Comment by md224 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by md224 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's definitely bad UX. Curtis tries to brush away criticism with his claim that the "kudos" number is "an otherwise meaningless number," but this argument is fatally flawed. Plenty of things that human beings use for social signaling are, when removed from context, technically "meaningless", but within context they can hold plenty of meaning. In the case of Curtis's website, the "Kudos" counter is implied to display a count of voluntary approval. By essentially tricking users into incrementing the count, Curtis violates this expectation, which is why everyone feels "cheated" by it. Subsequent visitors to the site who don't realize the counter has been gamed may take it as an indicator of how many people enjoyed the article, when in fact the numbers are inflated by other users against their will. This is not only terrible UX, but bordering on outright deceit.

In a world dominated by social media and ubiquitous "Like" counters, for someone to brush off a Kudos count as "an otherwise meaningless number" is either an incredible display of naivety or straight-up bullshit.

It's a pretty obvious dark pattern.

While I agree, my complaint with it is even simpler: hit refresh and you can ostensibly keep adding kudos without limit. If that's not the case, then it's a UI problem because it doesn't tell you as much. If it is the case, then it certainly removes whatever meaning it has the moment someone starts inflating the count.

The problem is really a combination of the two. People expect kudos to be tracked in a reasonable fashion for the reason that, if the counter exists, it must be taken seriously. The rest of the system is stripped down, leaving people with the impression that whatever is left must be important. This is a false impression, and that's what's disappointing about the feature. Dustin Curtis has taken a serious (read: pretentious) approach to the rest of the site, but he's left the kudos system hanging by a chad.

I repeated this about a thousand times and he seems to have fixed it ;). Also, he seems to have reverted the count on his unkudos page. Not the actions I would have expected from someone who thought nothing of it.

I disagree with your outright deceit allegation, because the number of people who enjoyed the article enough for a kudos is sure to be less than the number of people who bothered with the widget in the upper-right corner of the screen. I wish I had a study handy but it's well-established that far fewer people who read an article continue interacting with the page after they're done. For me to believe that it's a serious problem I'd have to be convinced that at least 50% of the kudos were from people who didn't think it was worthy of kudos.

On the other hand, first-time visitors or those that come to look at the design (as those who get there from this discussion) are IMO likely to think "What's that? Let's hover it; maybe some tooltip will pop up"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com