You're right about the herd mentality, but that's the whole point: measuring the herd mentality has a value. No one is asking you to put 100% of your judgment in the point count, and you'd be a fool to do so, much as you'd be a fool to believe everything you see on TV.

Showing points does not kill HNers brains. We've already lost if it does.

It has far less value than you might think. When this community was 100% startuppers, that worked better, but now there are so many people who don't have first hand experience that are willing to upvote anything that sounds correct that it's lost a lot of its value. It's now a dangerous positive feedback loop.

High vote counts tend to be very convincing to all but the most discriminating people, it's not the mark of a fool to believe what everyone is telling them is correct, just a sign of inexperience with that topic.

What you've just told me is the community is broken, not the system.

No, what he is saying is that the system that worked for a small community of like minded individuals does not work for a large diverse community.

The upvote system used to work because it consisted of a lot of similar people saying, this is a good point, or I like this.

Today's community is much more diverse, which is inevitable when you have a quality service/product/community/yadda yadda.

>> In total, Hacker News now sees about 90,000 unique visitors per day. http://newsgrange.com/ycombinators-hacker-news-reaches-1-mil...

The old system just doesn't mean what it used to. People are looking for new strats to preserve the original culture as best they can.

I don't really disagree with your premises, but please explain how removing upvotes fixed the problem.

I could see it going a couple of different ways.

1) It actually has improved comment rankings.

2) or I am just experiencing a placebo affect.

- 1: If it actually fixed the problem, this would mean that quality comments will appear higher on the page, not cluttered by mediocre comments that enjoy the group bump. I pull this assumption based upon the way I use the upvote system. So of course, I could be wrong.

- 2: Maybe the site just feels better to me, because I don't have to see comments get high upvotes that I believe are poorly thought out, or based highly on emotion/fanboyism/or other non logical motivations.

I could see it going either way, but my money is on the first possibility.

All I know for sure is that I now rarely find myself thinking.."Whaat? People think that was a good comment? People thought that added value? People think this guy knows what he's talking about?"

I think it has made the problem worse, sharply worse.

It's just not as self-selecting as it used to be. What worked for the community in the past doesn't necessarily work now or going forward. At least a bit of regression to the mean in the community is inevitable if it grows (which it has, by a lot).

That's simply not true - "Comments with high scores seem to have slightly higher scores than they would have, but comments with low scores seem to have about the same. Probably because the -4 limit on displayed comment scores was already concealing the actual score." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465002

My observation on my own comments has been that most of them level out at a lower number, say 2-4 when they might have hit 8-10 eariler.

But there are some outliers that are getting voted much higher than they honestly deserve. I'm talking 50-70 range for something that would have been 8-10 before.

I think people might be seeing comments that contribute to the conversation in some useful way and are now upvoting them when they would have let them cap out at a medium score, if they could see the score.

They have no way to know the comment is already considerably over-upvoted.

I mean, thanks for the karma and all, but I don't know that it's really helping.

I read that slightly differently. I read that as meaning there is a greater disparity between the high voted comments and the low comments.

I don't see it addressing the quantity of highly voted comments vs quantity of lower voted comments.

Good point though. It does definitely question my assertion that the herd mentality has negatively affected the value of upvotes. But I don't believe it disproves it.

isn't herd mentality exactly piling votes onto something that's already popular? If so, then herd mentality has been growing while we haven't had visible votes.

My experience is that I upvote less now. Which means I'm more selective about what I upvote. I am no longer affected by the polling of the community.

If this is a common change in other's voting patterns, you might see a shrinking of mid ranked comments, since there are less votes to go around.

If this is the case, I would say that the herd metality has been removed. I never stopped voting on comments that I thought were really good, just on the ones that I was on the fence about, and pushed over by their rank.

The fact that the high comments have seen a bump? Maybe people are reading more in depth, which could get them a few extra up votes? It's a possiblity.

We won't know for sure until we see some actual stats about whats going on. I don't think either side could prove the other wrong at this point.