zlacker

Stop showing people other people's comment scores. They stimulate argumentative comments.

>>tptace+(OP)
I do like that idea. I think I tried it a while ago, but users complained that without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most interesting comments in a thread.

Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and see their comments graphically distinguished in some way?

Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what voting was for, then this could break voting, which would in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.

>>pg+B
Gut: anything that reduces the number of comment scores shown on a thread will to some extent reduce the number of dumb comments. It's a knob. I suggest you turn it. I'd turn it to 11, but 5 might do nicely.

>>pg+B
I'd find a way to show what was a good comment with something besides points. Show that flag, but still hide the number of up votes. This flag would tell you whether it was a good comment, but not exactly how good. That's what karma points do well

>>pg+B
>Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves?

How about dispaying the rounded log(score)? You give some indication of how well a comment is doing but it's hard to vote strategically.

Not that easy with negative and zero scores, obviously, but those usually aren't the comments people are looking for.

>>pg+B
You could show a simplified indicator of Great Comment, Good Comment or Bad Comment (or a similar set of values) so that users can skim a thread effectively. It's hardly a model community, but I think Engadget used to have a system like this.

>>pg+B
I like the idea of showing point totals for comment threads. Entire threads (and subthreads?) with the highest total points could be near the top, which would indicate that those are the most interesting without revealing individual comment scores.

>>pg+B
What if comment scores aren't related to karma, but rather the position of a comment within the context of the story. You up or downvote a comment to move it up or down. The effect would be to rank comments based on their perceived value rather than score.

>>pg+B
If you remove the vote count, that doesn't mean you've removed the sorting by vote, right? Isn't that enough information for people to find interesting comments?

>>pg+B
I think people can figure out for themselves what an interesting or useful comment is on their own without points. We need to give people some credit. The use of points to rely on what others think is valuable, useful, helpful is irrelevant. At least for me. I can give a darn what other people think is useful. Maybe I find some insight useful where everyone else doesn't.

>>pg+B
> Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are?

a vague indicator instead of discrete values. People enjoy seeing their karma for a comment tick over from 3 to 4, but seeing a little thermometer rise by 1px is less noticeable and isn't so much something you can keep track of.

When you see your comment score increment, you know it's because a real human decided it was interesting - that's a good feeling, but it can encourage karma-whoring/playing karma like a game.

>>eurocl+h2
No, the software would still know the scores, and use them to sort comments. The scores would just not be displayed.

>>scythe+x1
That is a great idea.

>>pg+B
users complained that without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most interesting comments in a thread

I was one of those complainers. And that was then; this is now. I'm not sure I'd complain if the points went away again.

Today I find that comment scores are no longer a reliable guide to anything I care about. Something has changed -- most likely just the scale of the whole system.

>>user24+03
Maybe a refinement of this idea: show me the precise number of votes on my comments, and a vague log(score) or good/medium/bad grade for everything else.

>>pg+B
So you have two problems: users need to be able to figure out what are good comments to read, and correspondingly you want users to vote on comments that make good reading.

Have you thought at all about discerning between vote value based on some metric? You'd need something that doesn't disproportionately disadvantage new users.

>>SandB0+F1
This is basically an extension of limiting the display of negative votes to -4. I like it.

Perhaps there should be a "best comment in thread" indicator or something as well?

>>SandB0+F1
Take it step further and show 4 different smiley faces, a la 37signals.

>>pg+B
How about adding a star to the top log(n) comments in each post?

>>pg+B
If you turned off gravity for comments, then ranking would indicate their relative votes. Users could vote to create what they believe is the appropriate ranking.

I also think quality was higher without gravity for comments. Now, I scan comments to find the highly voted ones. Do you think gravity for comments was a net gain?

BTW: Is it possible to objectively measure the impact of changes, as opposed to be being persuaded by articulately argued complaints?

>>pg+54
No offence to pg, but why did this comment get upvoted 9 times?

This makes me think it would be good to remove the name of the commenter as well as the number of points a comment gets.

>>scythe+x1
> Not that easy with negative and zero scores

Started logs. [f(x) = log(x+1) or log(x+3)]

>>crassh+gm
Names are important because they allow you to use your own internal karma system (I will read comments from certain people no matter what their score). One problem mentioned is the overloading of what an up/down vote is - what about separating "good/flag" and "agree/disagree"?

>>6ren+2i
> Is it possible to objectively measure the impact of changes, as opposed to be being persuaded by articulately argued complaints?

Yes, if and only if "good" and "bad" comments are defined (intensionally or extensionally).

>>crassh+gm
Upvotes are sometimes used to indicate agreement.

>>jcl+cp
Yes, but in this case the upvoters could have simply upvoted the parent comment pg was replying to.

Short "i agree" or "i disagree" type of comments are usually discouraged on HN, as they don't really contribute to the discussion. Usually.

>>dochtm+p6
Elsewhere in this thread I proposed a scheme that meets both of your requirements: it discerns votes based on a metric (how closely the voters vote to your own preferences), and it doesn't disadvantage new users:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266

>>pg+B
would displaying them just like the links on the front page not work? are they not currently working like that anyway?

>>crassh+gm
pg's comments aren't differentiated in any way, but on discussions of potential new features, I'm very interested in seeing his comments. Even if they don't add on to the ideas being discussed, they're of interest because they indicate possible new features or changes to the site.

Also, username hiding is a good idea in some cases, but I think it's worse overall. It encourages snarkiness, some posters are actually worth looking out for (grellas on legal threads, pg on HN, etc), and it makes back and forth discussions difficult to follow unless you give each user a unique ID per thread. Impersonation can also be a problem. Overall, I think it adds up to more problems than it solves.

>>6ren+2i
Hybrid: the first comment by hotness (as now), to give up-and-coming comments visibility.

>>crassh+gm
I upvote comments if I am interested in reading them. I'm likely to be interested in reading anything that pg writes because he runs this site. The bar is set rather lower for pg than for any other user and for good reason.