Personally I'm really missing seeing the karma on comments.

Fundamentally, removing them has changed the balance of what karma is all about. Karma previously had a function for the reader. It highlighted and bubbled up the good. It showed where there were good counter points. Now...well it's just for the account owner. It feels just like it's there for your own rpg-levelling style dopamine hit. It feels pointless.

I really feel this is a mistake. Comment karma had a function for readers, not just for account owner's inner satisfaction. This role has now been lost. It's making browsing comments - especially for very popular topics with lots of comments - much harder. I'm skimming a lot more or actually skipping the comments altogether because I don't want to read them all to find the goodness. It also means people can't learn from others what is or is not a valued contribution.

So I really hope this will be reversed or at the least make a better way (more than just what is the top comment) to make karma benefit the community not just the individual.

For me, I missed karma scores most in indented threads, because good comments didn't naturally sort to the top the way they do at the root level.

Also, I was reading the nginx 1.0 post where I saw some short but technical observations, and I had no idea if the community deemed them valid or informational. At first I though this was bad, but upon further reflection, and after reading some technical comments with more beef, I'm now on the fence. The beefier comments brought along their own credence, so if removing karma scores prompts folks to write longer more explanatory comments, that might be better.

Correct me if I am wrong, but it appears the good is still bubbling to the top, simply the metric has been removed.

I find that I often instinctively head to upvote a comment that has hit its critical mass in terms of karma votes regardless of its content. I have to take a second, back off from my instinctual action, and evaluate. Often I end up upvoting it anyway upon reading it, but at least then I have taken the time to evaluate it myself.

Not having the points present makes this problem go away because there is no implicit "lots of people like this, I probably will to" reaction. The jury is still out on whether or not I think things are ultimately helped or hurt by the move but I believe it is worthwhile for the sake of experiment if nothing else.

With no indication of number of upvotes, though, there is no distinction between a 200-point comment on top versus a 2-point comment that happens to be on top. Sometimes it was easier to skip parts of a thread knowing approximately how many upvotes each post received.

It should be the content of the posts that matter not the point total.

Bluntly, I don't want to read every comment.

You don't have to. Highly voted comments are helpfully floated to the top of the thread or post. Just read a few at the top and you should be good to go.

Yes, but regardless of how valuable comments are in relation to each other, it is still no indication of how valuable they are independently.

For instance, the top comment at the top of the page may have 10 karma and 50 replies, while the next valuable comment has 15 karma (but was submitted 3 hours earlier), and isn't visible until halfway down the page. Without the karma displayed, it's much more difficult to skim the thread. And for all I know, the rest of the comments only have 1 point.

Interesting -- I never paid much attention to the relative weights, because I figured that the piling on effect was always taking place. So I used karma to figure out which contents to start to read, by some sort of ad hoc guess at what overall karma % a comment had in a thread.

Plus, I recall from my reddit days that the earliest comments are way more likely to receive votes. So I always ended up trying to divide the karma by the time since post, which just distracted me.

Different strokes I s'pose.

Replies to the top level comment are still surfaced regardless of their value. So there is no visual queue available to me to filter out replies and secondary comments by estimated value.

Not to be rude, but that may be part of the problem.

Nah. How's anyone supposed to create anything if they're busy reading HN all day? I have enough trouble as is.

Why not show the comment score after you vote on the comment?

That misses the point - the comment score helps you decide which comments to read given time constraints.

You could make it so that as comments get more votes, the time that they were written becomes less important in ranking them.

What I recommended would encourage more voting, so you could just read the most highly ranked comments with some confidence about quality -- poor comments would probably be downvoted quickly.

I enjoy reading comment threads for subjects I know little about. Without the comment karma, I have no idea which comments are even valid, let alone valuable.

Hat tip on saying comments with karma removed are point-less. ;-)

My experience is the opposite of yours. I find karma as it has become here recently is not a reflection of good counterpoints. I feel it has become a reflection of the popular points. Well argued counter points, if unpopular, are "voted down".

Assuming the thread sorts by karma, you can still read in order, and get what you're looking for, and maybe you'll read things that are less popular, not just the majority-upvoted comments.

Another comment here talked about score, a gaming term. I don't like the term "score". Like you, I value thoughtfulness and interestingness, whichever side of a point it comes from.

