Wow, I hate this feature. Comment karma was already implicitly self-reinforcing. Now HN has reified that in the UI. Can we opt out of being highlighted?
I'm already ambivalent about karma, but I think the highlighting is wholly a Bad Idea:
* it strongly encourages gaming and groupthink, already the biggest problem with social news sites, especially karma-based ones, while discouraging controversial opinions
* it makes those without highlighting feel less welcome
or that their contributions are less worthwhile
* it adds excessive weight to the opinions of popular members, and as noted elsewhere this causes a feedback loop
IMHO karma should be a subtle thing, used gently. Shoving it in users' faces is the worst possible thing to do with it.
I don't like sounding so negative, because I appreciate the work and thought that has gone into making HN the great site that it is. But I'd like to keep it great, and I think this is not a good way to go about it, and a bad road to go down.
It's not that I hate this feature. It makes me a bit sad. I've been coming here almost everyday for just under 2 years. I'm not orange. And that makes me wonder if I really should be here? Am I, actually, one of those people that HN doesn't want?
Okay - this is exactly the problem that occurred to me within 2 seconds of learning how this feature works. If it's going to work any way, it should at least be a GRADIENT from grey to orange. This way of doing suddenly splits your whole user community into two groups, the Greys and the Oranges.
There's a huge difference in human psychology between a gradient and a divider. Not that this is necessarily a good idea anyway - it encourages people not to post on old threads, or even not to post too far off the top of the page, etc. But in any case - if you're going to do it at all, make it a gradient!
While I agree that this is divisive, having a gradient would just defeat the purpose of the feature, which is to highlight those whose examples you should be following.
Making it a gradient makes it really hard to tell who is setting a good example and who isn't.
Rather than a gradient, I'd just like the option to turn it off, even if that option is only available after 50 karma or something. To me it is visual noise.
Even better if it was visible to a user up to X karma and then disappeared past that. Then it would serve its training purpose without leading to a long-term two-tier culture here.
My first real thought when reading this thread was, "Hmm...strange that he's not orange" about a few different usernames I recognized.
I think I have to come down on the side of not liking the feature, but I'm not sure I'm right about my reasons for not liking it. I've always thought one of the great things about reddit and HN is that identity of the poster is understated. It's not anonymous, but it's possible to read comments without seeing the user who posted them. Every comment thus stands alone and is judged on its own merits. "Bad" users get a fresh start with every post, and "good" users have to say something interesting or not at all. Now, I have some sort of stamp of approval the moment I post.
Then again, most people are idiots, and if software can make it more apparent who the idiots are, maybe it'll make it easier to tolerate them when they start showing up here in larger numbers.
As a recent "idiot" (sarcasm) who has read HN for over a year now, and just signed up to participate, I have a thought. I chose to reply to this particular post of yours with my thought, because you're orange, so maybe I'll get noticed (also sarcasm), because, alas, I'm only gray, oh and also because it fits (loosely) in the context of your post.
Anyway, I have a suggestion for PG, not that he'll notice it this deep in the thread, but:
What if we could add certain users to a "favorites" list and then any posts they make would show up to us as orange. I've got certain favorite posters on here who I like to read and other people who I do not like to read. Some of my favorites are orange, but then again some are not. I know this may be hugely complex from a technical standpoint, but that's my big thought for the day.
Edit: On re-reading my post, I'm not trying to come across as an ass SwellJoe, I was just trying to be witty. I guess if I have to clarify that, it didn't work :-)
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by a version 1. Basically, you've been hosed by the time-zone problem froo mentioned (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466967). I need to figure out some way to normalize.
If you're trying to normalise by the number of potential upvoters then a crude method would be: upvotes/(total thread views - thread views at time of posting)
Doesn't factor in a bunch of things, but it does also cover posts on unpopular threads as well as bad times.
i was just having a similar thought: won't this "flaunting" of karma create more social unrest (defensiveness, ego-grabbing, immature or strategic conversations)?
when i first came here i loved seeing my karma grow. it gave me a feeling of acceptance that reddit's meanness never could. (i found the content more interesting, too, and of course hope that i'm part of that, just as you do.)
i say karma should stay private. it is useful for personal gratification. the path to good discussion is humility and insight.
It's not flaunting of karma - it serves a usability purpose.
If you want to skim for good comments, this feature helps you do so. This feature helps to highlight comments with few points that might be of merit, because the poster tends to say good things.
I'd advise that if not being orange hurts a person's feelings, that reflects on the person's state of mind more than anything.
Bottom line - if the orange color helps me find better comments, faster - it' a good feature.
Suppose someone tends to make insightful, useful and interesting comments, the sort you want to find when quickly skimming. Suppose that same person also makes lots of little comments to assist others in finding information, the sort of comments that don't get upmodded because they've taken time to compile and hence come late, the sort that are on niche matters that don't make it to the front page, etc.
This feature prevents you from seeing their comments.
As long as I take the time to research my answers, and as long as I take time to find and flag duplicate submissions, my name will never turn orange. That means that people like you who skim for the orange will never value my other submissions.
<fx: shrugs> Maybe my contributions are of no value.
exactly. good comments filter up, bad comments filter down. recent comments need to be evaluated (and responded to, which are then evaluated themselves) to get placed. the orange is an unnecessary distraction.
the previous commenter makes a good point about mental state. I was pointing out the same effect. if everyone here was mature and not-defensive and self-confident, then we probably wouldn't have so much trouble with moderating discussions. most people here will skip over the orange fine, but i believe it may exacerbate karma trolling and feelings of ill-will.
Well, I'm not orange either, FWIW. So don't worry about it.
I do think though that this is basically going to result in the "orangemen" being upvoted into the stratosphere simply for being that colour, regardless of what they say. I don't think an overt display of what is essentially "I'm pg and I approve this message" is really the right way to go, but I applaud his effort.
Yeah I have been coming and participating in this community for a very long time, but I am just not that incredibly active. I don't post many stories, and I don't comment very often.
It is funny how many times the HN community it trying to protect themselves from 'noobs', I feel like they push the more casual users a bit further away.
