You know how sometimes online stores won't tell you the price of something until you add it to your cart? Hacker News feels kind of like that now. Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.
Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.
Fuck that. Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying and form your own opinions? That groupthink is just going to naturally turn out better than forcing every member to think about what they're reading?
For the longest time, HN has become more and more "accessible", at the cost of a lot of intellectual discussion. I've seen a lot of conversations where one side of the argument is downvoted to hell and it makes the other side look "correct". I just saw a thread two days ago where somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit. That's utter shit and it hurts Hacker News.
I'm fine with spending more time reading a thread if it means I'm legitimately thinking about what people are saying. This is a terrific improvement to the system, and it feels a hell of a lot less claustrophobic than it did when every single thing people said was being judged as if it were an objective statement capable of being "good" and "bad."
Hopefully this also stops people from downvoting statements based on disagreement. Feels less vindictive when you can't see what your vote's done.
I'm the guy who said "Look at your comment score; looks like I'm right." The details are off a bit, though; it was "judging by your comment score, the parent speaks for the majority." I didn't participate in the discussion before that, so "I'm right" would have been a nonsequitor.
More importantly, though, the discussion itself was about the poster's demeanor. In all other situations, downvoting isn't an accurate measure of sentiment toward the post, because voting mixes such things as agreement, clarity, obnoxiousness, and humor ratings, weighted differently for each person, into one opaque integer. However, in this case, when a person is voted down for [obnoxiously] arguing that they aren't obnoxious, and the parent is voted up for arguing that they are, in fact, obnoxious, the score really only has one meaning, in both cases: how much people dislike the poster. This is an exceptional situation; I never would have argued "by comment score" otherwise.
Don't you think that reaction is a little bit extreme? Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site.
If I'd just said Fuck that, absolutely! As it is, I went on to add a whole ton of details.
Unlike you, apparently, I don't have time to read all 800 comments on all the threads on this site.
Really? When you're spending 30 days flying around on a plane and sleeping in airports, I'd imagine you're the one with more time to waste.
The top comments on HN are still the highest-voted ones. Read however many you want before the discussion tires you. Also, I can't think of many HN threads that ended up with more than 300 comments. 300 is at most an hour's reading; an hour isn't very long.
Who are you? Why does it seem like you're angry all the time?
I pointed out an observation. Your response used the word fuck and then called me lazy, which is extremely rude. Would you have said that to my face? This isn't personal, dude. I just get the same feeling now when scanning comments that I get when I am looking at products on Amazon and can't see the price.
You got mad at him for making an impersonal remark
I think Are you saying that you're too lazy to read what people are saying and form your own opinions? is a rather personal remark. A psychologizing one at that. Pot, meet kettle.
If by "pot, meet kettle", you're mentioning how dcurtis responded to my remark with a personal psychologizing remark, then the expression makes sense; otherwise, I'm confused. I didn't get mad at what dcurtis said, so I don't know who's the pot and who's the kettle here.
"Are you saying that" is an opener that means, "How is it that you're viewing this, because I see it like this". I wasn't trying to be snide and put him down. I was letting him know that's how I was viewing the situation, and asking him his interpretation. It was also a teeny bit tongue-in-cheek, considering, again, he's currently spending a month of his life flying in planes.
I'm an art student who is very rarely angry and doesn't think swearing indicates emotion. I also believe that it's better to have to spend time thinking about what to read, how to spend your time, than it is to be offered an easy way out that risks devaluing what people are saying. (I further believe that being called lazy usually isn't an insult.)
In person, I'd probably be doubly critical. Don't think of it as rude; I think criticizing what somebody's saying is a sign of respecting them. To quote a guy I'm in the middle of reading: "The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself."
If I were being rude, I'd ignore your comment and not call out what I thought was stupid/wrong about it. As it is, I'm debating what you said because I think there's a discussion to be had. For instance: Why would you feel the same reading comments as you would buying things? There's no harm to reading a few extra comments. You lose nothing but your time, which you're already spending on Hacker News.
"Top-rated comments appear at the top of the thread"
True, but often times the top comment will not be the highest rated, but the reply or subsequent replies below the comment will be rated higher than the orginal post, but the entire thread gets moved to the top because of that.
