I know this is probably digressing too far from the topic at hand, but I just want to say that, having used plenty of sites that do display their points, it's refreshing to me that HN doesn't. I think seeing points has the psychological effect of swaying popular opinion one way or the other (the token "hivemind" -- you probably know more or less who I'm referring to).
Not very surprising. I used to vote based on "does the comment have a fair number of points", so a comment with 100 points would very rarely get an upvote from me - whereas now I don't have that information, so I can only use "do I like this comment/do I want to see more like it".
Unfortunately, simply taking away visible comment scores isn't a perfect solution to the problem of voting with the herd.
Even without visible comment scores there are still some indications of how many votes a given comment has received.
Highly rated comments tend to be at the top of the page of comments.
This can have a huge influence, especially in long threads where people often don't have the energy or interest to read all of the comments, so they'll tend to only ever see (and, consequently ever vote on) the comments near the top.
Also, since most everyone knows that comments near the top tend to have more votes, seeing a comment at or near could sway someone's vote as much as just seeing the explicit vote total itself.
The other indicators of how many votes a given comment has gotten are that comments with a vote total of 0 or less are grayed-out and tend to be near the bottom.
Again, this could sway people to vote the comment down, as it's a cue that the community approves of voting that particular comment down.
Like voting on polls, voting on comments would be fairer were the order of comments completely randomized and there was no indication at all (explicit or implicit) of how many votes a given comment had gotten.
Unfortunately, unlike polls, the order of comments can't be randomized without completely destroying the threading feature of HN, and without making the reading of a comment thread incredibly confusing (as replies could then be placed above the comments they were replies to, or not, since the order would be random).
However, even stopping short of complete randomization of the comment order, some of the other indications of comment scores could be removed. In particular, HN could be changed so that highly rated comments no longer tend to move to the top, and so that lower rated comments don't tend to move to the bottom. And, of course, comments with low scores need not be grayed out.
If these changes were implemented, voting on comments would be fairer, but (obviously) scanning through a heap of comments to see which are the most approved/disapproved comments would become more difficult.
That actually is the case for me now, and it's difficult to stop myself. There are a handful of users that always post interesting posts so when I am skimming a thread and read one of their posts I am always more considerate to them...
People also probably make enemies on HN, and vote against people who they think have particularly loathsome opinions or against those who they've gotten in to particularly acrimonious arguments with.
Revenge voting, spite voting, and fan voting would be mostly mitigated by making comments anonymous (ie. by not showing usernames next to comments).
But people could still intentionally or unintentionally give themselves away by, for example, either signing their comment or by writing in a distinctive style.
In any case, I'm pretty sure HN will never switch to completely anonymous comments for everyone, so this is all purely hypothetical.
I've noticed that voting patterns on my comments have radically changed since the no-points change. Far less piling on of up and downvotes, and at least to me, seems to far better reflect the additive discussion value of my comments.
I'd be interested to see have the average points have changed for HN celebrity types like patio11.
Sometime back, there was a poll about how many users wanted to see points versus how many users don't. And I still remember that (much) more users wanted to see comment scores. Is there any plan to bring it back?
I think it depends on how you look at it. From my perspective:
pg added a useful feature, hidden comment scores -- then asks if you liked it better with or without them -- took that information into account along with data on comment voting patterns he has presumably collected since the change and made a decision.
What information could he possibly have taken into account that negates the fact that the poll option to bring comment scores back had more than twice the votes than the option to leave them.
What would pg's advice to a startup be in this case? Ignore your user's feedback and push the removal of feature (or push to leave the new feature, based on your stance), or listen to your users? I think he'd say to follow what your users want-- so why is he preaching one thing and practicing the other?
He could take into account the content of the comments on the poll, for one thing.
You're right that the results of the vote show a pretty clear 'winner'... I'm not sure that's the end of it, though.
If 1000 people wanted a specific feature in my app I would obviously take that seriously and consider it carefully. But it doesn't mean I have to do it, just that I should be paying attention.
I also think that the people who desperately want comment scores back are simply more vocal about it. I don't care all that much, and I don't remember if I voted in the poll or not (but I do remember seeing it on the frontpage). I think this should be taken into account, too. I'm sure 37signals gets thousands of emails asking them to add <pet feature>, and few asking them to leave that feature out. Just because your users want it doesn't mean you aren't still in charge.
There are certainly some problems with the way polls are conducted on HN that would make me question the results.
The way poll questions are worded could sway people to vote one way or the other.
The order of choices is always fixed, and this could also have some effect on the votes. I've often noticed that the first choice (at the top of the list of choices) tends to be the one that gets the most votes.
Finally and most damningly, votes on polls have the same problem that comments used to have: you can see how many people voted for each option before you vote!
This makes polls susceptible to the exact same thing that comments used to be susceptible to before pg took away visible comment scores: voting with the herd (ie. piling on to whatever option seems to be the most popular).
I wonder how different poll results would be were poll questions stated more neutrally, the order choices were displayed in was randomized for each person viewing the poll, and the vote totals were kept hidden until after you voted.
Although that is often the case in criminal cases, it's not generally true that unanimity is required for a US jury verdict.
And, regarding your main point - duh. What would the result of that poll have had to have been to make it a compelling (e.g., actionable) argument for comment points?
> And, regarding your main point - duh. What would the result of that poll have had to have been to make it a compelling (e.g., actionable) argument for comment points?
I'm not sure, because I don't have a clear view of all relevant data. For example, I might weigh obvservations of improved discussion against the poll results. I'm not sure how overwhelming the majority would have to be, but if there was one, it would probably at least sway me to to do some more investigation.
And pg's comment was:
I'm curious if there has been any drift toward a consensus.
It wasn't a referendum - pg never said that he would follow the poll. I'm assuming (standard disclaimer, ass, you, me, etc.) that it was simply an informational poll.
If I recall correctly, Opera, Chrome and Safari use the exact same standard for extensions, so porting would take about ten minutes to do all three. I ported a Greasemonkey extension to Opera in about five minutes.
Or just make a way to retrieve the points from hnsearch.com since they have access to them anyways...
Also, searchyc.com is now back up, but I'm not sure whether it has points access yet (it didn't before it went down during the initial points removal).
Seems like this is tackling the issue in the wrong way. Points won't be near accurate even, since most people won't have this installed. something something over engineering something something occam's razor.
Unfortunately, there's no way to look up an item by ID using the HNSearch API, so it's not much use for building something to show points on all comments.
How many tokens of Arc would it take to make the display of comment scores configurable? I know that removing options is a good way to impose design but this just might be one of the cases for which mere user preference is enough.
I am probably not going to use it myself, simply because I don't want to be swayed by other people's opinions of any given comment.
Unfortunately, even without visible comment scores there's still some indication of how many votes a given comment has received.[1] But if you don't want to be swayed by the herd, not seeing comment scores is still a step forward.
The only disadvantages of not seeing comment scores I can think of are that without them the reader would be less effective at using the "wisdom of the crowd" to gauge the relative worth of comments, and his curiosity wouldn't be satisfied.
This debate has been done to death, but I will not be using this because I think the existing UI features give me all the value I need. Most importantly, the way severely downmodded comments get grayed out.
Beyond that, I don't personally care whether a comment is +3 or +103. I don't want to miss a nugget of wisdom in a +3 comment. I like all you folks, and I trust you to filter out complete dreck like redditesque attempt to create pun threads, but beyond that I plan to read everyone's opinions and form my own conclusions.
Don't think of it as disdain for your opinions about other people's opinions, think of it as respect for your opinions.