There's a major difference between n00b and casual user. The n00b doesn't try to integrate, they don't try to absorb the culture. They simply act like puppies, get very excited and pee all over the place.
The intention is to help n00bs become casual users, and some casual users to become respected members. You are definitely more of a casual user approaching welcome member.
I've been here less time than you - these are simply my opinions.
I'm orange because I posted a 50 point comment the other day. pg replied to it saying my comment violated the site guidelines (which it did) and calling it superficial (which was an unfair insult). So, that's how my name got pretty. Now does life seem fair? ;-)
I have mixed feelings about the orange highlighting.
Yes, I think it will help improve the quality and perhaps brevity of comments, and I think it sets up a visual caste system.
Writing and getting comments upmodded make me feel a little better - a little recognition but reading comments (or listening to them via TextAloud) is why I read News.YC.
I comment frequently but sometimes sporadically, and I comment to try to add value to a discussion (e.g. point out something I've read before) or sometimes for the heck of it. I think it's good to express opinions.
I remember at one point making it onto the top 100 'Leaders' in News.YC and it felt great. I felt like I was competing with swombat for the bottom 5 spots. I think this was around when swombat had 1300 or so karma. He now has 4924! Amazing. Consistency. It is nice to be recognized but it is fine with me to just be a small fractional part of this community, and it is hard to be consistently be a quality contributor (like swombat and others).
I fired up a Google spreadsheet to see why I wasn't orange (3.04 with highest thrown out vs 3.64 included).
Perhaps median would be interesting to look at, or 90th percentile?
With average, witty, or emotionally-moving one-liners will gain a disproportional impact as they are easiest to upvote, and as such, these items tend to be runaway karma-catchers.
When you say you've learned your lesson, do you mean you'll upvote thought-provoking, longer comments in the future? If so, I wish you good luck, but I'm skeptical about your potential success.
I've had my news.yc account for almost 2 years now, and it has always worked this way. Pithy 1-liners get upvotes; longer thoughtful comments often languish.
We're all in a hurry, so we're more likely to read shorter comments. The longer a comment is, and the more it makes us think, the less likely we are to expend the effort. The most valuable comments are ones that can change our thinking, and by nature such comments will seem wrong or unimportant when we look at them with our current thinking. The problem is human, not technological.
It's easier for me to change what I do than to change what others do, so I've adjusted my comment style to be shorter. Sometimes that means I pass up the chance to share deep thoughts. Other times it makes me more effective. For example, both ericb's and my comments made the same point, but mine drove it home better, didn't it? Upvote with a clear conscience. :-)
I've likewise been here a while, and it has had an effect on my commenting style too. (Albeit almost the opposite.) If I think of a witty one liner or a joke, I'll resist posting it (where before I would have gone for it), because I actually consider whether it'll just add noise.
I also try to be more concise with my comments. Often times I think I have a point to make, but after writing quite a bit I realize that I'm just reasoning in circles and have no ground to stand on. If I can't state my point briefly (and then add elaboration to support it), then maybe I don't have one.
It says something about a site whose culture can make me abandon a position because I realize it's unfounded as I try to articulate it.
As for the one-liners. I'd like to qualify that I'll still upvote them if they are truly insightful, but I'll think twice if they are merely witty. As you say, good comments teach us something new.
Not everyone that deserves to be made an example of gets the privilege, nor does everyone that deserves to be marginalized so treated. It doesn't imply you aren't in either group if you aren't singled out; it just means the stage isn't that large. :-)
The problem is that gauging worthiness of something is a very difficult, even -- or especially -- when human judges are involved. I think of this as a first stab at a very complicated problem; making sense of votes made for a variety of motivations, not all of them what this algorithm is trying to isolate and encourage. I suspect several iterations will follow.
Here I was, just days away from being able to down-mod people and they double the karma requirements.
Don't be silly pistoriusp, after being here for two years I'm not surprised your last 50 average comments karma is not 3.5 less than your last 25 average comments karma. Your definitely leveling off, which should be fine. Although there have been many more users lately, so perhaps there is karma inflation that should boost your average karma over time.
I have to confess that the idea is clever: but ultimately does not fix the problem.
The issue, as I see it, is not so much the posts as the voting. Which varies wildly and is fairly indescriminate. A worthless but sensationalist message might get lots of upvotes whilst a shy but informative message will get missed.
I suggest it is the voting practices that need to be addressed. I vote very rarely on messages (maybe once or twice a day): making my approval something "to be gained". I know others use that approach too - and I think it makes things worth much more.
Ideally (IMO) a good situation should be one where a post with 5 votes should be stunningly good and 20 votes a "once in a lifetime" achievment.
Some ideas...
- Vote weighting (Karma or average Karma effects the weight of your vote)
- Include "Downvotes" next to the total. This helps identify messages with a lot of disagreement (i.e. something with a 1 might have 20 downs and 21 ups - that is worth taking a look at).
- Im not sure how you position the comments (never tracked them in depth) but I think you could try
- - New comments stay at the "top" of the page for a set time (an hr perhaps?) before being ranked properly.
- - Ranked posts: push all negative marked posts below -1 to the bottom. All positive stuff to the top marked on activity (a combination of the direct replies and the number of up&down votes)
That doesn't totally fix the problem but I suggest it might have an impact :D
I've wondered for a long time whether the following system would work:
Everyone can vote posts up or down if they like. There is a feature which statistically analyses how your votes correlate with other votes, and you can choose to see votes that the analysis predicts you will find interesting and worthwhile based on what you have liked seeing in the past.
Ugh. Count me out. I'm not a fan of how the trend online is towards algorithmic recommendation rather than on editorializing. I mean, I understand why a user-based moderation system is good. I like that content is pruned out a bit. At the same time, I think that public points mean ultimately ignoring complexities of a topic, thread, or person for the sake of easing consumption. I'm not a fan of that.
A recommendation system is even worse. That actively encourages people to look only at the path of least resistance for them. It means less emphasis on people who argue valid points that you don't want to hear and more emphasis on groupthink.
If anything, the trend should be reversed, and people should feel freer to give their opinion without a chance of whiplash.
I understand your reluctance, and I'd love to see strong editorializing on some site on the internet. It seems, though, as any site becomes reasonably large the editorializing disappears and is replaced with algorithms.
