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In heavily technical discussion I tend to like the visible upvote count as just a way to see a baseline of how much the post resonated with the community. In that case the difference between 8 and 9 points doesn't matter. But when I post, there is a terrible dopamine searching activity where I just refresh hoping for feedback.
Given all that, may I suggest a compromise? What if there was just a Neutral, Valued, Outlier signal inplace of the score?
The way I'm envisioning would be scoped to a post so you can't interpret value outside of a context. You check the average number of upvotes across all posts and if it's below average then you assign the neutral signal (gray?), if it's above or equal to the average then it's valued (green?), and if it's a crazy outlier (95 percentile or something?) then give it the outlier designation.
This solves a couple problems:
- Refreshing to check your signal on a post is basically pointless
- It allows recognition of fantastic comments that are buried deeply in a nested thread (whereas Hotness only values top level comments to it's fullest extent)
- It feels descriptive and organizing, but not gamified.
- Because crossing "average" (median? mean?) is necessary to exit neutral, it means that neutral posts are not considered bad, whereas 0 upvote posts do feel that way to me sometimes. This gives them more chance imo.
- Because being higher than the 95 percentile is a huge order, outliers would be uncommon.
- This system scales better with more users. sic.pm is growing at an impressive rate for a social media site, even if it feels a bit quiet now due to the raw number of users. If the rate keeps up then we'll suddenly have tons of comments and the system would balance along with them.
- Because the system is scoped to a post, lesser tended to niches don't get punished. If I see a post on the chemical implications of dyes for certain weaving patterns, then it may only be something a few people deeply care about. If it has 3 comments and the top one has 3 upvotes then I might not think the comment is superlative even if it is. But 3 upvotes might be enough to kick it into the top tier signal due to the amount of attention/interaction the post got and it's rightly recognized as a great post.
This is just a casual idea that popped up in response to rhn_mk1. Open to discussion/refinement or it just being dropped. But I like the idea of still incentivizing indepth and insightful posts somehow, which goes away with literally no visible scoring system.
EDIT: for the record, the colors never need to be explained or named. I just needed a way to refer to them in text. If the system is well balanced, people will intuitively build a feel for them without anyone feeling like their post didn't achieve "valued" or whatever.
I like this idea, because it feels "harmless" to implement and disable whenever without any negative consequences.
Right now there's no indication of what the comments order means. It should be clear if it's sorted by date or karma.
As to the value indicator, we could calculate the z-score of each comment. Showing it as color means it will not be accessible to all users, so a word signifier (i.e. [nothing, "valued"]) is better. And when and if we add flagging for abusive/hateful/spam comments we can show a "flagged" signifier.
Good point on color being inaccessible. My worry about using the word "valued" (I know I mentioned it first) is that it suggests the others are "unvalued", which wouldn't be true.
Maybe just a visible z-score not attached to a signifier would work? Might get confused for raw points though.
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Maybe it's just me, but generally speaking I actually like how thorough and thoughtful-necessitating the submission process is.
To (ironically) +1 rhn above , I also don't love the visible upvote counts :)
I guess the thoroughness must be balanced, and I'm glad that you don't find it excessive! If tagging turns out to be an unpopular nuisance, the whole categorization model of the website should be scrapped and revert to a hackernews model or consider implementing "subforums" which I personally don't like as an idea.
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I just submitted a post to try it out, and think the new submission form helps quite a bit.
I like the idea of not having visible upvote counts on comments. It feels good not to have them to obsess over, judging by HN.