Ask HN: Seeing points again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847486

by jacquesm • 17 years ago

41 64 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I can see the points again. I take it that I'm not alone (or seeing things due to lack of sleep :) ) ?

pg5• 17 years ago

Users I talked to seemed divided (at best) about the desirability of hiding comment scores, so I brought them back.

At least one good thing came of this experiment, though. There's now a new function for ranking comments, with a faster time decay. I should have done that before, but taking away points made the need for it more obvious.

tumult2• 17 years ago

It was so much fun :(

Has anyone suggested having it work like the down-arrow, where you can't see scores until you're above a threshold?

lsb• 17 years ago

Yes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846620

pg5• 17 years ago

Hmm, interesting idea. Maybe I'll try that.

dcurtis2• 17 years ago

I was kind of enjoying it. Can we try for a week, maybe?

Also, the new comment ranking algorithm seems to demote highly ranked comments a bit fast. I can't click the comments link for an article and then read a few good comments immediately. I think there's more value in time tested, highly ranked comments than in new blind ones. Are you tweaking it at all?

unalone2• 17 years ago

Seconded. We had this for a day. Keep it up for a week or two, let people adjust. Kneejerk reaction is always against change, even when it's for the better. I remember hating the Reddit redesign for a good month before adjusting and deciding I really liked how it worked.

pg5• 17 years ago

But you were one of the users who didn't like it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845254). What changed your mind?

cema3• 17 years ago

I support the second point (the time tested highly ranked comments).

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

Thanks for the experiment anyway, it was interesting to see how it changed the interaction with HN, I found I felt 'blind' at the same time a vote felt like it counted more.

Are there any interesting statistics that came out of this experiment ?

epi0Bauqu• 17 years ago

Did the avg # of votes/comment or comments/post change much during the experiment? (Maybe it was too short to be useful to predict a long-term trend, but I'm still interested anyway.)

jeromec• 17 years ago

I'm squarely on the side for having scores. Many thanks. :)

EDIT: Maybe there could be a toggle in the profile settings for those that prefer the reading style of the '5 plus red dot'?

vaksel• 17 years ago

why not just make it an option in user preferences? That way everyone is happy

lucumo2• 17 years ago

Not really. The point of the experiment was to increase the quality of the votes. It doesn't really help if the votes are only disabled by people who don't like to see it.

ashishk• 17 years ago

out of curiosity, what's the new function?

pg5• 17 years ago

At the moment, it's

    (= comment-gravity* .8)

    (def comment-rank (s (o scorefn realscore) (o gravity comment-gravity*))
      (/ (let base (+ (scorefn s) 1)
           (if (> base 0) (expt base .8) base))
         (expt (/ (+ (item-age s) 1) 60) gravity)))

blasdel• 17 years ago

I don't perceive the new ranking algorithm as 'faster time decay' — it seems like the opposite: newly made comments almost always appear at the very top of the thread, even with negative points.

It makes the site feel like digg! Previously stories and comments always had to be pulled up from the bottom. Now new shit is always plopped at the top of the pile, from whence it can roll down (time) or be pushed (moderation). Please explain your reasoning behind its implementation, as I don't see anything good in it.

It's not quite as bad since you've turned point-showing back on — At least now I won't accidentally downvote comments to zero that are at the top just for their recency.

netsp2• 17 years ago

Most votes are positive. That means that the longer a comment has been there, there more votes it can expect to have. Then by having more points and more visibility it has the potential to attract more points. Early comments have an advantage over later ones.

I don't understand why you assume new = shit.

tc• 17 years ago

Somehow I feel more connected to the community here when I can see the scores. It's like the online forum equivalent of being able to read facial expressions.

rntz• 17 years ago

IMO, the inability to read facial expressions etc. from mere text does a good deal of ground-leveling between the real-world socially adept and socially awkward, which is at least an interesting, if ambiguously desirable, feature of online interaction.

mkyc4• 17 years ago

I don't want to feel connected to the community, I want to feel connected to the content.

I don't like scores. A high score means that a comment was posted early, that it was good or agreeable (which is not the same as being good), and that there was groupthink. A low score means the comment is new, or not useful, or not read.

Instead, scores should be there to tell us what to skip. A high score (0) would mean that I need to give the comment attention - whether it's new or a must-read is irrelevant. (This also means that we wouldn't need a score/time ordering system.) A low score (-30) would mean that the comment adds nothing new, or is otherwise less worth reading. Upvotes reserved for those who are seldom downvoted. Perhaps this is too hostile and negative, but then perhaps it's more honest, and better able to filter out those seeking points and those who cannot stomach criticism (which I've always found has helped me improve much more than praise has - and improving the quality of new-contributor comments is the only way we'll be able to grow).