Has the idea I proposed (essentially the Netflix recommendation system) ever been tried before for a comment/story posting system? If not, why not go the whole hog and try it? Let's see if it works.
That's why I'd propose a forking. Create mini-HN communities and slowly thin out the userbase. That's if the site ever gets too big. It's perfectly manageable right now for me - I don't think new systems are necessary.
Ask yourself: has content recommendation ever worked? I've never seen an "If you liked X you'll like Y" work for any original content. Even for movies/books it's shady at best. Working with something as complex as comments is too tricky to make worse. How do you measure tone versus stance versus wit versus writing style? They're all elements of what I look for in comments.
Just because it's never worked as a movie recommendation system doesn't discourage me from trying it for a commenting system! (Especially since the idea is so trivial, and ought to be easy to implement).
Well, how would you display these recommended comments? How would you analyze the content of comments to determine recommendation? If I downvote every anti-Linux comment I see, does the algorithm stop showing me anti-Linux comments? Because that detracts from the debate going on. What if I downvote based on poor spellings - or even more, if I downvote solely based on how well the writer forms sentences? How will the algorithm figure that out?
The easiest solutions are the simplest ones. Complexity only serves a purpose when there's a simple cause behind the complexity. Adding algorithms when there's no need will only make things less reliable.
You could take that farther and create a "pool" of good users who vote and comment in keeping with the HN style (a pool that could, of course, grow over time) and if your voting habits correlated to them your vote began to be worth more.
Thanks! I think you're right, that in order to avoid fragmenting the site into a lot of different subclasses with different tastes that there could be a pool of "good" users who determine what the default "good" story and "good" post are.
I think you're subconsciously reinventing k-means clustering with random starting points.
Subclasses might not be such a bad idea at all actually, after all there are different coffee shops for different tastes as well. If a site could be made to automatically appear as a place that caters to your 'taste' that would be a pretty awesome development. Everybody would feel right at home.
Some people are here for startup stuff. Some people for codign/programming stuff. Yet others (though probably a smaller demographic) are here for social stuff. And more.
Plus others are here for a mix.
Some way to tailor what you see would be awesome! not too much that each "genre" is different but enough that the posts or articles you want to see are at the top :D
I know very little about statistics so I wouldn't have much of a clue about the right algorithm to use, but I do have a good idea of the behaviour I would like.
I think the behaviour I want is exactly that required by the Netflix Prize:
I agree with tptacek - if you're going to indicate that some commenters are better than others, make them darker rather than orange.
And here's a theoretical underpinning to explain so it doesn't come across as simply a subjective design choice: coloring objects darker or lighter with different shades of the same base color to show intensity is one of the few principles I remember from an Edward Tufte workshop from a few years ago. Varying levels of saturation indicate a shift in degree, whereas different colors altogether imply that the objects are of differing qualities.
Applied to the new commenting feature, darker colors would imply more "solid" feelings of trustworthiness, similar to how trolls already get washed out with the lighter shades.
Similarly, that explains another thing wrong with the highlighting - "alarm" colors like orange, red, yellow etc indicate that something's wrong, whereas bolding or darkening the names wouldn't imply that at all.
Trying to suss out good and bad comments reminds me of the 37signals Troll Cap and the "Good Comment" crown:
The comment which I am replying to by tptacek currently demonstrates undesigned behavior which I have seen on other pages: to the best of my understanding, highlighting is done on a per-poster not per-comment basis, yet highlighting behavior is inconsistently applied to highlighted posters. You can see tptacek's comment earlier in the thread which is highlighted, while the parent comment of this comment is not. (Further, the parent comment is actually highlighted on the reply-to screen.)
Not too important but, to quote our house dev motto, "behavior contrary to specification mandates a bug report no matter how minor the deviation is".
[Edit: I refresh this page and am seeing it sometimes highlighted and sometimes not highlighted, so I'm not sure if my bug report is accurate or not. Apparently the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to bugs: attempting to describe one changes its behavior.]
I think this is explained by a previous news item on the linked page. pg talks about introducing lots of caching to speed the site up. Sounds like you're seeing cached bits and pieces.
i'd say the line is minimally important. flag might be crucial, though i've never personally had to use it. the link and parent links, as well as time, are convenient.
i bet discussion interestingness improves by removing the username and points.
Not username. That would make it harder to know when you're having a back-and-forth, and that changes the nature of the discussion. Removing points would be a good idea, though - is there any advantage to having that visible beforehand?
knowing you're having a back and forth with the same person is one cause of long flame wars. not knowing who you're talking to keeps things less emotional and more polite. i think.
the advantage of seeing points is the same as seeing orange usernames. it allows people to decide which comments they want to read.
No, but that gets rid of the really clean feel! I like that this site's only got 4 (5, now) colors. It feels so minimal that way. (Then, I enjoy the feeling when I discover something like clicking a user name and finding that it's a link when it's the first time; perhaps that's not the attitude pg wants?)
It'd be cool if it was = topcolor*0.8 or something so it fits in to everyones prefs. Each time I see orange I think I must have accidently logged out :)
Yeah, I have to admit that it's really unhappy with my (admittedly spartan) sense of style. A nice underline or just regular black would've been preferred.
We've seen the Arc code for this site and know you didn't need to spend all day in the repl. More likely you spent all day in a comfortable chair with a hot cup of tea thinking about how the feature should work.
The other thing that didn't hit me is that I enjoy commenting on things that are on the "new" page -many of those stories don't make it to the front page and as a result comments don't get replied to or upmodded as much.
Forget commenting on anything that won't hit the front page.
Also forget commenting later on in a story when it gets stale. Best to hit a hot story when it is fresh and a lot of other people will be piling on later.
I'm amazed that you would have a karma system, special colored status indicators, and yet people would still claim that it doesn't affect user behavior.
That's the point, guys. If the karma/colored system didn't affect user behavior, it wouldn't be there
Create a game, and people will play it as a game. Put a number next to someone or a color and people will change behavior to change the color/number. Especially hacker/gamer/competitive males, which are clearly represented pretty well here at HN.
