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.
