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.
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.