That's a really good point. I thought that maybe you could solve this by dividing the story karma by the comment karma, but then you get the opposite effect; it hurts you to make a new comment on a front-page item and helps you to make one on a less-upvoted item. Maybe that itself would be a good thing.
Another approach would be to normalize the comment's score against the other comments on that story, and use a threshold on that. If there were 4 comments with karmas 1 to 4 and another story with 100 comments from 1 to 100, the 4 on the first would be just as good as the 100 on the second. That might be too much work, though ;)
I've found that much of my karma has come from commenting on stories on the New page. Yeah, many don't make it to the front page - but the ones that do haven't been seen by many people, and so when they do, everyone reads your comment and hopefully upvotes it.
It's much like startups. Many of them fail, but the ones that succeed tend to succeed big.
I agree. I think the algorithm should take comment depth into account.
Make it take thread age/traffic into account too. I don't want to worry about posting in dead or near-dead threads.
Overall, though, if we can figure out how to implement this without discouraging good commenting, it could be a pretty nice change.
My biggest problem with the system as it stands is this: there are two HN posters who I think of as exceptionally insightful, prolific, and committed to the maintenance of the community, and one of them doesn't have a highlighted name -- I assume because he's posted a lot in low traffic areas. That's a major bug.
Do you mean deeply nested comment threads? I don't think many users would be calculating enough to resist replying to something just because their comment wouldn't get attention. After all, most people who make a comment they really believe in will sit and watch it get modded down rather than delete it.
But if there does start to be a problem, it will certainly be visible.
Its one of the first things I thought of, after thinking "The Rich Get Richer" as I predict there will be accelerated upvoting towards those that are orange.
However, as you note, I decided "ehhh" and still replied to you right here anyway ;).
On the contrary, I would (be calculating enough). I typically won't make a comment to a thread that is over two hours old, because shelf-life on here is so short, and because I don't think many people will see it, unless it's a super-active thread. Humans (at least this one) like to hear themselves speak, and like it even more when others hear them speak.
The new system actually encourages me NOT to comment on less active threads, because it's going to hurt my "average score."
I agree. I reply to comments because I feel the overwhelming urge illustrated by http://xkcd.com/386/ , not because I think the comment will be seen or ignored.
I for one think this is a good move, though the best part of the recent change is not so much the username highlighting, but the capping of negative karma at -8.
Referring to the recent thread where I was being seriously downmodded, with this cap I probably wouldn't bother defending myself (and creating all that "waste of space"), because -8 or -16 is not all that much karma.
Counterpoint: I read the thread to which you refer, and while I didn't agree necessarily with some of what you said, or some of what the others said, it was insightful to me to see both sides of the argument spelled out in more detail.
I think this makes the comments more compelling, and helps us to get to know the other users a little better.
Yes, different sides of the argument is definitely what makes a thread interesting. I think downmodding comments that people disagree with needs to be discouraged. I'm guessing people have become accustomed to doing this on other sites like Reddit, but that's not what it's for here.
>"I think downmodding comments that people disagree with needs to be discouraged."
i completely agree. it might explain this in the guidelines, but it needs to be written right where people evaluate. maybe the first time someone votes they get a pop-up with the vote guidelines, kind of like sudo. it pops again once every two months as a reminder.
it's really hard not to see voting as opinion tallying rather than comment goodness. that's what voting is used for everywhere else.
I'm not so sure about that. The deeper the thread, the fewer participants, and the less benefit there is to the site as a whole. If karma is considered a measurement of that benefit rather than simply a score (as it should be, but on most sites that use the term is not), then it makes sense that threads with less participation would accumulate less in the way of extrinsic reward.
Also, consider that people so concerned with karma that they would be dissuaded from participating in a worthwhile discussion are among the least likely to have worthwhile discussions.
That's not the same sort of deep conversation. PG asks a lot about not getting into bickerfests, and that's certainly fair. On the other hand, gravitycop and I got into a discussion about artificial intelligence a day or two ago, which went on for quite a while. Since it's not a big center-of-discussions, all our posts remained at one or two points each.
In the end I don't think it matters much either way - the really fun conversations you do for the sake of talking, not for the karma. But this system still subtly discourages those sorts of exchanges, which is a pity.
But has he ever asked that in a case where it wasn't a heated argument? I got asked to stop because a guy was swearing and I was calling him pathetic, but that was because we were generating a flamefest. Do people get told off just for talking at length?
What he was replying to is deleted. But it doesn't matter what it was. pg objected to "filling up comment threads". I didn't know they could get full...
It looks to me like DarrenStuart was being overtly melodramatic and got asked to stop. "Filling up" refers to visual space as well; people looking for conversation would get diverted by nonsense like that. You're not making the best case: I'd rather PG try and stop stuff like that and encourage more rational discourse.
Aww, but they were going someplace good with that!
Out of curiosity, have you ever stopped a conversation just because it was getting exceptionally long? At a certain point does that mess up the table layout?
No, of course not. I sometimes ask people to stop when they reach the yes-i-did-no-you-didn't stage, but because it's wasting everyone's time, not because it's messing up the page.
So, you believe you should judge the quality of comments, and put a stop to the ones you deem to have low quality, even if the participants disagree with you. And further, you think it is your role to protect people from "wasting time" by voluntarily reading comments of their choosing.
You further ridicule the comments you disapprove of as "yes-i-did-no-you-didn't" style comments, knowing that isn't literally true in some cases.
PS YC and searchyc are both very slow for me. It's hard to find anything. If I could just search for posts by pg with certain keywords then I would give you better links, but I can't.
Because your response makes me want to respond in kind...tit for tat. And, it's apparent that you're in that mode, as well, having to have the last word with every reply from pg and others. Neither one of us is saying anything, at this point, except, "It is" or "No, it isn't".
That's the kind of thing that pg is talking about.
I agree with you that you are saying things without any serious content, and that you are in troll mode.
Please note that your accusations against me are covered under this, so can be safely disregarded.
No doubt you will complain that I am arguing pointlessly. But I think this is fun, and that my comment is true. It is logical that if you admit to posting badly, then your claims in that very post shouldn't be accepted.
