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Comment by antjanus | Hacker News Reader

I disagree, the Y meter is the best part. I rarely ever look at the number of points until after I look at the article. I just click on what looks interesting on the front-page. Having an easy up-front visible way to discern new vs established articles would be much more helpful than an exact number buried under too much information.

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A point made is that the Y meter obscures an otherwise instantly understandable metric with a visualization that must be deciphered. If you don't care about that number, sure, it's less information and thus perhaps less clutter. For myself, it's chart cruft.

> the Y meter obscures an otherwise instantly understandable

I'm not sure I agree with that, because it takes me a noticeable amount of time and effort to look at the scores for two different stories, located at two different parts of the page, and to compare them. It's far easier to get an instant notion of how a story is performing compared to other stories using the Y meter, for me at least.

My recommendation for the Y meter is dead simple: just also show the number.

Nice design, but I'm not sure I like the Y-meter myself. I don't like when websites/apps change to hide information or remove detail. My eyes already do a pretty good job discerning big numbers from small numbers. Now I have to understand a 70% full square versus an 90% full square?

It bothers me a little that (<)100 is half-way around the meter while (<)400 is all the way around. I don't usually quibble about small details, but if you're going to make a meter, just make it sensible.

Why not have a continuous (or at least less discrete) meter?

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