In user profiles, karma can work as a gaming feedback mechanism to encourage desired behavior, while in a comment thread, it can work to surface insightful discussion and bury non-contributory content. A display of "score" isn't needed for the second mechanism, just good sorting.

However, it seems that a refinement of seeing your own 'score' on your own comments could be valuable towards the first mechanism: "How was my comment received?"

That dopamine hit is valuable to foster recurring contribution.

I totally understand why the karma is kept hidden, to avoid herding votes, but I also really miss the access to the HN community barometer. I placed great value in the information contained in those vote tallies, and it hurts to have that taken away completely.

A good compromise would be to have a button at the bottom of the page that says, "OK, I'm done voting now, please show me the tallies", and the voting buttons would disappear, and tallies would appear in their place.

A more thoroughly thought-out (easy to implement) architecture would be for voting to be disabled on all threads after x days, with vote tallies being displayed at that point.

If you guys want to fancy it up, you could implement the feature where users could indicate they're done voting on the thread and see the tallies early, and you'd only have to keep track of x days worth of user thread status flags before you can purge the data.

Or invisible until you up/down vote.

I've noticed that I'm actually getting more out of the hidden-karma comments because I am not able to skim as easily. I'm also not forming preconceived notions of a comment's quality before I read it, which is activating the critical-thinking bits of my brain more than usual.

Yet because the comments are still sorted somewhat intelligently, I'm not really being drowned in the cruft like one would expect.

I don't miss the karma at all. If you don't have time to read the comments and evaluate for yourself which ones are good or bad, why are you even here?

It's like removing karma on articles, and saying 'if you don't have time to read the articles and evaluate for yourself which ones are good or bad why are you even here'?

For me there are a number of answers to your question:

- I love HN because I get to learn about lots of stuff I know very little about. For example I'm a business guy not a progammer, but I love to learn more about the non-business things. I genuinely can't judge the 'good or bad' on my own on some of this stuff. The karma gives me a quick and simple way of the community - this wonderful, intelligent community - pointing me in the right direction.

- It also shows where my comments might be off base - not because my comments karma is high or low (which I still see) but because I can see if the counter arguments are rated highly. For example I can't see if your comment is highly regarded or not. If was +40, compared to +1, I'd be more likely to think 'hmm, maybe I'm wrong on this after all'. Sometime is not just the power of the argument that changes minds, it's the weight behind it. I can't see that weight now.

-sometimes I quickly browse HN with some minutes of down time. Sometimes I read in depth. I now feel I'm being forced all the time to read in depth. Whilst that sounds good, in practise for me it isn't. Instead of more in depth reading I'm just cutting out the browsing, so I feel ultimately I'm getting less out of HN.

As a PhD and researcher that occasionally sees articles on HN in my field, I can tell you that correctness of a comment's content can be independent of comment karma. I have seen 100% correct posts downvoted to oblivion with highly rated 100% incorrect responses by users playing some sort of formal debate game nonsense. In my pre-HN-bankruptcy account, I used engage and try to correct these discussions, but really it's just not worth it and once I see it starting I just skip the thread. Since that's how it works for posts related to my field, I have to assume the same holds for others that are not my field.

The score doesn't have to be perfect to be helpful.

Sometimes, I do have time to read all the comments and evaluate for myself which are good and bad. That's great.

Other times, I don't have that much time and simply want to glean from the best comments on a post.

And then there are the posts in subject areas that are outside or on the edge of my expertise, where I have no business evaluating the comments. I can still benefit from reading them though, and the karma helps me give weight to the good ones and disregard the bad.

What are you even talking about? The point of sites like HN is curation.

Do you ask museum curators what point value they assigned the paintings in their exhibits?

The curation still happens without numbers attached.

You don't need to. It's there, therefore it has value. Not at all like HN comments.

@angrycoder - your shitting me right? Because I don't have time to read EVERY comment I shouldn't be here?

I agree. I've kind of stopped reading comments and voting because I don't have the time to filter through them all. There are always comments that get downvoted to hell due to complete inaccuracies and I don't want to waste my time on them.

I would like to see the karma after (a) voting or (b) 24 hours. I understand wanting to cloak it on a hot thread, at least until a person makes up his or her mind, but I think it should become visible eventually.

I'd still like to see an experiment where the up and down arrows (generally interpreted to mean "agree/disagree") are replaced with "| interesting | spam" before the present "|link" in the comment header.

Or any two words that intellectually interrupt the "vote up / vote down" reflex to vote down unpopular or dissenting points of view no matter how well thought out.