Funny, but still a very opaque policy. As far as I could tell, qqq was for criticizing your comments related to Israel, and xlnt was either for what qqq did or for having a new account. Is that right?
It would have been because you used the same ip address as both curi and one or both of them.
Edit: Usually that's how the software catches multiple accounts belonging to the same person, but I went back and looked, and in this case you (as qqq) outed yourself as curi.
I'm a little confused. I did not reset my modem or anything when making this account. I don't see why it wouldn't have triggered the same thing. And also, wouldn't the accounts get banned right away, not at a random time later? Did my ISP one day just happen to give me the same IP I had months ago?
He has several times asked people to stop posting in deeply nested threads. e.g. a recent thread about parenting. And he has sometimes disabled accounts for participating in deeply nested threads he didn't like.
I don't think pg has ever disabled accounts for having a long discussion. I've also have never read the idea of long conversations being discouraged by anyone here.
God knows there are things about the pg-cult that irritate me, but the point of this site is that it has an opinion on what its culture should be. I'm the other half of the thread you're pointing to, and when the site's "curator" said "please stop", it didn't take much thought to figure out the right response.
What's weird is, why are you still thinking about this? It was weeks ago. Life is very short.
You are mixing up whether he did X, or not, with whether you agree with X or not. I said the former; you argued about the later. (Note also that I did stop posting in that thread, too, when he asked.)
I am not the only one who remembers some of these things. pg does too; he linked back to a time he punished me for having fun. Personally, I find it interesting, and I enjoyed this thread. I have an ongoing debate with a friend about how email lists should be moderated, and this stuff is relevant. And I got to see interesting attitudes like SwellJoe's. I didn't predict a reply like that.
Excellent. Thanks very much. I've made them black and will now set about fixing some of the other poor colour decisions, e.g. the body of the top post of a thread being an unreadable gray which puts me off reading it through no fault of the author.
I agree. It seems a little too self-reinforcing to me. It may look nice when graphed out, but I think this feature may end up discouraging the discovery some of the variety of posts (more so than things already are).
Difficult to quantify. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
I feel dumb for contradicting myself in a single thread, but after thinking about this for a bit I think I agree with you that it shouldn't be a part of the UI. However, I think the idea of implicitly boosting people with a good history is a good idea.
One idea would be to invisibly boost the ranking of comments by orange users, at least at first (we don't want to give a bad comment more credit just because the commenter has made good comments in the past). Let a new comment by an orange user rise for the first hour or so, and then drop it back down to where it would be if it was posted by a normal gray user.
I have to say, I don't like it either. I don't like the limiting of downvotes too. So someone can get say, +100 votes on a comment but, if they say something incredibly stupid, or harmful/bigoted/whathaveyou, it'll take a systematic effort over multiple comments to hit their karma.
Making it virtually impossible to 'punish' idiots.
New rule: screw the comments where you're trying to help one person understand anything. It'll just lower your comment average. Better to post generally agreeable and interesting but mostly forgettable nuggets that impact a larger group.
This has me thinking, comment score appears to be tied to two independent things:
1. The quality of the post.
2. The time since the article was posted, it's arrival to the front page, etc.
Not all insightful comments are modded up the same, for this reason amongst a number of others. If someone says something smart, but says it late, the net effect will be to drag their karma/comment ratio down. I'd be concerned that this would prevent people from making good points when they run the risk of insufficient eyeballs.
BTW, I just turned off orange usernames for now. It's not a policy decision; computing it was killing the server.
(It's not the computation itself that's the problem. The problem is that it causes a lot of stuff to get loaded from disk that would otherwise not be.)
I just went through and (roughly) calculated my average. I am just over the threshold. Which creates an interesting scenario:
A couple of stupid comments from me and I will fall below the threshold.
That creates a really great motivation.
So, if you add this feature back, it might be worth it to run some reports to see if there is a "sweet spot". Not to mention it would be really neat to see the distribution of average comment scores.
My concern is that this doesn't negate or discourage a lot of the behaviors that get amply rewarded (e.g. one-line zingers), but which a lot of us recognize as harmful to the community in the long run. In fact, I suspect it will actually exacerbate the problem.
That would be true if you were shooting for total karma, but for the orange name thing it's the average that matters. If you want a high average, it's better to have a small number of highly rated posts than a large number of ok ones.
10% is a fairly significant number, when all is said and done. Meaning, 10% of all highlighted users could essentially just be good at making witty one line comments.
That being said, 90%/10% is a fantastic signal to noise ratio when compared to the rest of the internet. :-)
Right, but it shouldn't matter what the makeup of the top 30 comments are. In this case, it only matters that someone can net a 3.5 average over their last 50. Which maybe isn't statistically probable for users who happen to write the occasional popular but low-value comment.
Either way, I would argue that while the upper bound on exacerbation isn't high, the same is true of any potential mitigation. At the end of the day, I don't see the major problems subsiding much, and it's not just one-line zingers, but, say, uncharitable comments that piss people off and provoke deep threads of people talking past each other. There's nothing more unpleasant in online communities than being the recipient of an uncharitable reply, and feeling compelled to defend oneself. (I say this being guilty of uncharitable replies myself.)
See, I think the one-liner blight could be headed off by auto-collapsing threads that are long and mostly really short replies unless the karma of the parent comment is above a certain threshold.
Collapsable threads might be a good idea, but I'd prefer having the system make its values explicit via descriptors for comments (think Slashdot or Plastic). My top two would be "insightful" and "uncharitable". The former encourages what's best about this community, the latter strongly discourages what's worst. A lot of deep and pointless threads are caused by commenters reacting to their own hasty interpretations of what someone said rather than even-handedly responding to them.
I've seen that work really well on a couple sites. I played a certain MMO for a while (I know, I know) and the overall maturity level was, shall we say...low. Anyway, one of the popular database sites implemented that feature for it's threaded comments and if you compared the tone of the discourse their to the tone on the regular forums, it was night and day. The trolls simply branched off into threads that where below a certain threshold and were autocollapsed. You could still see the parent thread title inline and click through to the full thread if you wanted, but the signal to noise was much improved.
word. i'm one of the standard slashdot->proggit->hn users. slashdot's comment system rocks (ui and concept). it's a very strange worse-is-better effect that reddit and hn have both meant losing features in exchange for the advantages of being part of smaller communities.
edit: i was going to whip out a greasemonkey script to do just that, but then i saw that the comments are just one big table...ug. i was hoping for nested div's. eit.
