Those are wonderful points, and I really appreciate them. I am persuaded that it is important to set a good example of behavior for the kids. (And, perhaps, for myself when I'm talking about things I'm even more ignorant of than I am about J; an example is linked below.)
There is some amount of "social hierarchical information" available, if you look carefully — the original poster in this thread has "karma" of 47, while you have 2957, I have 12549, and dang has 52985, plus 29993 as gruseom, although that's less visible. But of course most of the people at the Hackers Conference don't have HN accounts on here at all, so this is at best a poor guide; and, even for those hackers with accounts on the site, surely it would be a grave error to consider me senior to, say, lutusp, lispm, davewiner, Arnt, tonyg, kens, masswerk, or DonHopkins, simply because my account has higher karma. An even more extreme example is my friend johncowan, who has 6 karma and is one of the major authors of R7RS.
High karma is perhaps more an indicator of the kind of poor impulse control that results in wasting our time trying to educate the deliberately clueless, or in my case just going off half-cocked on topics I don't know enough about, than of actual seniority. All of the people in that list are more accomplished hackers than I am, but they have less karma in large part because they post less, perhaps because they're hacking.
To some extent, spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation are similar signals, but consider https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20404735, written by someone who apparently really knew what they were talking about, in depth, in a way that I absolutely did not — "Lol" or no "Lol". And even at best those indicators only serve to indicate social background and literacy, which are only weakly correlated with competence.
I wonder if there is at least something we could do to make voting more thoughtful; for example, put the voting arrows at the end of the comment rather than its beginning, or even after all the replies to the comment. (People could collapse the replies to find the arrows if they were really determined to vote without looking at the responses.) Or use a PageRank-style or Advogato-style trust metric rather than raw vote count, so that the votes of people like the ones I listed above would count for more; or, like lobste.rs, request a reason for downvoting. Fundamentally, though, I think there's a kind of insuperable conflict between thoughtful discussion and hair-trigger interactivity. Long comments rarely get many votes, either up or down, because they take too long to read.
Again, I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. Maybe we should set up an "Old Hats" mailing list or something for discussions like these. Maybe it's possible to rescue HN from the "finance-obsessed man-children and brogrammers" JWZ refers to.
Karma is mostly an indication of how much time people have spent posting to the site.
I agree with you about some of those examples and have reset the score on them; we do that routinely when we see good comments unfairly downvoted. So do a lot of users, while the upvote window is still open. The corrective upvote is a standard practice here. And yes, that still leaves some good comments in negative space. Voting is a big messy statistical cloud. I don't think there's a way to make it precise. Maybe it's worth noting that the examples you cited are already months old? There have been about a million comments posted to HN since those. It's inevitable that a sample that large will contain some shitty outliers, i.e. really unjust cases. Comments tend to fluctuate up and down in score; some are going to end up in the red just stochastically. Perhaps we should be more open to experimenting with the voting system, but years of looking closely at that data has diminished my sense of what's possible. I think the two biggest factors are human nature and randomness, and we can't do much about either. There could still be better mechanisms for channeling them, though.
There is some amount of "social hierarchical information" available, if you look carefully — the original poster in this thread has "karma" of 47, while you have 2957, I have 12549, and dang has 52985, plus 29993 as gruseom, although that's less visible. But of course most of the people at the Hackers Conference don't have HN accounts on here at all, so this is at best a poor guide; and, even for those hackers with accounts on the site, surely it would be a grave error to consider me senior to, say, lutusp, lispm, davewiner, Arnt, tonyg, kens, masswerk, or DonHopkins, simply because my account has higher karma. An even more extreme example is my friend johncowan, who has 6 karma and is one of the major authors of R7RS.
High karma is perhaps more an indicator of the kind of poor impulse control that results in wasting our time trying to educate the deliberately clueless, or in my case just going off half-cocked on topics I don't know enough about, than of actual seniority. All of the people in that list are more accomplished hackers than I am, but they have less karma in large part because they post less, perhaps because they're hacking.
To some extent, spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation are similar signals, but consider https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20404735, written by someone who apparently really knew what they were talking about, in depth, in a way that I absolutely did not — "Lol" or no "Lol". And even at best those indicators only serve to indicate social background and literacy, which are only weakly correlated with competence.
I wonder if there is at least something we could do to make voting more thoughtful; for example, put the voting arrows at the end of the comment rather than its beginning, or even after all the replies to the comment. (People could collapse the replies to find the arrows if they were really determined to vote without looking at the responses.) Or use a PageRank-style or Advogato-style trust metric rather than raw vote count, so that the votes of people like the ones I listed above would count for more; or, like lobste.rs, request a reason for downvoting. Fundamentally, though, I think there's a kind of insuperable conflict between thoughtful discussion and hair-trigger interactivity. Long comments rarely get many votes, either up or down, because they take too long to read.
I'm really sick of seeing thoughtful comments like vkou's in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20395050, mine in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276994, and eloff's in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20275006 (although it was mistaken) punished by downvotes and even flags like we're filthy spammers.
Again, I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. Maybe we should set up an "Old Hats" mailing list or something for discussions like these. Maybe it's possible to rescue HN from the "finance-obsessed man-children and brogrammers" JWZ refers to.