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
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.
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.")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
>I don't think hiding comment scores will have that effect, though it might make it more difficult to recognize when it happens.
Comment scores make group beliefs far more obvious. Common knowledge of group beliefs is a necessary condition for groupthink.
>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.
The thing we need to be afraid of is public praise or shame for writing a well-received or poorly-received comment.
>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.
I disagree. When people are called out publicly for unpopular beliefs, they tend to commit to them even stronger.
Consider the following two stories. In Story A, Joe is downmodded on a comment with no replies and his low score is public knowledge. Joe becomes unhappy and stubborn. In Story B, Joe is downmodded on a comment with no replies and his low score is private knowledge. Joe wonders what might have caused so many to individually downmod his comment. He replies to his comment and says "Just curious, I noticed that a lot of people seem to be downmodding my comment. Is there some sort of flaw in my argument that I'm not seeing?"
> Comment scores make group beliefs far more obvious. Common knowledge of group beliefs is a necessary condition for groupthink.
True -- but obviousness is not a prerequisite of common knowledge in a knowledge-oriented community like this. Maybe if it was Digg the scores themselves would be a lot more necessary for groupthink.
> The thing we need to be afraid of is public praise or shame for writing a well-received or poorly-received comment.
I think you're underestimating the power of a pat on the back.
> I disagree. When people are called out publicly for unpopular beliefs, they tend to commit to them even stronger.
See above, re: "being smart". Were you not reading what I said?
I didn't realize how integral the numbers were to how I read HN until now. It's taken me a while to stop feeling lost without them, but with the orange dot present, I at least feel like I'm getting the insightful comments after a quick scan of the page.
Well, no. With the numbers I can get a sense of how quickly a comment is being upvoted by looking at the time it was posted. I can also compare a comment's total points to the those of surrounding comments for an indication of its relative worth.
These things aren't perfect measures, but I find them useful.
It's just a filter. By reading only high scoring comments you will get a combination of insightful posts and annoying witticisms. Only rarely do you get a false positive: a post that with a high score that is inane or simply wrong.
By reading every post you'll certainly find the "diamond in the rough", posts that don't get the recognition they deserve. But you'll also have to trudge through loads of posts of little merit. Given that there is an infinite amount of information on the internet, those 2 minutes can probably be better spent on wikipedia or reading the top post in a different HN thread.
Additionally: HN isn't just about opinion, it is also for a large part about fact. And insightful facts almost always rise to the top. On the bottom of threads you often find things that are wrong or subtly wrong.
Judging by the numbers may very well be the most efficient and reliable way to get to insightful content.
If it's a post with a lot of discussion, it'd help with one or two more levels of "good post" indicators.
Maybe making the default text color slightly more grayish and the "a bit better than orange dot" have #000 text, and for the exceptionally upvoted posts also make the "pg 26 minutes ago | link | parent | flag" header bold.
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.
BillSwift your comment has all of the sniping dogma that you attribute to Herd Followers.
Have you tried to think of a more generous reason that people might look at the scores? perhaps people (like me) do a first pass to understand the herd reaction, and then do a second pass to delve into the specifics.
Simply saying score readers are herd following cretins is insulting and wrong.
I said nothing at all about anyone being cretins; sounds like you are being a bit defensive. The post I was responding to said specifically that he used scores as "which comments to keep an eye on" and to avoid "getting lost in the text". But actually reading the text is the only way to absorb the information. The biggest problem I have is with following a comment back to its reference when there are a lot of intermediate comments - allowing comment levels to collapse, like emacs outline mode, would help.
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).
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
