Here are two of the polls created by pg:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039 186 days ago

  prefer points: 2355
  prefer no-points: 1763

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 141 days ago

  prefer points: 2717
  prefer no-points: 1703

So, 57.2% and 61.5%, respectively, were in favor of bringing points back.

EDIT: succinctness and formatting

EDIT 2: Not sure why this is being downvoted, I simply found and linked to the polls mentioned above, because I couldn't remember the exact outcomes.

Beware of selection bias. I saw these submissions when they were posted, but voted in neither, because I didn't mind the status quo of no points, and I'm wary of meta-discussion. If I had felt differently, I'd definitely have voted.

Perhaps those who see no value in point races also shy away from polls?

Or perhaps they don't? Without more data there's no way to know.

I think people are downvoting you because publicly viewable poll results are too similar to publicly viewable karma.

My guess is pg just hasn't gotten around to hiding the results from everyone except the poster.

I don't understand. Without publicly viewable results, polls are absolutely meaningless to everyone except the poster.

In other words, the only content in a poll is the numbers.

So, I actually think dlss is making a very valuable point here: the argument that many people are making with relation to hiding point totals, is that if you can see the number of points a post has, it may affect whether you decide to vote at all: you may go "oh, that's already high enough, I won't bother voting".

In essence, people have a mental concept of how high or low they feel posts they are looking at are, and adjust, possibly very subtly, possibly without even realizing it in a way that they would explain if asked, their behavior to cause the post to hit that target, as opposed to showing their true interest with an up/down.

(For a reference on users discussing this effect, and some commentary from PG about having seen this effect on the high end of comment karma scores, see this example thread from another post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271 .)

How peoples' behaviors change is complex. On the one hand, you may see "your side" heavily lower than "the opposition", and decide "ugh, it's pointless". On the other, you may go "ok, that's just not fair", or "help out the team", and make extra certain to vote on that specific poll.

Due to these attitudes, which are pretty much the same things that are driving the changes in behavior with respect to comment voting, you don't get accurate information with public live polls. This really is the same effect, and should be thought of and treated the same.

Now, making the entire poll /permanently/ only visible to the poster would mean, as you say, that the poll becomes meaningless. However, I would say that's a strawman: there are numerous other ways to handle the situation that still make sense.

Example: polls could be private until they "time out", at which point the poll is no longer votable on, and the data becomes public. Frankly, this seems correct, and I'm glad dlss brought it up (although apparently people disagree with the way he worded it or something, which seems silly).

(I also think that this behavior would dovetail very well with "show the comment scores after people can no longer vote on them", which came up elsewhere in the comments for this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122362 .)

>Without publicly viewable results, polls are absolutely meaningless to everyone except the poster. //

Voting is a mini-poll on a comment. Without a result shown there's no point in voting.

That's a secondary, and arguably unwanted purpose of voting.

The primary purpose is to push a valuable comment up towards the top of a page (or, conversely, push down a non-contributory comment).

Oh wow, did I miss a major feature here. You're saying that currently on HN top comments go to the top of the page?

I thought things were ordered by datetime according to the top node of the thread?

It's an analogy. Without publicly viewable karma, posts lose a lot of their information content.

Polls without results lose more, but some would argue[1] that there is no royal road to understanding what others think, and that the best way to use polls is to simply read the possible responses and ignore the results.

For example, [1] believes that if you saw a poll on "which database do you use?", you should ignore the poll results and researching each option on your own. The person he is replying to is advocating researching databases in HN popularity order.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122546

> They draw our attention to the best comments.

Social proofs are bad. You should be reading the comments and then deciding what is interesting and noteworthy, not looking at comment scores and then reading and then "deciding" after your opinion has already been influenced by the group-mentality of popular opinion.

> Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair enough.

I don't think that's a fair comparison, see above.

> So, is there any way of getting back the utility, without increasing the fights?

This is not the utility you are looking for. waves hands

In all seriousness, this kind of short cut seems nice on the surface but in reality is a bad habit: social proofs are misleading and bad, e.g. leading to groupthink. Hiding comment points was, in my view, a very good move. I certainly noticed an improvement after it happened and I think it's something that is needed in order to maintain a richness of quality in the comment threads.

