Have people commented more? Does user karma matter?
Are there more "quality" posts?
Is there a different subset of users posting?<p>Probably too early to tell, but it would be nice to see what happens when you take karma away from comments. I am trying to imagine reddit without it and it doesn't seem quite as interesting. Some hard data would be cool to look at.
Personally I'm really missing seeing the karma on comments.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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'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.
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.
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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Too bad, my hope and wish is that the karma on comments is coming back.
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.