News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Longer Discussions in HN?. Parent comment

Re:Longer Discussions in HN? by chrismarlow9 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @12:27PM (#34666704)
This wasn't always the case. I've used Reddit since the Digg days and in the earlier days it was long form comments with sources and the vote system was actually used as a "this is true" signal instead of an "I don't agree with this". The thing that killed it in my opinion was the layout change to embed media directly in Facebook style. Sure there's always old.reddit.com , but the problem is that because of the default interface change it drives a certain type of ecosystem for submissions and discussions that's not as enjoyable.

Tl,Dr when it was primarily a text based website the discussions were better. The gifs, video, meme layout is like junk food.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Longer Discussions in HN? by mancerayder on Sunday February 05, 2023 @12:48PM (#34666934)
I was thinking that HN shows only the writer what the 'value' of the post is (number of upvotes). In Reddit, most subs seem to show that number to the whole world.

So if this comment had 100 upvotes, and another one 20, you're the winner, everyone can see it. I speculate it at the minimum encourages subconscious behavior of trying to game votes upwards, and also biases people that it's a good comment. Because your brain will process "100" before reading a paragraph of words.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Longer Discussions in HN? by disgruntledphd2 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @01:59PM (#34667755)
HN used to have points! It was a long time ago though, and hiding them was probably the right decision.
[ Parent | on HN ]