I'm used to scanning comments as a way to determine which articles to read. Postings with a lot of comment action usually indicate something emotionally appealing.
Once I go to the comments section, then I filter by score, only looking at comments above a certain threshold (depending on how much time I have). I usually try not to comment, unless some comment has been upvoted to a high level and doesn't make sense to me.
Alas, there are a huge number of comments that I disagree with or fail to understand, and only by knowing the score am I able to determine whether or not my adding to the discussion will help the other readers.
That don't work no more. Now I'm just blindly poking around in the comments section, not really feeling connected to the discussion at all...
The top-level comments presumably rise and sink based roughly on their karma (though the algorithm also seems to have other considerations, like momentum). But what of the second-tier comments and below? Ripostes are often where the action is.
I might find that I'm reduced to skimming for names that I recognize. That's how the rest of the web works. The web in general has no karma system, so the way to "upvote" something is to repeat it with your byline: You Twitter it or reblog it (or retweet it, or re-reblog it) with a link and your signature, implying a certain degree of implicit endorsement.
I expect that if this system holds we'll start seeing more "amen" comments. I kind of hope so, frankly: Now the only way I will spot an incredibly insightful but short comment buried downthread is if I see a bunch of comments from people I vaguely know saying "amen".
I'm not sure this trend will represent progress, however.
If we want to tinker, consider this: relative rankings on a page. Find a way to distinguish the top-voted 20% of comments from the second quintile, and the second quintile from everything else. (My instinct is not to bother distinguishing things below the top 40%, and of course negative-karma comments presumably are still doing their disappearing act, my favorite cute HN feature.)
At the risk of repeating the legendary eye-searing Orange Name experiment... we could turn the byline of comments in the top 20% a different color from the second 20%, which in turn is a different color from everything else.
Red is probably the wrong color for any of this -- too loud. Think "green". I'm thinking shades of green: Comments in the first quintile have very green bylines, comments in the second quintile have slightly green bylines, and all the other comments have their usual light grey bylines.
PG wrote an essay which discussed the 'fluff principle' at work in other voting-based aggregator communities, in which the most superficially sensational content usually rose to the top, beating out longer-form but more intellectually substantial content: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
I think this move by PG is aimed at reducing the herd mentality of voting, and reducing the ability of readers to engage in voting without having engaged the content first.
However, I think your scheme of highlighting comments by quintile is probably a good one. It gets us away from thinking about raw scores, but also serves to reward and reinforce good commenting contributions/behavior by setting an example for others to follow. In order to stave off the herd mentality of 'piling on' upvotes or downvotes, perhaps votes made subsequent to highlighting (or greying out in the case of negative comments) should have half the weight.
If you think that the secret to encouraging engagement is to flatten out the structure of the information, and ask everyone to read everything in order to discover the influential, popular, or insightful bits...
... you desperately need to read The Paradox of Choice:
http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000...
There is nothing engaging about thirty screenfuls of undifferentiated choices. When presented with that, I'll just leave. If I wanted a firehose of undifferentiated, recent, quality content, presented in a way which made it very difficult to nucleate a conversation or form a community, I'd be using Google Reader.
[EDIT: Incidentally, if not illustratively, I should point out that I haven't actually read the entirety of The Paradox of Choice myself. I listened to the author lecture about it for an hour in a podcast, and I started to read it, and I appreciated the concept, but I felt that the book kept repeating the same point too many times and I had other uses for my time... ;]
Yes. It's like "we want the voting system for our own purposes. You schmucks can just read every comment under an article because your time is not as valuable to us as our desire to prevent mobbing"
I'm sure that's not the case, but that's the way the new system feels.
20 Points for a comment 'supporting' my position and 20 for a comment arguing 'against' my position indicate that I shouldn't be too certain, but that my position is (probably) at least rational.
20 Points for a comment 'supporting' my position and 1 for a comment arguing 'against' my position is an additional sign that I am probably on the right track.
1 Point for a comment 'supporting' my position and 20 for a comment arguing 'against' my position is a clear sign that I may have missed something and should read that comment carefully.
I really dislike this change.
If somebody refutes you elegantly, then you should look into their refutation regardless of whether or not the refutation has many points.
Meanwhile, I think if somebody replies to you with something like that, it's worth investigating regardless of if they're the top answer or not. I'll draw a parallel to Reddit's "What's your favorite album?" threads. If you were to go by comment points alone, you'd think Radiohead's OK Computer was the best album of all time and that NIN took the four spots under that; meanwhile, albums out of the hive mind don't get as many upvotes, even if the commenter is more passionately in love with them.
Similarly, just because a lot of people think one thing on HN doesn't mean that one thing is the best answer. Looking up multiple solutions may take more time, but that leads to learning and growth, which I think should be the point of any community.
You obviously participate in HN a lot. Don't fault the rest of us for only wanting to do it part time.
Sure, it's a noisy signal because scores don't just indicate agreement, but the context usually makes that clear. If a factual claim is up- or downvoted, it usually indicates that people believe the claim is true or false. For analysis or opinion, it may have to more with whether the comment is insightful or thought-provoking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At least on slashdot, the "troll"s are sometimes, in their own way, funnier than the "funny"s (if only because of not involving overdone /. in-jokes).
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 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 think this change is for the better.