Ask HN: Orange dot?

By the way, suppressing these metrics is pointless. We are intelligent people who notice the difference between two comments with very similar upvotes and one that far outpaces the other and find these proportions to be of interest. The new portrayal of comment rankings keeps interesting information from users and will end up stunting the community's progress. If you're just trying to ward off users, maybe remove the nav and make the site even slower.

There are far more interesting ways to differentiate. I'd like to see this site be as light and fast as possible (would appeal to our hacker ethic) and allow users to customize the hell out of it given knowledge of Arc or similar (good chance to promote your language as well).

ujjwalg• 17 years ago

hopefully, it wont last too long. The experiment with orange dot will fail and we will have comment score back.

dc2k08• 17 years ago

I hope it lasts long enough to gather some stats on voting; whether or not more or less votes are cast with the new system, how spread out they are etc. I liked the idea of masking votes when it was initially suggested too. Bravo to pg for trying it out.

NathanKP3• 17 years ago

make the site even slower

Yes, concerning the site speed I definitely upvote the idea of making the server faster. Maybe they really removed the comment scores to save bandwidth. ;)

rendezvouscp• 17 years ago

I’m pretty sure there are a few font elements that could’ve been removed first. ;)

j_baker3• 17 years ago

I honestly haven't ever had a problem with the speed of HN.

krav2• 17 years ago

Agreed. The numbering, for me, is a good sign of which comments to keep an eye on while scanning the page, rather than get lost in text.

chrischen• 17 years ago

Don't higher rated comments get pushed to the top?

And of course these dots will help you locate higher rated comments that get pushed to the bottom (perhaps because they replied to a low rated comment).

pg2• 17 years ago

Doesn't the orange dot work for that?

billswift2• 17 years ago

Goes to show that removing scores was a good thing. You are saying that you are more interested in following the herd than in evaluating the text, which is where the real information is, for yourself.

tigerthink3• 17 years ago

It's true that comment-score information is interesting, but is it interesting for the right reasons? People are hardwired to have a morbid interest in the thinking of the tribe. Even if hackers consciously try to avoid paying undue attention to the opinions of the tribe, the subconscious instinct is still there.

apotheon4• 17 years ago

I think that the dangers of majority-conformist thinking and other groupthink behaviors are very real and should be discouraged. I don't think hiding comment scores will have that effect, though it might make it more difficult to recognize when it happens.

The one thing in this experiment that might (I intuit) help discourage groupthink related behaviors is hiding one's own score from oneself, because people will then be less emboldened when they're being idiots just for expressing popular opinions. Unfortunately, this will also (I intuit) discourage people when they're being smart from as readily taking another look at whether what they've said is idiotic when others recognize the idiocy.

This strikes me as something of a parallel to when people sometimes claim that programming languages should be made "safer" at the expense of power provided for the programmer, and does not seem like a good direction to take the site.

pg2• 17 years ago

I'm experimenting with not displaying comment scores. The orange dot is an alternate way to help users find high-scoring comments. More details here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979

lsb• 17 years ago

Perhaps allow comment score over a certain karma and/or age, just like the ability to change topcolor and downvote?

reedlaw• 17 years ago

Here's the reference：

  I've been experimenting with various ways of indicating high scoring comments. 
  At the moment I use an orange dot after the time.
  At one point I tried giving all comments initial dots, and turned them red when 
  the comment had a high score.

yters2• 17 years ago

I like the idea. The dot is basically shorthand for what we use the score for, minus a kind of "attractor" effect whereby two high scores, one higher than the other, skews my mind one way.

Anyways, have definitely noticed a distinct difference in how I read thread. Instead of skimming scores, I now skim text.

apotheon4• 17 years ago

I'm not exactly sure I understand what you're saying. Are you saying . . .

1. You used to pay more attention to scores than to text? (i.e., "I used to skim the score to see if I wanted to read the comment, but now I skim the text.")