Visible distinction between users creates an upperclass and an underclass, if there is no very good reason for doing so I am very much against it.
Use the 'karma' counters as an internal mechanism to reward users with extra features or to remove those features if their karma drops below the thresholds again because of misbehviour. Use it to sort the submissions and the comments possibly using some kind of weighting system so that the 'good' content (content by long established users) bubbles to the top, it gives newcomers something to strive for.
But don't make it visible, remove the points from the header of the site, keep it under water. Why?
This is why:
- good 'karma' need not be shown, it comes across in every posting you make, because you are supposedly showing good judgement in your writing, not in the 'colour of your name'
- there will be no timidity for rookies to speak out against 'old timers', similar bs happens on ./ where your UID number seems to be the arbitrator of the discussion
- karma has some meaning outside of HN, and if I take that meaning correctly then you're not going to get any for showing it
- karma tends to self-reinforce enough when used as an underwater feature, it will self-reinforce out of control as soon as you make it into a distinct mark
- this feature to create a distinction between the 'top group', the 'incrowd' of those who are 'better' and 'the rest' (the unwashed masses or whatever you wish to call them) will be an incentive to game the system, if it is underwater such an incentive is not present.
FWIW, here's a data point on how a new member of the community (i.e. me) is reacting to these changes.
I've been an avid reader of HN headlines for some time, but only started joining the comment conversations in the last week or so.
Discarding the top-karma comment, I've made 13 comments with an average karma of 3.08, ranging from 1 to 7.
Here's what I am observing about my instinctive, not particularly thought through reaction to the change in terms of future commenting behavior:
- I'll likely avoid what I think are low-value though not offensive comments, the throw-away chit-chat that is likely to just stay at 1, and which could be considered either acceptable pleasantries or distracting noise.
- I'll also be more likely to avoid commenting on threads with many comments already, for fear that even a high-value comment late to the conversation will get overlooked and drag down my average.
- I'll think twice about commenting on new submission, which I've found to be a good way to get in early on a conversation, but which will be more risky in future given that the submission may never get noticed, leaving me with an unnoticed 1-karma comment that brings down my average.
- As I scan comments, I will instinctively skip through to the orange users. As a new user, I provisionally assume these are the users who (1) have, on average, higher-value comments and (2) which collectively define the personality and social norms of the community which I'm seeking to be part of.
- I think I'll learn from the orange users in terms of community norms, but I don't think I'll actively conform my opinion to theirs. In fact, my assumption so far is that this is a community that values merit-based argument and substantive discussions, not just "I agree" or "I disgree" type discussions. I suspect I'll conform more to the style and approach of the orange users in making arguments, not to their opinions and views as such.
Are the behaviors above good or bad? Intended by the community or not? If they encourage me to seek out fresh, likely to be popular conversations and add to them in a way that meets the approval of the community old-timers without groupthink in terms of substance (which I'd like to think would not be particularly appreciated around here), I suspect that's a good thing. But I do have a concern about my hesitance to comment on older threads (a hesitance which may be acceptable, since perhaps those conversations are effectively over) and new submissions (a hesitance which may be detrimental).
You should not be using average: you should be using median (or perhaps average, using comment scores capped at 8 or 10) as the strategy you're using now will overly reward comments which hit a community sweet spot and garner 100 or so points, and discourage comments on stories which have been unwisely ignored [both of which tendencies are somewhat too pronounced on the site already]).
I tried both median and average, but ultimately went with average on the "judge talent at its best" principle. I do throw out the highest score though.
While people will no doubt have a lot of differing opinions about any change in this community, one thing I find very encouraging is that PG and co are being extremely proactive and are very willing to try new things. -Whatever the outcome of any particular experiment is, I'm really glad to see that they are on top of things.
Hmm... not sure about the comment karma thing. People with decent averages may refrain from posting more speculative comments, just so it doesn't drag them down. That would seem to reinforce a tendency towards group-think. Of course, maybe that is good. :)
Not just people with good averages, but more so people with lower averages who want to make them better.It may keep them from expressing counter-views that the orangey colored folks might, as a collective, down-mod and post ripostes which will encourage others to down-mod or not up-mod further.
Not implying that the orangey folks think as a herd, but it is possible that, by virtue of their prettier coloring, people will be more inclined to follow their lead, and think their opinion the more correct one.
Sure, it makes people less likely to post anything that goes against the desires of the group. This will impact inane and stupid and inflammatory things more than unpopular ideas. As long as they are phrased civilly, unpopular ideas usually do fine. It's just that very often people that know their ideas are unpopular go out of their way to antagonize the community.
It also really hits those of us who make lots of little comments across several threads. Unless you're early to comment, the structure of the thread's already there -- you don't want to coerce your own discussion into it, just add your thoughts.
What I find interesting is the + and - votes often appear to be attempts to deny or affirm the truth of the post in opposition to its actual truth content. Its as if mere expression of an opinion contains the expectation of being able to coerce reality to agree and that a counter opinion can cancel that effect. Its Postmodern philosophy in full flower. Kant would be proud of his intellectual children.
Thankfully, there does seem to be much less adherence to Postmodern philosophy on this list compared to others which is why I bother with this list. However, the philosophy lives deeply inside the Karma feature.
The fact remains, that throughout history, what most people believe to be true has little to do with what is actually true. Any new truth that is discovered, is discovered first by a single individual. If that truth is fundamental, it will be rejected by "common sense" and "consensus" until at least one generation has passed - likely several. So also a crackpot notion of a crank will take at least a generation to pass or at least the death of the crank. The age of a "truth" has a poor correspondence to what is actually true.
The net of this is each is responsible for filtering the noise coming at him and finding the few gems of truth it contains. There is always the possibility of being wrong. Karma scores are simply irrelevant accumulations of noise signals. Sorry, that is the nature of the beast.