Now I have no way of knowing that.
[edit] I also have no way of knowing when the MAJORITY of readers are disagreeing with me.
Up votes/down votes has always been a way to express yourself without commenting. If it's not visible, it's not as expressive, nor is it as rewarding to the commentor or the voter. I officially dislike this.
I officially dislike disagreeing with somebody without explaining why. That's not what upvotes and downvotes were meant for. They're meant to maintain commenting relevancy by downvoting irrelevant comments. It's a brilliant idea dashed by the fact that most people would much rather downvote things they dislike and call it "democracy".
Oh, I agree with that. I rarely downvote, and if/when I do I always leave a comment. It's more the opposite that I'm talking about here.
Someone may not down vote my comment, which, say, has 7 points. But they may leave a reply that is argumentative to my comment. With this new system, I can only see that my comment has 7 points, but I can't see that the counter-point reply to it may have 34.
The fact that many people are agreeing with the counter-point to my comment is significant, as is my inability to see that.
> I also have no way of knowing when the MAJORITY of readers are disagreeing with me.
Why would that matter ? The majority isn't always right.
HN is not a popularity contest, but when you look at the comments that way it certainly starts to look like it.
Let's see what I can say that many people will agree with so I can be voted up ?
As unalone already remarked, now you have to make up your own mind about what you are reading, which is a huge improvement over the groupthink mentality. It forces you to think for yourself before casting your vote, it takes care of the huge feedback loop that was in HN before this change.
Even now, there is still some of that left, after all the sort order still tells you what the majority voted for, but that's subtle enough that it probably won't matter too much, and the new sorting algorithm seems to do a very good job of bringing the good stuff to the top.
What the old system did was to provide a numeric indicator of other readers' emotive participation in the discussion. It wasn't a popularity contest (although it could be for some) and it wasn't an agree/disagree rank (although it could be for some)
These "bad" uses of the score caused the system to get out of whack as more and more people participated. The problem is, there are "good" uses of the score, which is to use it as a way to filter the site. After all, there are thousands of comments added per hour and it's crazy to think that I'm going to have time to read every single one. I need an indicator of those comments that seem to affect the most number of readers because that's where I want to add my limited amount of effort.
I am not on a treasure hunt for good comments. I am not here to please PG or the other readers. Some might be but I am not. I am not jumping onboard to upvote things already upvoted -- the sad fact is that I can't read everything, so some things will have to have higher priority than others. If you take away the numeric system, I'll find some other way to filter -- perhaps by comment author or by scanning the front page for buzzwords that interest me.
I, the user, have a need to skim. Now the system can either easily provide that for me, or I'll probably go somewhere else. I don't mean that as a threat or anything -- I'm sure nobody gives a hoot where I read on the net or not -- but as an indication of the type of reaction the general public is going to have.
The sort order is what gives you exactly that, and that is still there, so the 'good' stuff is still at the top (and even better than before now with the improved sorting algorithm). It's just 'relative' now, instead of 'absolute'.
But right now I look at this thread and all I see is a bunch of jumbled-up comments. I don't know if the one at the top is worth-while for me to read or just matches some arcane criteria established by the programmer.
I'm forced to use "threads" to see where I've commented before and to use the new comments page to see where people are currently commenting. Any semblance of being able to apply my own sort criteria is gone.
And I think it gets to my ability to sort by my own criteria and the nested nature of the comments. Do I want to find highly-ranked comments under a lowly ranked parent? Sometimes those are the best ones.
That explains why you have so much time to read all the comments.
I don't have time to read all the comments so I'll look at the greatest hits. You can find the conversation based on the kharma scores, both positive and negative. If someone says something -4, it might be worth reading because it got such a reaction out of people. But a bunch of 1s and 2s on an old thread are noise that aren't worth reading.
That explains why you have so much time to read all the comments.
What, that I'm a student? Reading comments doesn't take that long. As I said above: Fifteen minutes at most? And that's if it's a seriously long thread. Most threads are five minutes' skimming at most.
If someone says something -4, it might be worth reading because it got such a reaction out of people. But a bunch of 1s and 2s on an old thread are noise that aren't worth reading.