I think we need to let it go on for at least a week before drawing any conclusions. People need to integrate this way of displaying posts into their mental model for the site, and that takes time. Before that happens, none of the data will be meaningful.

I agree. I feel like I need to get used to it first before I can decide whether or not I like it. Besides- maybe more change trials are coming? I'm actually curious as to how pg (and others?) is /are going to evaluate the changes. Monitor chatter? Randomly distributed survey? I'm curious because I'm not sure how much thought/effort it's really worth, and I wonder how much pg &co think it's worth.

Way too early to tell, but I figured I might as well get the idea out there early.

And pg & friends probably have some different goals than what some hn users are used to a online forum having. HN doesn't need to be monetized or have huge page views for it to be a success. All pg needs hn to do is attract the right people and scare off the wrong people. And I imagine that creates some metrics that are more quality based than what most hn users are user to.

From a visual inspection things look the same as always.

from this users inspection things don't.

- I spend substantially more time wading through comments because I can't pick out the good ones. This is particularly true of nested threads.

- I often vote based on the current score. If the score is as the comment deserves (in my opinion) I leave it, otherwise I upvote. I rarely downvote.

- I can't pick out whether a comment is valid (based on scores, and thus the opinion of other users). For instance if a user writes in a comment that joshua schachter never invests in B2B startups I don't know how valid it is.

- When someone responds to a comment I like to see the votes. This is particularly useful when someone disagres with me - if the response gets a lot of upvotes I can be fairly certain I'm wrong. If I don't see the votes I won't know.

Besides, if we don't see scores they're not much good to users. My bet is that over time people will vote less, since they don't immediately see their impact anyway.

This comment thread is a pretty good example of what I'm talking about: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438577

Do people here think this is a forum for entrepreneurs? Do people think it's OK to link to the HN thread and not the post? Without the votes I simply don't know.

I'm wasting a lot more time figuring out the comments than before. The points would guide you to the really important ones (factual corrections, context, valid rebuttals), now I have to skim everything and can't tell whether there's a consensus or not.

Is the average number of comment upvotes per day the same? Would that prove that people don't care about how many upvotes a comment has when they vote?

Or how about the distribution of upvotes over comments under one post -- are upvotes more uniformly distributed?

Do the comments on the bestcomments list have greater or fewer upvotes on an average?

Do you have thoughts on some automated algorithms enterprising folk could implement?

What about average time spent on site?

I've made one important change in how I vote as a result of the hidden score change. I'm now more afraid to downvote. My usual downvote algorithm was: If offtopic/noise and score >-4 then downvote. Now I don't downvote for fear that it already has 100s of downvotes and I'd just be dogpiling.

Maybe I am misinterpreting it, but comments seem to vary in color from black to nearly white. I am not sure how many levels of gradation there are, but it seems that ones that have been down voted are lighter than those that haven't?

They do, but I don't know at what levels this happens. I'm kind of hoping not to need a pantone swatch to vote in the future.

I'm not understanding the downside?

If the post is offtopic/noise why is -4 a magic threshold? If that threshold can be justified why not incorporate it into HN as policy? If it's just to protect egoes, then HN can just secretly use something like a log scale or some other relationship when displaying karma to users.

If voting patterns are more independent of a post's current karma, the measurement should be less biased. The same is true for positive karma--I often don't bother vote up comments that already have relatively "high" karma.

Its the functional equivalent of "someone should tell him that his comment is just a little off", and the score: "oh, good, someone has | I guess no ones done it yet, I guess I will".

I would see loosing a record of your evaluation as a loss for the community. You've gone to the effort of evaluating the content, but your feedback is not recorded and is treated the same as if you had not read it at all. Maybe rather than just ^/v voting, capturing that sentiment is better handled by an agree--disagree scale.

Where I could see things changing is higher highs and lower lows: previously I wouldn't downvote a well-intentioned but wrong comment below 0 or -1, but now I might because I don't know. Also, previously, I stopped voting up the first comment on an article if it already had a ton of votes, now I'm not so sure, so I might vote for it.

Why would you downvote a well-intentioned but wrong comment? If something is wrong, explain why it is wrong. Downvotes, I think, should be reserved for comments that are 1) pointless ex:"agree" or "great post" 2) mean ex: "How could you be so ignorant!" 3) Way off topic.

