This and the "karma" info on people's profile page - bring it back.

Please also provide a new view that lists all top 20% of highest commented and highest voted news stories per day (disregarding any downvotes/flags !!). I really hate to miss stories that received a lot of traffic but got buried on page 200+ just because a vocal minority decided to hide it.

Please let me vote on old comments. "Voting is closed on that comment, but you can add it to your favorites if you like." Why have you recently changed that?

> This and the "karma" info on people's profile page - bring it back.

Your wish has been granted, you have a "karma: 4406" line

I meant the karma ratio (or what it was called) that was on the profil page, a percentage value as far as I remember - ...maybe dang can explain it?

Here are the comments he made in reference to removing average karma [1][2][3]:

> dang 781 days ago

> It's based on comment scores only. My sense is that it's an irrelevant distraction and we should get rid of it.

> For example, we caught a bunch of users who were gaming it by deleting any comments that brought their average down. We fixed that by treating deleted comments as comments of score 0 for average-computing purposes. It's an example of how, once you publish a metric, people start to care about it and do things based on it, regardless of how meaningful it is.

> Comment average used to be used by a few algorithms (like comment ranking) but we turned that off as an experiment a while ago and nothing seemed to get worse. If anything, I think it may have helped a little.

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> dang 572 days ago

> What brudgers said is correct, but I'll add that we're probably going to get rid of comment averages. We've looked at the data extensively and it hasn't proven to have much value. We've phased out the code that used to rely on it, and what's left (which is only for display) is probably not worth the cost.

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> dang 567 days ago

> ... We got rid of average because (a) after looking extensively at the data we didn't see any value in it, (b) we had evidence of people gaming the metric, (c) its implementation was complicated, and most importantly (d) we think upvotes are wrong thing to optimize for. Optimize for saying substantive things.

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[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9297678

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8264220

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322256

I'll add to this that statisticians taught me averages are actually meaningless when applied to individuals. The number is tied to a data set but that data set can be all over the place in terms of what it contains. You can't know where you're at relative to others in a data set just by comparing to an average. Unless it's the median where you know you're above or below the middle person without further data on what that means. Pretty useless.

From what I was taught, averages are mainly (or solely?) there to measure trends in sets of data. Basically, where it's collectively going over time. Applying it to individuals is meaningless. So, that feature should never exist unless you're intentionally exploiting psychology & common misinformation for personal gain. Example: showing players how they compare to an "average" so at least half of them think they're better than average and keep playing to get number higher. Another example: differentiating a software company with terrible defect rate by comparing it to the industry average, which is worse, in an industry full of shoddy software. The software looking good is still crap but "better than average." ;)

Yeah, that had a major drawback: it discouraged helpful replies deep in the thread. I'm glad they removed it.

It was also buggy. On several occasions, I'd post a comment that got voted several points higher than my average, but the average went down; or vice-versa.

It may have been a moving average of the last N items.

It was, at least from my observation

The vote counts weren't removed to make the comments more comprehensible or the threads easier to mentally rank. Their removal may very well have made those tasks harder.

Vote counts were struck because they were causing fights.

Paul Graham decided to risk sacrificing a little bit of comprehensibility in exchange for some extra civility. I think the tradeoff has worked very well --- especially because incivility crowds out comprehensibility anyways, so that almost anything you do to make a thread more civil will have the knock-on benefit of making it easier to read.

It would be good if the vote counts became visible after a time period, say 7 days. That way when people re-visit a topic the most appreciated comments are visible.

You can get the scores on old comments through search. Since, to a first approximation, the average 7 day old thread gets zero viewers, it seems unlikely to be worth the energy to add new features just for them. But if you think it's worth doing, you should mail Dan and Scott at [email protected].

There is Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat that has internet comments with two boxes: "agree/disagree" and "well argumented/poorly argumented".

So far it seems to actually work. There are differences in the scores and lazy but popular comments get punished.

How about just reading and evaluating what the damn words say instead of relying on a "score"?

Because there are a lot of topics, even in my professional field, where I don't have the necessary foundation.

Because sometimes a comment reaffirms or conflicts with my evaluation and it's useful to have a weight assigned to that.

Because the world has enough people who make their own evaluation and refuse to change their opinion regardless of overwhelming evidence.

>Because there are a lot of topics, even in my professional field, that I simply don't have the necessary foundation.

And what makes you think that the "majority vote" on them will be correct?

Most often, it's the majority that doesn't have the necessary foundation.

It's not an all-or-nothing. It's an extra piece of information.

There might be valid reasons to remove it (it hurts the community, it leads to negative behavior, .... I forget why they took it off).

But when it comes to trying to assess the quality of the comment, more data is better than less. Then you have the option to weigh it as you see fit, including ignoring it.

>It's not an all-or-nothing. It's an extra piece of information...But when it comes to trying to assess the quality of the comment, more data is better than less.

It could be an extra piece of disinformation, which can make it more difficult to evaluate.

I suppose I'd like it if there was no way to sort. What happens on Reddit is that such comments easily bubble to the top, and they're often wrong, or just making a silly joke rather than being informative.

Well, if we had the vote counts, we could test your conjecture.

We have them in other forums -- e.g. Reddit if I am not mistaken.

Do they work that well there, or do they make the forums a competition for points and popular comments, in other words a popularity contest?

WEB 2.0 turned online discussions into popularity contests. Period. I preferred the older, smaller communities sans likes & upvotes where you knew most in the community and had the ability to 'ignore' MUs. Of course, that had it's drawbacks and is much more difficult to scale as the site gains popularity & evolves. I do not have the answer other than self-moderation, yet, most(including myself) fail sometimes in the heat of emotional impulse... and personal investments, paid actors, other reasons.

As sad as Slahdot is these days, I still think they have a superior moderation system. I like that every vote comes with a reason and that you can use that information to do things like filter out the jokes.

But points don't equal expertise.

You can be an ignoramus in an echo chamber, or be the world expert who doesn't come here too often

Some expressions cannot be evaluated without knowing what people think about them. The truth is not determined by popularity, except from the perspective of the person who chooses to believe in the falsehood. I think it's relevant, but not sufficient, to know what other people believe if you want to understand the world.

Of course, the whole problem is that this reflects back on itself. Such that a highly upvoted comment will be upvoted by a person who values popularity too much, whereby he thus alters the very property he used to judge whether or not he should alter the property in the first place. So some people's over-reliance on popularity destroys the usefulness of the reading for everyone else.

Classic observer effect.

Not everyone have the time.