I'm curious, do others perceive undeserved upvotes as an issue? As far as communities like this go, I think HN is pretty fair about what kind of content is valuable.<p>Sure, maybe some high-quality niche articles don't get a ton of attention, but that's the nature of writing about niche topics.
Great idea. I have been having this idea for years of doing a little stream editing to change the color of the grey text to match the other comments. But I use a text-only browser so I cannot see text colors anyway.<p>I think what happens is we learn to "play to the crowd" when posting comments, knowing certain "inside the box" ruminations will garner support. This seems almost like a form of self-censorship that we are doing, sometimes without even realising it.<p>Is there really any definition of a "vote"? It is ambiguous. Better that we ask commenters "Is this what you mean?" Many times voters are probably misinterpreting comments. It is quite challenging to write comments where every single reader gleans the same meaning.<p>Another idea is you could pull new comments from the Firebase endpoint and insert them into their respective threads, randomising the order, or maybe just have chronological order. It would be an interesting experiment, if nothing else.<p>The web today has seemingly become a series of filtered, ordered "lists" where the top spots are the only content that is deemed to matter (and, for the vast majority, the only content that is seen). Not saying this is necessarily ill-advised, but one has to consider the effects, which are becoming more difficult to understand as we lose <i>the ability to choose</i> non-opinionated ordering (alpha, chronological, etc.).
To offer a different perspective, I find upvote counts useful.<p>Part of why I’m on HN is to follow the community and understand what the community finds important.<p>In practice I read submissions that look interesting to me and I also read those that received an unusually high number of votes, even if I find them uninteresting or disagree with them.
I've worked on some rules for this in my similarly motivated extension Disengaged[0].<p>Another thing it does which I think helps a lot is automatically collapses subreplies.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/a13o/disengaged" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/a13o/disengaged</a>
Everything that's on the front page is massively upvoted already anyway. I'd suggest checking the 'new' tab from time to time instead.
I have a similar script, except that it removes posts that link to domains that I've found to frequently be non-interesting or low-quality.<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/scott113341/56c03bc7f285eefbea0a6146bcb59134" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/scott113341/56c03bc7f285eefbea0a6146...</a>
I actually kind of miss being able to see comment vote counts.<p>Now you can only see that a comment is voted higher or lower than its siblings, if any. The vote count could show you that HN thought a comment was 50 times better than a sibling, or whatever. Of course it's subjected to biases, but rank-order voting is as well in basically the same ways, but the absolute count just gives you more information.<p>(re: a bias towards first-mover advantage specifically, we should obviously have an exponentially weighted moving average of the votes over time decayed to the current timestamp rather than an absolute vote count, of course.)
Great. I think that social media concept is awesome. I want to follow people in my feed, I want to create discussions with them.<p>But how those main social networks did it, with likes or other shallow simplifications of human response, with not showing stuff from those I follow in a linear order, instead pushing "engaging" content to my face, is just terrible.
I personally rely on frontpage and comment count as an indicator as to weather I should spend anymore time to read that article/comments. I do read all titles though so metrics are not the only factor.<p>I do realize that in using HN in this way I'm "leeching" off of hn curators work rather than contributing to curating new things myself...
I wouldn't see a good point for this. HN is focused on these counts, because only they allow you to identify the "importance" and "discussion size". Would be like twitter without a like and retweet counter. How do I know its important? Is it something I support and give a like, to boost its rank?<p>Something like [1] is more useful than hiding information.<p>1: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23804469" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23804469</a>
i use ublock rules to hide scores and disable downvoted comment fading, but i haven't blocked comment count. HN has been much better for me since making these changes.
I tried to build a similar extension for Stack Overflow that would remove the downvote button and close button, but it got rejected by the Chrome Web Store :(