I've assumed that the goal was to intentionally add a degree of friction to the comment process. As readers, we're now forced to at least scan for content, rather than a number. This has actually benefited my experience in 3 ways:
- I actually am able to digest the content from all of the comments, simply because I'm forced to devote a few moments more to them than before, rather than jumping to the "Top Votes"
-I post less, simply because I've already seen my opinion argued in the less prominent comments. I've noticed that since comment volume is down, this must be the same for others as well. This just decreases the overall noise in the comments themselves
- There's less votebait comments now that the comment number has become downplayed. Many of the "Top Voted" comments were intentionally written to garner votes, rather than to encourage group discussion and knowledge.
I'm personally for this switch, and I'd even argue that removing post scores would be a step in the right direction as well, based on my opinion of the comment score removal.
>> I actually am able to digest the content from all of the comments, simply because I'm forced to devote a few moments more to them than before, rather than jumping to the "Top Votes"
I see your point. But for me, I often don't have time to digest everything. So if I'm going to only read some of the comments, I'd rather quickly find the best ones and read those.
I guess it just depends on your approach to how you consume HN comments. That's probably why this topic is so divisive.
I hate the new system. Can I be any more explicit?
EDIT: I'm at -1 now and that's ok, because I have no other way to share my approval of the parent comment. If you enjoy reading long threads of +1, keep the scores hidden.
One place (perhaps the only place) where I find points valuable is when people offer more fact-oriented comments rather than opinions and anecdotes.
For example, in a discussion on some aspect of law (I don't come to HN for law advice, but nonetheless sometimes there are interesting tidbits to consider), it would help to have comment scores to know whether a given piece of "fact" is strongly or weakly corroborated by the community.
Another example might be peoples' experiences with cloud storage - I don't know anything about cloud storage, so if a thread goes into a discussion on pros and cons of specific providers, I would be interested to know how many others have had the same experience. (I guess this is an anecdote too; but one on matters for which there could be a "right answer" in contrast to peoples' opinions of TSA screening practices.)
This usually works fairly well on stackoverflow; answers are usually (certainly not all the time!) voted based on their technical merit.
Slashdot does a similar thing: comments are rated based on a category. An upvote for "+5 funny" in the HN world could carry less weight than "+5 insightful", because it is the latter that we want to bubble to the top.
Could we perhaps just give sub-threads a descending rank (starting at 1 for the highest voted comment) instead? Comment scores were never an indication of accuracy, so validation may be the wrong word. There do seem to be more than a few people (myself not included) concerned with an indication of consensus so a middle ground solution that brings that data back could be useful.
An interesting test would be showing percentile instead of total vote counts. You could still get a sense of quality questions without vote counts directly influencing voting behavior.
That's true, but you can't automatically assume there is a silent majority who is happy with the change just because happy people tend not to submit feedback.
There's no need to assume in either direction anyway since pg posted a poll on this a month ago, and the "bring back the comment score display" side "won" the poll.
Still no return of comment scores, though, which is fine because hacker news isn't a democracy, but there are many people out there (including me) that would like to see the point total display returned.
Easy solution, just mark your comment score at the top of your comment, and when you come back later to check for replies edit your comment to show your current score.
We'll work on the honour system for now, but if it catches on maybe some sort of computer program could be used tally the scores and display them with our comments, to save us doing it manually.
- I actually am able to digest the content from all of the comments, simply because I'm forced to devote a few moments more to them than before, rather than jumping to the "Top Votes"
-I post less, simply because I've already seen my opinion argued in the less prominent comments. I've noticed that since comment volume is down, this must be the same for others as well. This just decreases the overall noise in the comments themselves
- There's less votebait comments now that the comment number has become downplayed. Many of the "Top Voted" comments were intentionally written to garner votes, rather than to encourage group discussion and knowledge.
I'm personally for this switch, and I'd even argue that removing post scores would be a step in the right direction as well, based on my opinion of the comment score removal.