>Social proofs are bad. You should be reading the comments and then deciding what is interesting and noteworthy [...]

Respectfully, I disagree.

Its a core idea of this site, that the community does a good job of surfacing interesting interesting content; what appears on the front page is what has been upvoted sufficiently. I presume you wouldn't argue that HN users should read all submissions, and decide what is interesting and noteworthy for themselves.

You have a point, in that there may be feedback effect with comments.

Personally, I don't think that a comment being highly rated seriously effects my judgement of its content. It does, however, draw my attention to that comment.

I would argue that comment scores should not be optimised to give the most accurate rating to comments, so much as to filter comments - e.g. draw attention to comments that are interesting, and might otherwise be overlooked.

As such, if there is positive feedback in good comments being 'overvoted' I don't see a problem.

I accept that this is a subjective perspective, determined by what I want from HN. I want to use the smart community here to quickly learn important information, and gain insight; as such, I don't really care whether comment scores are 'correct', so much as whether they are useful.

As others have said, the ability to see the wider community's aggregated opinion on a particular set of conflicting comments, is also useful, where I lack the expertise to evaluate them myself - but I wouldn't be casting any votes, in such a situation.

> It does, however, draw my attention to that comment.

There is a subtle feedback loop in there. After all, a comment that draws your attention will then be more likely to be upvoted by you and people acting like you.

I'd appreciate having the bins that you mentioned. My issue is that often times I see a parent comment being corrected by a child comment. However, due to no point values, I often dont know who is correct and who isnt. Here's an example:

http://files.jjcm.org/example1.png - Here we see a comment as it is now on HN. At the moment, I dont know if my page has a legitimate problem or not.

With comment scores, I'll immediately know whether the problem is universal ( http://files.jjcm.org/example3.png ), or if it's simply isolated to a specific user ( http://files.jjcm.org/example2.png ).

This is an issue that I find I encounter time and time again on HN. While comments are sorted by best score at each level, between indentation levels there is no way of discerning which is more highly ranked. I think having a system such as feral's logarithmic bins would be a nice middle ground here.

>Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments.

That is not the primary reason that I want points back. I believe that allowing people to signal their opinion with public upvotes discouraged redundant posts, and that visible upvotes encouraged participants to let their arguments stand rather than creating unnecessarily deep threads.

A secondary issue is that votes were a valuable part of the signal in many "Ask HN" threads.

> They draw our attention to the best comments.

Just to note, they don't necessarily draw your attention to the best comments, just the ones that have been visible the longest. If you come across a post with 800 comments and the top post has 300 upvotes, how much less likely are you going to be to post a comment or thought? Removing the score both makes it less intimidating to post, and also increases the likelihood that people are going to find your post-- each user has to trawl through the top level comments on their own to figure out what's good, as opposed to stopping as soon as they hit the 1- or 2- upvoted comments at the bottom of the page.

I can categorically state that the removal of publicly-viewable numbers has not made me more likely to read the 2-liner comments by latecomers, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

I don't think those polls captured intensity, either. After several months to get used to no points, I feel very strongly they should be brought back. These threads are much less useful without them, especially when I don't have time to read/judge every single comment, or am not familiar with the discussion topic.

E.g., if there were points in this thread, I'd have a much better idea what the 99% of non-commenters thought about points...

+1 for the time delay idea. Once a post has been up for a certain amount of time, points are displayed so we can sort out which comments to immediately go to. No points makes HN more time consuming for me and less interesting. If there is a fight due to points, I'm just not going to read it.

In general, useful is a good thing. A tool that washes your clothes for you is useful, and good. A tool that hammers nails for you is useful, and also good.

Now, a tool that judges what you are reading is useful, but is it good?

The points don't judge if what I'm reading is useful, they merely indicate how useful others found it. This helps give me context in situations where I am a) inexperienced or b) short on time.

Your time lag idea is inspired.

I agree.