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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853658

Would it be possible to include both karma and avg. on the top bar or simply chose which one to display. I like the karma on top for 2 reasons:

1. When your karma goes up/down, it's a good indication that you might have replies to your most recent comments.

2. Karma seems to be updated not so frequently.

I like the idea though of encouraging a good ratio vs total karma.

I'm not keen on the total karma display. I take your point that it's useful as a vague reply indicator, but it would be more useful still if there was an actual indicator of new replies, in the style of Reddit's red envelope. I don't know whether such a thing would be feasible for HN.

I would like to see total karma disappear altogether, because I don't think it measures anything helpful and may well be counterproductive. Looking down the HN karma leaderboard[1] you can see a number of users with very high total karma but very low average karma. I'm sure that some of these users make a valuable contribution, but some seem to post a vast number of very low-value comments that are rarely replied to and receive only occasional upvotes. I'm not sure that we want to encourage that style of participation.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

"You can see a number of users with very high total karma but very low average karma. I'm sure that some of these users make a valuable contribution, but some seem to post a vast number of very low-value comments that are rarely replied to and receive only occasional upvotes."

I comment in a lot of new stories/links that pop up, especially people asking critiques because a) it's disheartening to post something about your work and have zero replies and b) I often get to see a cool product that's in a very raw stage and hear feedback from the creator themselves. In fact, I'd say less than 25% of my comments are in front page links.

But often these new stories rarely get traffic. And my comments will usually just get one or no upvotes at all from the creator, despite their thanks for the criticism.

Just saying that not all low-averaged scores are people not actively trying to make a contribution.

I quite like the total karma display. It gives me something to aim for. In the past few weeks I've made an effort to post in threads rather than my usual lurking and I'm using my overall score as a crude means of whether or not I should be posting more. I'm trying to go up by about 100 a week, which focuses me more on commenting early in the life of a thread and engaging in conversation instead of posting at the end of a thread's life or adding me too posts.

I would definitely love an equivalent of the reddit envelope, along with a view of replies.

Ok, now both are displayed.

Now, if we could only see other peoples average karma .

Total Karma of a user can be seen on his profile page. Afaik there is no way to see another users average karma, unless he is on the leaderboard, which uses total karma as the ranking metric.

Ok, now everyone's comment avg is visible in their profile.

This discourages people from posting helpful comments that aren't likely to get many upvotes. For example,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741408

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485254

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349459

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349455

Those are all comments by me that were helpful to the parent, but which are "punished" by the public display of avg.

More is not necessarily better though is it?

"More is better" is implicit. If the number has no meaning, then why calculate and display it?

I don't get that more is implicitly better. It is pretty clear from a naive glance at the list of leaders that there are diverse average points that correlate to diverse posting styles.

If you want it scaled to fit a continuum of "bigger is always implicitly better", a more reasonable number would be: average of (comment points/parent points)

Even if a number has no [absolute cardinal, > x] meaning, there is still a nominal information value to the datum.

I have an affinity for numbers, as I'm sure many hackers do, but the dual score doesn't look/feel right to me. Might we have the average show up only if it drops below a certain level? Possibly in red, to really emphasize the point?

This could help with another gripe I have with displaying average points (and comment voting in general), which is that oftentimes quality comments are downvoted simply for being contrary to the downvoter(s) views, and/or groupthink.

Thank you. I use the total karma number as a quick indicator of whether or not I am getting replies to an active conversation. That works for me since there are usually upvotes if there are replies to a comment.

Or you could just store the date of the last child comment with the user information, and include that on the top bar (near the average)? So a user knows the last datetime of child comments in their threads.

Personally, I like the average. Shows that HN is more 'adaptive', imho.

ETA. Whoa that was fast. I like the (abs., avg.), fwiw. That does seem best.

Could we have the avg change color slightly when there is a change to the actual karma?

You mean like the (in)famous orange experiment? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467895 and the top thread in it (the one started by jacquesm) makes for a good summary as to why it failed.

they did it already :)

If "consistently good" is what you want, then why not use something similar to a Sharpe ratio? For example, average / stdev.

xkcd suggested a novel way to filter out terrible YouTube comments by playing your comment out loud before posting. It had some very interesting results:

http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/10/08/youtube-audio-preview/

What's the time horizon for the avg? Does it change noticeably for non-noobs?

pg, I'm only seeing the empty list.

To join in the 'me-too' choir, rather than returning the arithmetic average, perhaps you could slap a confidence interval on it and return the lower bound.

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