general I would agree, and I would agree that people should do their part in up (and down) voting comments. But to me, with no scores visible, I hardly notice the impact. I always read all the way down the page, and rather than trying to work out how high a comment has been voted based on its position on a page, I just ignore it.
So I'd rather chose to not have any votes and actually get something out of other people's votes than to have an impact that nobody can actually see.
Bad idea. That doesn't help skimming for info, which is the main poster's problem - you have to read the comment before you decide to find out if it's upvoted. And once you've done that, you've already committed the time. Sound nice, but it's not practical.
How does this help the situation at all? And how long before there's a plugin to "click" all of the [view count] links?
The point is that we want to be able to see karma relative to the rest of the thread. If one comment in 20 has 150 upvotes, it means we should at least look at it because what is being said might be important.
I upvoted this. My own opinion. I don't know how many other
silent readers agree, but hopefully I can know soon.
Building on your idea: why not also have the downvote count revealed after pressing up/down/pass? That way we can also know more than the net score tells us.
No. It's overly complicated for the problem that's trying to be solved. I would have to weigh voting on a comment against seeing how many other people voted on it for EVERY comment. I just want to scan smart comments and learn the sides of an issue quickly.
What is the problem we're trying to solve again, anyways? And do the multiple downsides mentioned here multiple times (and heavily upvoted each time) really outweigh the downside of whatever that perceived issue is?
All systems can be hacked and tweaked, you should never write off a system just because its possible to work around it. It's a trade off, and you have to weigh it all up.
A great idea. You get to see votes only after voting, which eliminates social proof inertia and gives an incentive to vote. As long as you can't revoke votes (a la reddit), this would work beautifully.
Pretty sure they're doing this already; have you guys looked at how this thread is sorted? It's not by time of post, implying that your vote is tallied (and counts).
Would this even be a problem for most scenarios? I don't think most users have (or would want to spend) the time to look at two browsers for every set of comments I want to view and/or vote on.
Seeing vote counts could also be a karma linked feature, I suppose. That makes it enough work to the point where it's probably not worth it to game the system.
I hate this assumption that everybody on HN is stupid. We're not. HN is one of the smartest communities on the internet.
I'm not saying that everybody here is completely immune to what you're talking about, but this isn't digg. We're not just going to heap on the downvotes because we're trying to follow the pack. In fact I've found the opposite to be true; HNers seem to be really good about correcting downvotes. Compare the bottom comments here to the bottom comments at reddit if you don't believe me.
And what you're saying isn't fixed by hiding vote counts, downvoted comments still appear grayed out.
I agree with what you're saying, but I'm not entirely sure this is a totally conscious reflex. I'd be interested in seeing a study where comments are rated with one set showing a low or negative score, the same comment with a high score, and then again with a neutral score. Given to three different groups of course.
I agree that we're smart. That's why I think we can all read things. Points add little value to a good comment, or detract substantially from a bad one. If you don't have time to read, you shouldn't be participating in an active forum like this.
Do you also apply this logic to books in a library?
How do you choose which ones to read? Do you read all of them?
I think if you don't have time to read all of the books and judge them on their merits, then you shouldn't be participating in an activity like reading books.
If I'm interested in a book, I tend to read user reviews. A "351 people said this book is great" note won't help me much. I do the same thing for electronics. And most other things too, when the number of choices isn't very limited already, come to think of it.
I definitely agree, having upvotes visible fostered a herd mentality.
What I really like is there is less of a knee jerk reaction to assigning value to a post. You can assume it's value based upon placement, but in order to determine it's value you must actually read what they say.
What I don't understand is why people need to be told what is valuable. With an ever changing community, I don't see how you could forever trust it's ability to tell you what is a quality post and what is noise.
I find myself upvoting less as a result of this change because the post must actually persuade me to upvote it without the influence of the group mentality. This means my upvotes are now more meaningful, and I think that is a good thing. I believe many people are having similar experiences.
You're right about the herd mentality, but that's the whole point: measuring the herd mentality has a value. No one is asking you to put 100% of your judgment in the point count, and you'd be a fool to do so, much as you'd be a fool to believe everything you see on TV.
Showing points does not kill HNers brains. We've already lost if it does.
It has far less value than you might think. When this community was 100% startuppers, that worked better, but now there are so many people who don't have first hand experience that are willing to upvote anything that sounds correct that it's lost a lot of its value. It's now a dangerous positive feedback loop.