2. You used to pay more attention to text than you do now? (i.e., "I used to skim scores, then read text more carefully, but now I just skim text and move on.")

3. Something else entirely?

j_baker3• 17 years ago

Might I suggest starting an additional thread whenever a change like this happens? There's a certain point beyond which I quit reading comments in a single thread. If I saw a thread on the front page that said something like "we're using orange dots to keep track of scores", I'd have been a lot less confused.

_pius• 17 years ago

There's a "news news" section but, sadly, this change hasn't been mentioned there yet.

Semiapies• 17 years ago

I don't really see the point of taking away the rating information displayed as numeric scores, then adding back display of some of that information as an orange dot.

If the idea is to not show the the information the scores represent, then don't show it, even abstracted as little dots. If we do want the information, just show the scores.

wvenable2• 17 years ago

I'm surprised nobody suggested adding a mouse over to the orange dots. The first thing I did was mouse-over to look for a tooltip to explain the dot and got nothing.

antirez4• 17 years ago

I did exactly the same thing indeed, and probably tons of other people we can no longer count because of lack of score on your comment ;)

indiejade• 17 years ago

Suggestion for what the mouseover could read: "Our most sincere apologies; YC News has contracted a rather serious case of the chicken pox." (:

tetha• 17 years ago

You get nothing, because it is no image. Which does not enhance the information gained.

wvenable2• 17 years ago

It doesn't have to be an image -- you can put a title attribute on a <span> and still get a tooltip!

akamaka• 17 years ago

Hey admins, have you considered toning down the shade of orange a bit? It's pretty distracting right now, compared to the neutral colors of the rest of the page.

I'd suggest using something closer to #ff9955

tumult• 17 years ago

In case pg or anyone else is still reading this thread, I just thought I'd throw out my opinion on the experiment:

Today was the best day on HN in recent memory, and by a large margin. I've followed almost all the links on the front, and the signal-to-noise ratio in the comments seems to have increased by a full order of magnitude.

Please return the old behavior of displaying comment scores. I suffered an extra hour's loss of productivity today.

(This is awesome, please don't go back to regular comment scores.)

hughprime• 17 years ago

I disagree -- to me, signal-to-noise looks somewhat lower.

I also found a thread which seemed to have devolved into the trading of personal insults without getting greyed out. I didn't like that.

yters2• 17 years ago

One prob w/ lack of score: I misinterpret time as score.

mapleoin• 17 years ago

Also, it should be topcolor, not orange...

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

Oh, dear. My topcolor is a light blue that looks good with orange but would be invisible in dot form.

antirez4• 17 years ago

To work hard is the only way to build great things. You can get rich by accident, but you can't build great things by accident. Only working hard.

Still it is very important to realize that it's better to improve the quality of your work and work 6/8 hours a day and find the time to relax and enjoy the life. To work very well and focused for 6 hours a day without interruptions I think can be considered to work hard as much as working 12 hours a day with a lot of breaks, environmental noise, and so on.

Usually I work from home, but I have a company with five people working together with me, and from time to time I go to work on the office in order to organize the work, solve the hardest tech problems, and so forth. When I'm at the office I'm a lot less focused because I receive many questions, I can't just have my usual working patterns, and my productivity is something like 20% compared to my working at home productivity.

antirez4• 17 years ago

My score is -2 but I got no replies, I wonder if it's because you think that 6 hours of hard work a day are too little, or for other reason. Please feel free to comment even anonymously because I'm very interested in this issue. Thanks to downmodders for any hint, I believe that smart people should use critics to improve themselves.

allenbrunson• 17 years ago

you got modded down because your comment has nothing to do with the topic at hand. perhaps you meant your comment to go in some other thread.

tel• 17 years ago

In my usage, the orange dot is getting confused with the orange star of "this is my post". I like the consistent color scheme, but maybe there needs to be something else to make it more distinct.

Other than that, I really like it.

Ask HN: Orange dot?

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