I'm curious, what has happened to the average time spent on comment-pages since removing the points?
I personally don't care about fights, they're usually confined to a single nested thread which is easy to skip right over. What I can't stand is not being able to judge consensus on topics in which I'm inexperienced. In that regard Hacker News has gone from being my main resource for diving into new topics, to being near the bottom of my list of resources.
Removing points hasn't merely reduced HN's usefulness for me, it's put it in an entirely different category. This used to be a place for me to skim and read an entire thread, top-to-bottom, and provide insight where appropriate. Now, if anything, I read the first couple comments and move on, because I just don't have the time.
I have to totally second this. Reading this comment made me realize I got the same behavior too. Even worse, sometimes I avoid reading comments altogether, because to me they lost almost all the value they had when displaying votes.
I am really curious to know how the number of fights is measured, though. Is there some sort of sentiment analysis on the comments, comment statistics or it's just PG feeling?
What you were doing before was a bad idea. HN talks about a lot of things I don't know much about --- Haskell, high frequency trading, scaling Cassandra and Riak, AI search. But it also talks about some things I know very well. And it was not my experience that comment scores generally tracked correctness on those threads. Generally, they track what people want to hear, or what the "cool kids" think.
You misinterpreted my comment. I wasn't looking to comment scores as a measure of "correctness". Hell, I can find out correctness on my own by actually researching the topic. I used comment-scores as a measure of consensus. That is, after all, exactly what it is.
Simple example:
> Ask HN: What's the best way to perf-test my server?
> comment X: I use httperf, it has great features and is very robust.
> comment Y: Check out Apache Benchmark (ab).
There is a huge difference between whether comment X is marginally higher than comment Y (i.e. it has slightly more upvotes), compared to if it's a factor of 2-5 or more. In the former scenario, I know to spend an equal amount of time evaluating both, while for the latter scenario, I know one project has much greater user-adoption among the HN community than the other (or at least more passionate adoption).
Likewise, if a comment thread has a question that has 50 upvotes, then many more people seem to be interested in that particular facet than another question with 3 upvotes.
My point is that comment points provide an additional form of context. I actually want to know "what the cool kids think", because that in itself is useful info. In most cases, I take it with a grain of salt, but that's really up to me. If other people misinterpreting comment points, or abusing them, means I can't have them... well, that's a shame. HN will continue to be the fraction of its former self for me.
The problem with your logic is the sample population. What is the "HN Community", if we define it as "the set of people who click a vote button within a given topic"? It's a nonuniform cross-section of God Knows Who Is Using HN At This Hour.
It isn't even a representative sample of "what the cool kids think". Even cool kids get bored with repetition. For example, once upon a time almost every XKCD got linked on the HN home page, but due to tacit agreement (and, perhaps, intervention by Our Invisible Friends The Moderators) this almost never happens anymore. And yet everyone I know continues to routinely read XKCD. It's not uncool or anything. It's just no longer new.
Similarly, Lisp and Erlang make far fewer guest appearances on the HN homepage. Should I conclude that these things are now uncool? No, just that time has marched on, and HN has grown and changed, and the makeup of its increasingly gigantic audience has shifted.
If you want to take a poll you should try to find someone who takes polling seriously. Otherwise you're better off with un-numerated anecdotes. At least an anecdote doesn't masquerade as data.
Your comment is missing the point. I know about sampling bias, and I'm aware that the points are representative of the subset of people who read that particular comment (or didn't) and decided to click a button. These are all facts that go into my interpretation of the data. But it's still data!
And the data was useful to me, in my own interpretation. Why is everyone so determined to convince me that comment points weren't useful to me? You're not qualified to determine that, because you are not me. And I'm telling you, they were useful to me. I can't make it any clearer.
Frankly, how I interpret the data is none of your concern. If you're afraid that other people will misinterpret the points and assign some false value to them, I can't do anything about that. It's simply a shame that the solution is to take away data from everyone, because you're afraid some will misinterpret it.
But hey, if making HN less useful for me makes it more useful for everyone else, then I guess you can disregard everything I've said.
Why bother having a voting system at all, then? Karma that can only be seen on the user's page is simply just point-scoring. Sure, you gain minor functionality increases with karma, but you could do exactly the same thing with comment count for comments that aren't flagged (since you need to comment to get karma anyway)
Just give people a way to flag inappropriate comments, and then you've got pretty much the same system as we currently have. Early comments stay up the top, and there is no way to tell which has engaged the community apart from volume of response. Inappropriate comments get flagged and with enough flags they die. Get enough unflagged comments under your belt, and you're 'participating' and are then allowed the escalated priveleges.
I personally don't care about fights, they're usually confined to a single nested thread which is easy to skip right over. What I can't stand is not being able to judge consensus on topics in which I'm inexperienced. In that regard Hacker News has gone from being my main resource for diving into new topics, to being near the bottom of my list of resources.
Removing points hasn't merely reduced HN's usefulness for me, it's put it in an entirely different category. This used to be a place for me to skim and read an entire thread, top-to-bottom, and provide insight where appropriate. Now, if anything, I read the first couple comments and move on, because I just don't have the time.