Not necessarily. Perhaps somebody made a brilliant comment, but only after people were done reading. In any case, that hasn't changed now: Top-rated comments appear at the top of the thread, same as always. So if you want the most "valued" conversations, read at the top.
I take a lot longer to read a thread, but I think it is well worth it, even the downvoted comments sometimes contain really good stuff, and sometimes the downvotes are based on ambiguity or misunderstandings (or cultural gaps).
So if I pick a thread I read all of it, sometimes again at a later point in time (or via the 'threads' page).
I generally pick one or two most interesting topics from the front page, and read most of the comments on them. It seems better to read a few things in depth than reading sound bites on everything.
This also frees me of any need to complain about offtopic stuff, as long as a few on-topic posts remain.
That's why I try to be careful how I swear. I thought that "fuck that" was casual enough to come across as being neutrally dismissive. Guess not; apologies to all!
The problem is that in-person you can use body language and tone of voice to moderate the effects of using something like, "Fuck that!" but when you're expressing yourself completely in text you are at the whim of the reader's interpretation of your words.
somebody in the debate responded to a guy who was at -4 by saying "Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." That's shit.
That's assuming that the majority is right. If somebody gets voted down there is a pretty good chance that they were wrong, or even if they were right, they said in the wrong tone/manner.
"Pretty good chance." But here's the thing. What if they're not wrong? What if a bunch of people read the comment, didn't quite understand it, and then downvoted it because it already had downvotes? I know I act like that a lot while reading.
I also see a curious downvoting pattern on those frequent incidents when somebody mass downvotes all my comments for some reason or other. I'll assume for argument that on average I make useful, relevant comments. When new comments that I make get downvoted, there's about a 50-50 chance that the next person to come along also downvotes the comment, even when it's a good one. They see the other person's downvote and it reenforces in their mind that there was a good reason the comment was being downvoted. The ones that get a reverse upvote, however, then soar upwards.
I had made one comment a few days ago that go downvoted such, then for a while hovered between -1 and -2, with very little differentiation. Then it hit 1 again, and within a few hours had hit up to something like 16. That's a pattern that I see a lot. People are less willing to upvote a comment that's grey than they are to upvote something solidly in the black. That's a flaw.
"Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth.
The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that". Also consider pg's comment recently about "bogus" research, and how so many people then jumped on him. Actually, someone got sued in the UK for calling research "bogus", instead of factually and objectively calling out the problem with it. It's also in the HN guidelines to use neutral and factual language without connotations.
By observing myself, I've noticed that my interpretation of a comment is affected by the upvotes/downvotes on it. It's not surprising, given the experimentally confirmed tendency to conform in humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3).
"Look at your comment score, looks like I'm right." is an appeal to the democratic theory of truth.
There's no such thing as a democratic theory of truth. The truth isn't something that can be voted on. Does God exist because more people believe in Him than believe in a secular universe?
The use of pejorative language obscures your content. Like "fuck that".
"Fuck that" obscures nothing. It's a concise way to say what I wanted to say. I could have said "I disagree", which takes twice as long to say and sounds garbled. I think there's a place for the word "fuck": It's for saying something very clearly and quickly when there's no need for delay. So, "Fuck that" doesn't have connotations. Not in the way that "That's shit" does, or even "Fuck you".
Finally: negative scores on a story are still shown... not numerally, but by how gray it is. Thus, the current experiment does not apply to comments with negative scores. I think it would be worthwhile extending it to include those, at least for -1 or -2 comments (for example, by not graying them out til they hit -3).
I agree completely. As an aside, it's interesting right now watching my comments just in this thread. Once they hit 0 and turn grey, there's a lot of turbulence and they hover around there until they go black again, but the comments here that are in the black have quite high scores. That reinforces my belief that reading a grey comment biases you to think it's a bad comment. So in my mind, the threshold now where a single voter can grey a comment is too low. Setting it to -2 means there'd have to be a three-vote discrepancy between ups and downs, which I think sounds about right.
So, "Fuck that" doesn't have connotations. Not in the way that "That's shit" does, or even "Fuck you".
I disagree with that. Of course I could have said "Fuck that." However, just like you probably wouldn't want me just saying "Fuck that" in response to your viewpoint other people aren't going to appreciate a comment that says "Fuck that."
