Ones near the top are some kind of product of age (more recent) and score (higher).
By the way, the kind of skimming you're describing is what leads to mob voting :) People skim for the highest rated stuff, read it, then rate it up more. Plenty of good comments never get rated up, and people who say the most inflammatory stuff (or just make stupid jokes) get the votes early on and stay in the "lead" as it were, the system having been made into a game.
Repeat after me: you cannot have a system with points and expect people not to play games with it. Just accept it as a given and try to work around mob voting in other ways. Perhaps there is a way to make the system work against it's own mob tendencies.
The entire point of using karma is that it means something -- it has value. Heck, I bet to some folks it has a lot of value. I'd further bet that it has so much value to some folks that you could monetize it. But that's a discussion for another day.
Repeat after me: you cannot have a system with points and expect people not to play games with it.
Exactly! A lot of games just got killed, and now we're hearing some protesting about it.
The entire point of using karma is that it means something -- it has value. Heck, I bet to some folks it has a lot of value. I'd further bet that it has so much value to some folks that you could monetize it. But that's a discussion for another day.
You don't find it slightly pathetic that people would be judging themselves by the score of their comments on a web site? And I say this as an upstanding member of the Karma Kommunity.
There is, actually, one system of points that works brilliantly. Metafilter's favoriting system, which allows upvotes but not downvotes, lets top comments get notified, but doesn't penalize any other comments, and because MF uses a flat commenting system the conversation isn't at all affected by what people like and dislike.
Of course it's a game. But it should be a game that fosters insightful comments and interesting threads, not one-liner jokes and inflammatory outbursts.
I wonder if you could just have three buttons/widgets: insightful, funny, and troll.
Then just click what you think of the article, and insightful articles rise to the top.
Heck, you could even make it a user preference whether to sort insightful first, funny first, or troll first (why you'd want to do that I don't know, but some might)
It would involve just one more graphic element than the current up/down arrows, and would give people release to say the funny things when they feel like they have to instead of having the site self-police.
I'd go so far as to say that I'd enjoy reading jokes and one-liners the folks here have to say about the news. We've got some really smart people that read HN. I bet their jokes are hilarious.
But that's only sometimes, not all of the time. If there could be a button for turning jokes off or on (or sorting by funny) then it'd be a hoot to see the site in that asepct.,
In short, I don't think it's a human behavior problem. Computer systems should let people act like people naturally act. This is a display problem. Some folks are seeing things in spots they would not like them to be in.
Instead of viewing the site as some huge function to take limited input and provide maximum output, perhaps it's better viewed as a big bucket of various randomized data. Then the purpose of the site is to sort and organize that random data in such a way as to provide maximum utility.
> I'd go so far as to say that I'd enjoy reading jokes and one-liners the folks here have to say about the news. We've got some really smart people that read HN. I bet their jokes are hilarious.
I agree. HN, while of course useful in other ways, seems so humorless to me. I understand that some HNers are paranoid about HN turning into Slashdot or Reddit, but it would probably be nice sometimes to have a more community-like feel, even if it were totally segregated from the "real" HN.
I agree. As an administrator on Wikipedia since 2004, I have to say that, while Wikipedia is not perfect, I do appreciate their skeptical stance toward voting. Especially where points matter and pseudonimity allows for multiple accounts, voting runs into awful problems. The Wikimedia foundation has codified some of their thoughts on the negative effects of voting here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Voting_is_evil
I think you hit the nail on it's head in the later part of your comment. I think what is killing reddit is that funny attracts 10x votes when insightful attracts x and lately that is exactly what is happening here. But I don't think this experiment is a solution at all. The thread as ordered by the HN algo is definitely not the right order to read a thread.
By the way, the kind of skimming you're describing is what leads to mob voting :) People skim for the highest rated stuff, read it, then rate it up more. Plenty of good comments never get rated up, and people who say the most inflammatory stuff (or just make stupid jokes) get the votes early on and stay in the "lead" as it were, the system having been made into a game.