High vote counts tend to be very convincing to all but the most discriminating people, it's not the mark of a fool to believe what everyone is telling them is correct, just a sign of inexperience with that topic.
- 1: If it actually fixed the problem, this would mean that quality comments will appear higher on the page, not cluttered by mediocre comments that enjoy the group bump. I pull this assumption based upon the way I use the upvote system. So of course, I could be wrong.
- 2: Maybe the site just feels better to me, because I don't have to see comments get high upvotes that I believe are poorly thought out, or based highly on emotion/fanboyism/or other non logical motivations.
I could see it going either way, but my money is on the first possibility.
All I know for sure is that I now rarely find myself thinking.."Whaat? People think that was a good comment? People thought that added value? People think this guy knows what he's talking about?"
It's just not as self-selecting as it used to be. What worked for the community in the past doesn't necessarily work now or going forward. At least a bit of regression to the mean in the community is inevitable if it grows (which it has, by a lot).
That's simply not true - "Comments with high scores seem to have slightly higher scores than they would have, but comments with low scores seem to have about the same. Probably because the -4 limit on displayed comment scores was already concealing the actual score." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465002
My observation on my own comments has been that most of them level out at a lower number, say 2-4 when they might have hit 8-10 eariler.
But there are some outliers that are getting voted much higher than they honestly deserve. I'm talking 50-70 range for something that would have been 8-10 before.
I think people might be seeing comments that contribute to the conversation in some useful way and are now upvoting them when they would have let them cap out at a medium score, if they could see the score.
They have no way to know the comment is already considerably over-upvoted.
I mean, thanks for the karma and all, but I don't know that it's really helping.
I read that slightly differently. I read that as meaning there is a greater disparity between the high voted comments and the low comments.
I don't see it addressing the quantity of highly voted comments vs quantity of lower voted comments.
Good point though. It does definitely question my assertion that the herd mentality has negatively affected the value of upvotes. But I don't believe it disproves it.
isn't herd mentality exactly piling votes onto something that's already popular? If so, then herd mentality has been growing while we haven't had visible votes.
My experience is that I upvote less now. Which means I'm more selective about what I upvote. I am no longer affected by the polling of the community.
If this is a common change in other's voting patterns, you might see a shrinking of mid ranked comments, since there are less votes to go around.
If this is the case, I would say that the herd metality has been removed. I never stopped voting on comments that I thought were really good, just on the ones that I was on the fence about, and pushed over by their rank.
The fact that the high comments have seen a bump? Maybe people are reading more in depth, which could get them a few extra up votes? It's a possiblity.
We won't know for sure until we see some actual stats about whats going on. I don't think either side could prove the other wrong at this point.
Hard to count the ways in which mmaunder is wrong here, but let's try:
>You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction.
Judgmental and prescriptive much?
>The problem with vote counts is that two downvotes can start a cascade of reflex downvotes.
a) You're guessing
b) Is that really "a problem"
c) Said "cascade" can only actually amount to 3 additional downvotes before the -4 limit is hit. Not much of a "cascade".
>Or at best, it won't get upvoted.
How do you know this? And if you do know it, why are you contradicting it in your very next sentence?
>When vote counts where active, this effect caused many instances where an excellent comment was found greyed out at the bottom of the page until a few smart HN folks with high karma voted it back up.
Yeah, this sentence. Anyway, the effect also "caused" many stupid comments to be rightly downvoted. BTW, high karma does not equal "smartness"; but it's interesting that you seem to like high karma so very much, since your rating is rather high, but hate displaying the accumulated karma on actual posts. Who precisely is "addicted", here?
You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction
I think you are making an unwarranted assumption about the OP.
The OP, like me, gained a great deal of value from knowing the vote counts of comments. In much the same way I (and presumably s/he) gain value from knowing the score and comment count of the post itself.
Vote counts were not perfect indicator of value, but they were better than having to guess at comment quality by observing the relative position of comments vs posting time.
In terms of learning new things, the vote count helps tremendously! You can tell that a security-related suggestion earning 50 up votes is sound (of course considering context), technology-wise. I've learned a lot about passwords, plaintext, server-side hashing, salting and related best-practices solely from HN comments.
Displaying scores might make the other aspects troubling (since group-think is supported unnecessarily, often disregarding novel thoughts or disagreements). But I've learned to ignore such things, especially since most of the conflicts are "opinions" anyway, so the value addition is somewhat limited.
In terms of actual facts and expertise though, nothing can beat the vote count!
Having said that, I am still not sure which one I prefer given that there is inherently a tradeoff between the two aspects.