It might be useful to be able to see the average score for my last 50 comments on my user page. In principle, I could of course compute it myself - but might as well have the computer do the tallying for me ;-)
Mine was 2.98 before this comment, and assuming it stays at 1 will be 2.94. (edit: learned more about it, actually 2.6, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467290 )
I know what I have to do to game it (reload /newest and look for stuff that is generally interesting and I understand, contribute a neutrally toned slightly technical comment and not follow up or reply to questions), but I will not be doing it (much) because it it goes against two things that I value about comments here:
1) It's a friendly place to converse and ask legitimate questions without getting RTFM or LMGTFY (unless your question is reeeealllly dumb)
2) I value contributions that are presented later, even if they're not as highly scored (this, of course, the reason that comments aren't sorted by raw score), and I don't mind tagging something onto an article, even if I'm joining in late, provided I think it's a net contribution to the site.
I don't know if this is a bug or a feature ... but, the edit button is no longer present on the main page. I have to click 'link', and then 'edit' is available.
I was just going to edit my comment with a link to searchyc.com. It tells me, for example, that my average comment score is ~4, but that my last few comments have been unusually unpopular (or at least unnoticed), which I assume drove me below the threshold. Maybe it would be nice to take the maximum of a user's all time average and average of the last 50 comments - that way users who have historically made positive contributions are given a little leeway to voice unpopular/controversial opinions.
EDIT: Odd, now the edit link is back. Maybe a weird effect of caching or something.
pg, is it just a plain average as in "karma / count_of_comments" ?
Consider using an average over a median range, i.e. sort comments by the score, trim top 10% and bottom 10% and then compute the average. This basically ignores occasional flukes, both positive and negative. Specifically, it rewards for consistently scoring well (and not just once) and doesn't punish for an occasional negative score.
Is this really the direction that YC News should be headed? I don't think that this is a good idea and could easily lead to many problems. As some people here have pointed out, comments on new stories will be discouraged, deep and long threads will be curtailed, and comments are likely to get longer. It also creates a sort of class system within the community. Now a person's karma level is visually seen all the time.
It's not quite a class system if it's based on your 50 most recent comments. 3.5 karma points a comment is a pretty low barrier of entry, after all, which means that a, it's easier to get the highlight, and b, it's not worth as much because it's easier to get, meaning people won't jump to try and achieve the highlighted title.
Except that getting karma points is more difficult for people who comment/post in offpeak times (like on the other side of the world), so this system can essentially penalise them.
What is offpeak? Until a month ago, I was staying up until 6 in the morning Eastern Time, and there was never a lull in activity. Stories stay up for 24 hours very often, so even if you post while nobody's on, they still eventually come across your comment.
Well I'm about 14 hours ahead of east coast USA - I usually get to stories about 6-8 hours after they've started and my comments can most often be found down the bottom of threads and due to "group think" thats where they stay.
The other thing to do is to comment on new stories (which I do) but due to them not being as often trafficked those can also go unnoticed.
Generally, I can still get karma, but most often I get Karma by saying inane things or being early to a post. At most other times I'm shit-outta-luck.
Yeah, but a visual distinction that constantly shifts, with no high entry point, isn't much of one at all. Even if you do have it, you have no advantage over keeping it than somebody who's just joined yesterday.
I don't know if it's a useful feature - I'll give it a few days and see if it starts looking natural - but it's not one that's creating any more of a skew than the leaderboard is currently.
The funny thing is just the other day I was thinking that one of the best parts of HN is that comments and submissions are evaluated on their merit. Since a users name is relatively obscure and not as identifiable as forums with avatars I never really remember names or associate them with good or bad submissions.
To me this seems to be contradictory to the way HN is supposed to work.
Maybe (probably) I am reading too much into this but it just seems to be reinforcing a kind of Ad Hominem discrediting of submissions.
In fact I think it would probably be more interesting if it went the other way, don't show names at all on submissions. Maybe revel the name only after say 30 minutes from submission time.
If HN's goal is to avoid becoming redit/digg... why implement the same ideas as they have?
Edit: I was seeing some weirdness with different comments by the same person being highlighted / not highlighted, but it turns out that it was just due to caching (see pg's response below).
My own new comments weren't showing up as highlighted for some reason. Now they are.
I didn't believe I had an average score of less than 3.5 (not to brag or anything... it's only 4.4, for the record ;), so I went back to average my last 50 comments scores, and on the 2nd or 3rd page I noticed my username was finally orange.
* Commenting on new posts that may never make it to the front page.
* Commenting at the "wrong" time of day.
* Commenting on fringe issues unloved by the crowd.
* Adding a comment to an already long comment thread.
[Edit] I don't mind scoring low at all (I do mind negative scores). That doesn't keep me from doing all of the above. But being visually set apart from people who, for whatever reason, do not do these things as frequently as I do makes me think I'm in the wrong place.
Would it be possible to have an indication of your comments-points average within your profile.
The new orange badge-of honour has motivated me to become more insightful, witty, helpful and technically adept... but I want to know how much more ISWHTA I need to become to hit the threshold.
There's actually a serious point to this, some people will be quite serious about wanting to "go orange" and I think that's a fine aspiration. Unfortunately, the system as devised is likely to penalises two types of comment:
1. Commenting on slightly older stories - the comment is less likely to be voted up (or down) and will therefore harm the commentor's points average.
2. The "Thanks" comment. I have on occasion posted a quick 'thank you' to someone for answering a question. I wouldn't expect that to be voted up - it is not interesting or insightful, it's just an (almost private) message of appreciation for some help. Saying "thanks" reduces your average.
If you want less of that type of behaviour then, fine - but I suspect that these are unintended consequences.
i'd rather not see any karma or any points when i vote, thereby providing for content-based decisions. ideally, a comment would have three possible votes: up arrow, circle, down arrow. only after voting would a comment's score and user become visible.
Really anal suggestion for a nonexistent feature: square instead of circle. That maintains the compact feel, while giving the visual metaphor of putting a hold on your vote.
Somewhat related, I would really like an abstain feature not just because I like the idea of hiding votes, but because if I see an arrow I feel the need to click it until all the arrows disappear. An abstain button would help when I don't want to upvote and don't have a downvote.
