I think it's too soon to actually judge, as we're still in the "ick! change!" phase. Ask again in another week or two. Same for any other experiment you run in the future; unless it obviously and immediately fails, give it some simmer time. (IMHO, of course.)
It is going to take time for the second-order effects to develop.
The optimum writing style may change. When threads require more skimming it pays to write more skimmable content. The reading style will also change. None of these changes will happen overnight; it takes time, the way that learning emacs takes time.
So I agree: Let the experiment run longer. What is the worst that can happen? HN becomes an order of magnitude less popular? I liked HN when it was an order of magnitude less popular. ;)
Personally I feel I've lost a great news source as the work required to use HN is now much greater (for me). Obviously, as a community, losing my comments isn't going to be noticed. But this appears to be the way of things, first Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then HN, where next ...?
I see that the average comment score has been fiddled with too - mine was only 2.6 or so (but rising). I can't tell from it whether it's rising or not now.
I'm in this camp as well: keep it for a while and see how we adjust.
My initial reaction was negative. I found it harder to scan a long page of comments quickly. And I'm not sure why, but I also found that I'm more resistant to vote, either positively or negatively. Maybe because the site feels more static.
The one fix I would suggest is that having the arrows disappear after voting does not feel fulfilling. It feels like my vote has been lost. Switching to displaying the darkened arrow that I chose would feel better.
Or, if more voting was thought to be a good thing, you could display the vote count only afterward. I think I'd be more inclined to vote if there was some sort of 'reward' for the action. The previous reward was seeing the number change in whatever direction I wanted to move it, but receiving information about others would probably work too.
I worry that if people could see vote counts after voting, they would start voting purely to see vote counts, upvoting (or downvoting) a comment not because it deserved it, but to see how many votes it had attracted.
I agree. I was lost without the scores at first, but now I think it is useful not having them. However, I would like to see them after so many days/hours when the article is off of the front-page as it would be helpful when referencing older stuff and at that point I don't see any harm including it.
You sound like you subscribe to the notion that the majority is right? Does this mean that the poll might decide the fate of the karma display?
This is of course an entire debate by itself - are the users right, or should they largely be ignored (cf. Zuckerberg and Facebook "controversial" redesigns).
It's always important to remember that the two choices are governed by factors that could be targeted individually and might change the experiences with either completely.
There are at least three problems with the current situation, that don't go away by 'getting used to' them:
- You don't know whether you clicked the right arrow
- You are forced to skim/read many comments to determine
which ones are of value, where previously you may have
chosen to skim a particular discussion for the best
comments.
- You can't judge the quality of comments on a topic you
know absolutely nothing about
I didn't get the impression that the upvoting of lesser comments, to the level of 'the best comments' is a primary concern? The mere existence of the comments is the major problem, even when they aren't upvoted?
In any case, I do think the set of 'the best comments' is usually a subset of 'the comments with the highest points' and especially in submissions with many comments/threads, the amounts can be helpful.
Since no one can actually see the points I just gave jerf on his comment. I would like to say ditto. I think its much too soon. Some times there are a need of comments like this one where I would rather just vote up then comment ditto like im doing now.
What about on ASK HN: comments we allow points and on articles, we don't? Just a thought.
The entire point of hiding comment scores is to allow people to judge for themselves how much a comment is worth – your expression of agreement is ruining that somewhat.
Whether you can see points or not, I would think "I upvoted" comments with little content would still get downvoted.
Although, one side effect might be: When you can see a comment is highly scored, a reader may think, "everybody gets this guy, no need to help him argue the point. upvote" Whereas when you can see a comment is lowly scored, a reader may think, "this is a good argument, I'll help carry it, upvote and comment". But when you can't see scores, making the call to upvote and comment, or just upvote is made only on the content of the comment. Whether that's good or bad, I'm not sure.
I have an idea, thinking out loud here - so bear with me:
Traditional point based forum systems provide a way for people to up/down any given post - but its a binary decision.
There are a range of factors that one may want to upvote/downvote a post based on. /. had an interesting moderation model by allowing a context selection along with the score - though this too had its limitations.
With respect to the implementation on HN, not showing the score changes the dynamic that we are used to, which is fine - but we sometimes need a contextual vote/filter to promote answers with links/content.
What would be interesting is if one were to post a link in the comment if we could vote up the individual link. So next to the links there were a score for that link -- this way - while we could vote the post author either way, if multiple posts contain links in an answer to a question, the community can vote on the links themselves -- which will aid in people who are seeking the answer.
Additionally, if we have a contextual label selection for posts, then the community can select the label that applies from a list - and the readers would see which applies.
This removes the numerical karmic judgement from the post, but allows for insightful, helpful, informative, opinion or other classifiers to be used.
Would something along these lines work better for us?