> In terms of learning new things, the vote count helps tremendously! You can tell that a security-related suggestion earning 50 up votes is sound (of course considering context), technology-wise.
No, absolutely not! You can only tell that other non-experts agree in some path-dependent fashion.
I'll occasionally see highly-upvoted nonsense in an area that I'm expert in. This is very bad.
This is some kind of cognitive bias.
EDIT> I should clarify that it's entirely possible for experts to disagree. So this isn't the you disagree with me so you dumb argument.
But that's a great opportunity for the expert to step in and say something valuable in reply. The high upvote count of the "wrong" response will lead to your response getting more readers.
The fact is we're already half way bought in to this "social bias". Otherwise just get rid of the voting altogether. Get rid of karma. In fact, get rid of associating usernames with comments. But I think everyone realizes, even if they don't like to admit it, that social context provides some value, even if not perfect.
No the don't, they provide a social signaling function that can be just as powerful as a vote count. When a "popular" name is attached to a post it gets read more closely and frequently voted up. If HN users were truly interested in letting the "quality" of the content stand on its own then comments would not have names attached to them and the content would truly stand on its own.
> when evaluating someone's comment it would be good to see other comments they've made that might provide insight into their biases.
In other words, let the popularity of a username influence the visibility of the content. If you are suggesting that people (including yourself) actually go back and check out user comment histories with any frequency I think you are mistaken.
Karma is not just popularity, it is also a measure of perceived authority and insight that a comment provides to a discussion. The consequence of losing this signaling function may not have decreased the quality of the comments, but it has certainly decreased the utility of the comment sections at HN.
I disagree. Since the new system was implemented the signal:noise ratio seems to have gone up. The fact that HN is more difficult to read now is a good thing; it forces people to think for themselves, and improves the overall level of discussion.
I do agree that the voting should be shown after a few days, but for right now the changes seem to be making things better.
I disagree with you. The signal/noise ratio has gone down considerably. What I'm noticing now is that people are writing longer comments, but the comments have considerably less substance.
People can't stand out based on upvotes (actual community approval) so they're trying to stand out based on post-length.
At a very basic glance it appears that what you're saying is true, but I've found the opposite.
Removing the obvious noise comments like "+1", "lol", bad jokes etc. how are you defining signal and noise?
This is my entire point: I don't care about the points when I know about the topic, it's when I'm not qualified to decide what is signal and noise that they are valuable.
I can't agree that the signal noise ratio has gone up since the system changed, though this is a subjective, unmeasurable point.
It may improve the "level of discussion" in some abstract way, but it certainly does make it less useful for individual readers.
It was common, before, for me to jump into the comments of a dicussion, check out the few highest rated ones, and then read the article with that information in mind, coming back to read other comments after that. With nothing to differentiate upvoted comments (unless they happen to be at the same thread level in the same thread), there's no way for me to do that, now. I don't view this as a good thing.
You don't seem to accept that other people may have different tastes than you. I often use the vote count to be more efficient in getting a grasp of the issues quickly, without reading everything. Great for you if you like to read everything from start to finish. Not everyone does, at least not all the time.
> You don't seem to accept that other people may have different tastes than you.
No. I'm well aware that others have different tastes.
What I'm arguing is that this feature that some people find convenient and harmless is not in fact harmless, and actually systemically degrades the site over time.
It's a systems problem, not a problem with any one individual.
If points aren't being shown, why have them in the first place? What's the point?
Points should reflect the quality of the comment. If it's not being used for that, it's worthless to have.
Showing them days later, after the discussion is finished, is also fairly worthless.
I'd much rather have some indicator of quality posts. We already have an indicator for poorer quality posts. Their is value in knowing what your peers think.
I must agree with this, I find this feature one of the most missed. It doesn't even have to show the number of upvotes, just anything that will tell me which of the posts is more highly upvoted in a relative manner (e.g. normalise all comments based on the highest ones on the page and use a 5-number/color/whatever scale).
Having the information normalized as you suggest would be great. Breaking it up into a ~5 point scale (especially if it took advantage of visual cues) would save some mental effort. Perhaps relative font sizes?
> The problem with vote counts is that two downvotes can start a cascade of reflex downvotes.
So? As you said, this is usually corrected. And, if points don't matter as so many people want to suggest, where is the harm in having some indicator of a posts quality. Please note indicator does not mean points.
I've been suggesting for some time now that high quality posts should be marked in some manner. No, rising to the top of the page is not a good manner, as it only affects parent posts.