I think it punishes commenting on niche hacker news postings that don't make it to the front page (i.e. far enough up on the list).
If only few people read a posting, only few people will upvote it. So even if the comment would be valuable for a high traffic posting, it doesn't really get any points.
Something that I really like about Hacker News, is that you can find lots of stuff on the second or third page that doesn't appeal to too many people, but is still interesting. Now, if you comment there a lot, it will decrease your karma.
IMO these comments can be more valuable to those interested than it can be appreciated using points (esp. for Ask HN/YC posts).
BTW, average comment scores are only calculated very intermittently (because they wreak havoc with lazy loading) so it could take up to an hour before everyone's name displays in the right color.
Ultimately, I think the biggest issue with the commenting system is that it's too easy to get lost. For example, this post now has 181 comments, and I barely have time to read 20. Maybe comment 84 has a really good point to be made? Don't know...I'll never see it. Not that this is unique to HN. Any community that gets above a certain size is going to have an issue where only those dedicated enough to read through entire 181 comment threads can really participate fully. Anyone who is pressed for time, or only interested in being a casual community member gets punished by the legions of 12 hours-a-day staring at comment threads dedicated fanatics.
Anyway, this is not a rant, but a suggestion. What about not showing some comments? I mean, I sort of already do this on my own, but why not choose a random subset of comments (and their corresponding threads) to display. Make the frequency dependent on the score. At the very least, would it be too much to ask for disclosure arrows? For example, the first thread on this page was entertaining for the first 4-5 comments. After that, I just wished it would go away, but instead it continued for another 3-4 pages.
Anyhow, for the time being I'm kind of curious how a community run by self professed geeks, with the express intention of remaining a community for said self professed geeks, fares in the long run...
I think it's a great idea over all. I think it would be better though if all new account were automatically redirected to the welcome screen upon registration. That would make sure it's read. Right now it seems to be a little too easy to miss.
There aren't any other ones besides the ones I describe in that post: orange usernames, welcome links for new users, and limiting downvotes. Maybe it would have been more accurate to call them changes rather than features.
the default 1 point you get from commenting no longer adds to your karma. that is, the comment is 'worth' 1 point, but your karma doesn't change. i think it used to...though now im not so sure...
No, 1 is considered the base value. Your karma gets modified based on upvoting/downvoting. (So if you get voted down to a zero, you've lost a karma point.)
I can see the reasoning to limit it to the first day, however I would argue that the link isn't that intrusive and should probably stick around until the first comment or some karma threshold.
I certainly did not post within the first few days (if not months) and a quick reference to the guidelines would be handy.
(actually i post so infrequently that having it always there would be handy)
Hmm, I'm not entirely sure if colouring someone's name is the best of ideas since you have now created an artificial class system within HN.
While people will argue that it's only a colour, it is still a line in the sand that has been drawn and it will (if even slightly) penalise people that access the site primarily in offpeak times as their comments may go unnoticed when people scan threads for orange names.
I would have thought about going the complete opposite direction... Hide the username until AFTER you've voted.
I think that in any society you tend to find people you agree with and disagree with, and then become biased in your opinion of anything they say/suggest.
Does it really matter who posted a comment? You either agree with it, or you don't.
Can you add something to the user-stats page (http://news.ycombinator.com/user? ) to show the ratio? Now it shows the numerator (karma) but not the denominator (comment quantity). I'd like to know how close I am to being orange.
I think a problem with this is that it doesn't just highlight consistently good commenters, it does so at the time of moderation. When I'm deciding whether to upvote a comment, there's an indicator that appears to say everyone else thinks I should.
I don't know of any Internet community that was kept sane by coloring "good" commenters orange, but it sounds like a start. Is stricter moderation out of the question or just not in the cards yet?
It would be cool to have this feature on a per-submission basis. Like someone consistently making good arguments in a submission vs someone trying to de-rail the thread.
14 points by pg 354 days ago | link | parent | flag
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
I'm not too sure about that. My name is in orange, and I've had my share of terrible comments.
I'm honestly not too sure what the orange adds to the mix. Personally, I think it would be more useful to have the score displayed in the user's profile. I tend to check a person's profile if I think they're new and here to troll; that would help verify or disprove that (for me at least).
If we're going to have submissions highlighted based on their submitter, I have another request: Please unhighlight (make grey, or something) submissions from accounts which are less than 1 hour old, at least until someone votes them up. The first thing I do when I see a spammy-sounding submission is check to see how old the submitting account is, and if it's less than an hour old the submissions is almost always spam.
Perhaps it would be good to put a karma threshold, or at least a time limit, on the ability to submit stories. (A karma threshold might be bad for people who like to browse but not comment.)
i was just wondering today, "would it be possible to see a user's karma without actually opening up their profile?" this sort of addresses that. i like it.
For me the process goes something like, "Hey! That's a really good point. Does this person have a high karma? If so, perhaps I've seen them before but haven't seen the name around." Other times it's, "Wow, this person sounds snotty and wretched. I hope they've got a low karma score to compensate. Perhaps even a negative. Oh, damn, they've got 24,000, I'm arguing with nickb again." Once every few months, it's "Look, this person's disagreeing with this 'unalone' bloke, they click the name, and - look! - he can't possibly be wrong with that karma score." I like to delude myself.
I often click on the username of someone whose comment I'm replying to, and glance at the age of their account, their karma, and sometimes click through for a look at their comments.
I don't know exactly why I do this -- just want to know a little bit about who I'm talking to.
You can get a lot of that info from searchyc; a couple days ago, the median average comment score for the top 50 users, (excluding pg) was 2.48, the mean was 3.09, stddev of .5.
Yes, I am an unbelievably huge dork for knowing that.
I really love the "0 karma" feature from sites like this one: It helps very, very much not to waste too much time here, given that I never learned anything substantial on places like this one. May I cite some better teachers:
- books
- real persons
- live discussions
- pubs
- restaurants
- (last not least) my family(!!)
For people like me, who every now and then make completely unpopular comments (with some negative consequences, at least mathematically speaking), it would be nice if we could get more and more invisible (I mean the user name), because unpopular folks really deserve absolute invisibility! (Takethat, lst!!)