I will vote down any comment such as that, and I'm sure that many other members will as well.
I think the problem is not so much with the choice of words as it is in the company in which you choose to use those words.
I swear a lot, I grew up in a fairly rough area of a big town and it took me some self control to get rid of it.
It's not that I mind, it is that other people mind, and the use of it in 'polite discourse' is therefore discouraged, there are other ways to express exactly the same thing without chancing stepping on someones toes. In general, if every third comment on HN would contain swear words we'd have to start calling it 4chan, and I'm sure plenty of people - including me - would leave.
That says noting about your freedom to choose whatever words you want, but you have to be aware that you are changing the atmosphere in a non subtle way by your choice of language.
"Best indicator" are not the words I would have used. Like other (all that I know of, in fact) voting systems on popular social sites, Hacker News' is biased in favor of comments that repeat the established, arrive early, and are written by popular authors. All criteria which are subtly different from quality of contents.
My first comment was http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739112
Being my first intervention on HN, I thought I would be able to post anonymously so I included my name at the bottom of the post. The first reply (which, I admit is polite, well written and from a relatively famous person in this community, although not completely on-topic with respect to the article originally linked) got upvoted above ten. My comment, which revealed a lesser-know but true fact strongly related to the original article, with reference to an experiment that you can reproduce at home, was upvoted twice or something like that.
> Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.
It can be when the site is new and only an overall smart population lives on it, but yc is (I guess) growing, and as it grows the quality of the voting (and therefore the score) decreases: insightful comments running against the general opinion get mercilessly downvoted, useless comments matching the general opinion rise.
>Like price, comment score is the best indicator of context, class, and quality.
You mean in the same way a book's price is an indicator of its quality? ;)
The nice thing about comments is that they are short and quick to read. Unlike books or films there's no need for reviewers or critics to help you find the better ones. Just read and decide for yourself.
Surely the content is the best indicator of context, class, and quality? If you feel lost, perhaps you were relying too much on others to judge an opinion for yourself?
Apropos of nothing, let me not one side effect of this recent change to HN: I'm really having a much harder time resisting the urge to downvote ideas just because they're really bad.
Instead, let me just say that this common notion -- that because good content is the ultimate signal of quality, we should read all the content before making a choice -- is like saying that, because the way your spouse gets along with children is vitally important to your future happiness, you should try having a child with all the eligible spouses you can find before you choose one.
That's the entire premise behind this site: popular items become more visible. There just isn't enough time to go through all the content; it's much easier to learn the site's bias & compensate.
There just isn't enough time to go through all the content; it's much easier to learn the site's bias & compensate.
That's one man's opinion. I read all the comments on every thread here, and find that not all the high-quality comments rise to the top. It's hit-and-miss. In a way that invalidates the theory of upvote-judging, no?
It's a shitty system that forces you to adapt to biases. Right now PG's experimenting with removing a bias and improving the system. You're arguing that it would be better if he left the system flawed.
Most people here don't want to or have the time to read all comments on all threads and would appreciate help in finding "good" things.
It's true that PG is experimenting with the system, but it's a value judgment to say the old way is more flawed than the new way. In other words, your last two sentences beg the question.
Sure, content is the best indicator of context, class, and quality... given you have unlimited time to read all the content.
Since most people don't have infinite reading time, people use a heuristic to work out what's worth reading and what isn't, and upmods are a reasonable, if fallable, heuristic to use. I've just come back from an 8 hour shift at a warehouse, and I'm not going to bother reading all the comments - it's simply not going to happen. Sorry if that offends people, but I'm tired. I'm going to miss out on the the good comments because I don't have time to read all the comments.
Secondly, upmods smooth out discussion by preventing redundant comments and people repeating the same point ad nauseum. While this might be perceived as "groupthink", being able to separate a fringe viewpoint (even if they're not necessary wrong) from a popular view is an extremely useful heuristic, because the prevailing opinion is often (but not always) more likely to be a reasonable and reliable answer.
I have a feeling that most people actually practice these heuristics in real life too. Given finite reading time and the contents of all books in history, most people read books that others people have recommended or are popular.
I wonder if someone will now habitually look at their own comment's position in http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments to infer the (relative) value of other people's comments in different threads :-)