Downvoted posts already get this treatment, even under the current system.
In fact, without some sort of quality indicator, points are useless.
Finally, their is a lot of discussion about how lack of points force people to read and research. That's all well and good, but I'm smart enough to know that I can't research everything, and their is value in knowing what the community thinks of a topic. It helps to steer me in the right direction.
Basically...
If you aren't going to use points to highlight good comments, then having points is useless, and they only serve those who think karma is worth anything.
What if the net number of votes a comment has received is hidden whenever it is between -10 and +10 (for example)? That way you are able to tell that a comment hasn't yet been rated highly, but also can't jump on the bandwagon of voting whichever direction the first couple of voters do. When a comment has a votecount somewhere near zero, you still have to think about it yourself (if you want to read it), but can also choose to ignore it if you only want to read already highly rated ones. If a comment at some point has, say, 12 votes and then receives three downvotes, it would return to the nebulous "small vote-count" status.
Another scheme I've liked on some sites is to show the counts for both up and downvotes, along with the total. A comment's having 10 upvotes and zero downvotes can be quite different from its having 100 upvotes and 90 downvotes, even though both equate to a net count of +10.
Only in comments, or should we apply that to submissions also? If it weren't for using social proof to decide which stories should be highlighted, why do we have a voting-based front page?
Indeed, we should all wander through the net with no inkling of others opinions in order to mitigate some dubious risk. Enlightened people read every article, decide for themselves and then sit silently.
And yet what we've left in is the feedback mechanism that provides people a self-centered understanding of how well the community receives them. ie: People are still "scoring points," though maybe we have made the points less valuable.
> The problem with vote counts is that two downvotes can start a cascade of reflex downvotes.
If the comment is good, eventually its going to float up to the top anyway. An excellent article submitted at a time when most HN folks are away is less likely to hit the front page. This is a problem similar to what you mention. Hiding comment scores, IMHO is not the solution. Rather, it just kills the HN experience (at least for me).
On the whole, I concur. However, for comments like your own, the votes are interesting, as a rough measure of whether the HN community agrees with you or not. (It's a rough measure because upvoting!=agreeing.)
Clarification: I don't want to bring back vote counts, or even a general indicator of votes, like others have suggested. I approve of the hiding votes, but a creative compromise could be better than what we have now.
I think there is a problem with the “upvote doesn’t imply agreement” dictum. It doesn’t make all that much sense to me, at least not in all situations.
I can imagine an eloquent, well written movie review with which I don’t agree but which I think is so well written that it should be read by more people. That’s taste and you should certainly not downvote taste, but most discussions on HN are not about taste but rather about questions with right and wrong answers.
When I’m disagreeing with someone about those I must be thinking that what the person writes is based on wrong facts or is illogical. Should users be encouraged to upvote eloquent and well written comments even if they think those comments are spreading false information and are illogical? (Whether or not such comments should be downvoted is a different question. I tend not to.)
It’s never quite that clear cut in the real world. You might feel that the facts are wrong or that some illogical argument is hiding somewhere in the comment but you might not be sure about it. Upvoting may be the right thing to do, then – the comment can be seen by a wider audience and it can come under more scrutiny. The comment and its analysis can help all parties to get closer to the truth.
There is no doubt to me that there are situations in which upvoting despite disagreement can be a good idea. I also think that upvoting because of agreement and not upvoting because of disagreement can be a good idea.
On a certain level, agreement and “making your point in a good way” are one and the same. No matter how eloquent, how can a comment with factual errors that undermine its central thesis ever be an example of “making your point in a good way”?
ugh has a very good definition of what a high vote count means: the comment is a must read. It doesn't mean everyone agrees, but it's a key point in the overall discussion.
You took away such an important buoy for us to navigate HN!
When vote counts where active, this effect caused many instances where an excellent comment was found greyed out at the bottom of the page until a few smart HN folks with high karma voted it back up.
Why would the people need "high karma" to vote it back up? I ask this as someone with high karma. "showdead" is an option available to anyone, isn't it? I don't know the answer but I've always had it turned on at least.
But then, you need to have a little faith in HN and PG. Best posts are usually shown first. Try that: Check a new post and try to guess the votes for the posts at the top of the page. It's still the same algorithm as before.. posts with -4 are shown in light gray.. high voted posts are shown first, etc.
But even you admit that eventually the excellent comment would eventually make it's way back up.
Maybe the solution is to only show positive vote counts. We were already stopped at -4, so not showing any count unless it's above 1 isn't that far off.