Everything else should get ignored or warrants further discussion. In some cases it is even important to upvote "wrong" comments.

100% agree. I think the core of our problem is that downvote is used differently everywhere else, and so people have an expectation when they come here that simply isn't true.

Naturally, the other end of that is a problem too, wherein people upvote for all the wrong reasons. I all too often see an comment that is wrong, but perhaps clever, and is upvoted highly. The most interesting aspect, I think, is that if you put a well-reasoned explanation of why the comment is wrong, you'll often see the trend reverse -- the wrong comment will start getting downvotes, and the correction will start getting upvotes. This might SEEM right, on first blush, but it also isn't.

The thing that irks me most though, is perhaps the hero-worship. I think if we were able to hide usernames until after we'd voted, then we'd almost certainly have better results. I cringe every time pg posts a one-liner that adds nothing to the conversation; Not because it isn't perfectly within his right to do so, but because I know it's going to be upvoted to the sky.

Downvoting is essentially the perscriptivist form of "should get ignored," as it moves things downward on the page (where fewer users are likely to find it before getting bored.)

If someone states that it is their firm belief that the Earth does indeed sit at the center of the universe, with the sun revolving around it, I just can't agree with it, and think it should not be a highly rated comment.

Same sort of deal when people are factually wrong, but aren't being a jerk about it: I don't think they should rate that highly, but I wouldn't likely vote them into negative territory either. And yeah, I might leave a comment too.

Then don't upvote then, it's simple! Remember http://xkcd.com/386/

I always thought that the saving grace of /. was the metamoderation. People here downvote based on personal bias here frequently enough, and it would be nice to have the bad actors dinged for it. I'm not saying you do this, but it is done. Far better to have a highly upvoted correction.

> Then don't upvote then, it's simple!

Downvoting obviously wrong comments is very simple too. And useful. Like I said though, in the past I've tended to do so because it's incorrect, not to "punish" as I might with a mean-spirited comment, so I would never go past -1.

I don't think you should be downvoting well-intentioned but wrong comments anyway. I think a much better action is to reply with a comment that corrects the individual in a well intentioned way.

Besides, for a lot of things, what constitutes "wrong"?

I really like it. It actually makes me participate more. It's always interesting though to see how many points someone got that commented on your comment, so perhaps after a certain "sleep" period we could be able to see the score?

There's already a timer that determines when a thread gets locked. Perhaps after it's locked, display scores.

The downvoting needs one simple change. It should not drop comment's score below zero until it has been effectively voted down to -10 or thereabouts, in which case it can be safely assumed the comment is a true junk and grayed out.

I personally used to use downvoting to sink comments that are of no particular interest to me, and to promote other branches of the thread that I'd like more people to look at and comment on. So there's gotta be a mechanism that would allow for rearranging comments in a more popular order, but without punishing their authors unnecessarily.

I'm delighted to see the end of comment scores, and if they are restored, I think i will hack HN for myself to remove them when I read comments.

I like having the community filter articles, but when it comes to a discussion, I like reading the arguments and deciding for myself. Scores do influence my expectations around what's important and what isn't.

Besides, there is already a filter in place for really bad comments. If something isn't at -5 or so, I really ought to give it the benefit of the doubts and read it.

One more person really missing the karma numbers.

My algorithm was to read the first several high rated karma comments than the article if interesting. I usually got the picture from the peoples perspective quickly and it also eliminated lot of the repetition and noise.

Too bad, my hope and wish is that the karma on comments is coming back.

Question, what does the orange dot mean? and why are some users green now?

I think green users are those that has been recently created.

The orange dot: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846591, the orange asterisk marks your own comments and the green user names mean recently created users/accounts.

I see an orange astrix next to my own contributions. I hope it means "Your contributions" and not "Stuff that has been flagged as dreck."

I'm liking the introduction of the flag link and coloring newbies green. I'm 50/50 on the comment points. I like seeing the points, but at the same time I no longer feel they're necessary. To me, the flag and coloring are more important changes that I hope stick around.

For what it's worth, I _really like_ the change. The almost unconscious thought of "does this comment deserve more karma than it already has" was useless, it's much better to decide whether it's a good or bad comment just on its own merits.

On the iPad, the up and down arrows are close together. when I upvoted a comment, I couldnt be sure I hit the correct arrow.

I'm really missing it. It also breaks the user experience completely on other HN-interfaces like the iPhone apps.