I also think it's a loss that we can't remove names from comments (though leaving links to profiles). Removing them would emphasize that the score is about the comment, and not about the name.

I understand that developing a large user base is important, and that trying eccentric solutions might aggravate our core group into forever abandoning hn for more predictable and friendly sites... but I really do wish that pg would mess with the site more often and for longer periods of time, and not worry about the community's response. Our system is not so perfect that messing with it is guaranteed to reduce its effectiveness.

kenver• 17 years ago

I also find them useful when I don't know a lot about the subject. When a comment is rated higher it gives me confidence that the person is talking sense / is correct, which makes it worth remembering.

dpcan• 17 years ago

I really didn't think I cared when they went away, but now that they're back, I see how much I do like having them. Good call.

Dilpil• 17 years ago

The really hackery thing to do would be to let people create and use custom ranking algorithms. Implementing this might be very difficult.

andreyf• 17 years ago

If you implement them in JS, implementing them would be easier (computation wise) than the current model.

stanleydrew2• 17 years ago

Why do people keep suggesting this? There's so much value in having everyone see the same set of stuff in the same order.

netsp2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure if I like the points showing or not. In theory, I don't like them. It seems like a cheap sort of game you get sucked with comments and scores and how you feel about how many points some comment got.

On the other hand, something felt off without them. Maybe just habit.

justlearning• 17 years ago

pg - please revert to the no-karma-mode. I thought this helped in bringing down the mass voted comments.

for example (bad examples- all i could search, but you 'meet' a lot of opinions of the one liner kind which in the recent times have got decent karma): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847571

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847008

and at a odd time like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=842627 (i can't speak fo if fact vs otherwise in this particular post, but sometimes a 'slightly' upvoted comment from a regular gets pushed up and it rides the karma wave)

For those who didn't like - I suggest keep the new version for few days - they will love it. thx.

rms• 17 years ago

It did get me to change my behavior from voting to get a comment to the right score to voting +1, 0, -1 solely on the basis of the comment. If this is the intended behavior, maybe you should put it in the guidelines.

radu_floricica2• 17 years ago

Can we still have it as an option, please? I really enjoyed it.

shabda• 17 years ago

There you go. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/56164

fjabre3• 17 years ago

Issue as stated by PG: comments section was beginning to feel a little mob-ish.

Solution 1: Remove scores on comments.

Solution 2, 3, 4, n: ?

lacker• 17 years ago

It would be interesting to see the impact of the UI and scoring changes on stats like average # of threads read per session, likelihood of users commenting, stay time on a comment thread, etc.

ujjwalg• 17 years ago

Thank you PG for bringing it back. However, the time decay is too fast IMO.

Also an orange dot for comments with more than +2 vote difference from the previous comment, might be useful.

oxygen• 17 years ago

I am not sure if the point system changes my behavior or writing style. It definitely impacts my reading style. Let me think of a good experiment to verify.

hs• 17 years ago

using chickenfoot in firefox:

//begin include('~/jquery/jquery.js'); b=new Button('hide comment heads', function() { $('.comhead').hide(); }); insert(after('add comment button'), b)); //end

click the new button injected to hide comments. can be automatically triggered whenever ff opens http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=*

you can make it fancy like toggling instead of hiding, or showing only points or authors, but it's sufficient for me (actually i use auto-hide-trigger-with-no-button which is simpler)

mkyc4• 17 years ago

We should use an orange dot, the opacity of which goes up based on the score, with alt text. This isn't a console. It was refreshing to be able to check scores with hardly a glance, even at the cost of seeing exactly how well it scored.

mkyc4• 17 years ago

Turn both on. The dot will allow people to skim, the score will inform the overly curious.

fjabre3• 17 years ago

Is it heresy to suggest thinking about 2 columns instead of 1 for comments..? Looks like there is plenty of space to do this.

I know I prefer to process information looking at a grid instead of a single column.. but maybe that's just me =)

fjabre3• 17 years ago

ahh. I've been publicly flogged. I'm going to put on my dunce cap now and sit in the corner.

At any rate, why allow a comment to get negative points pg? Just delete the comment or let it sit at 1. It definitely feels a little vindictive and childish in here at times.

EDIT: For context - My original comment was at the coveted dead last -1 position but has since been up'd. Thanks ;) I still say we do away with negative numbers. If someone is flaming another or using excessive language, let the mods do their job and delete the comment.

robin_reala• 17 years ago

I’d suggest a user stylesheet with some CSS3 multi-column trickery, but I’ve just seen that the markup is all table based :( Bang goes that idea.

pclark• 17 years ago

I'd like to not see the score till I've voted.

apgwoz• 17 years ago

But, then if you wanna just see the score, you'll vote up/down without reading the comment, which sort of goes against the entire idea to begin with.

Ask HN: Seeing points again?

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