| Well, it's true that I can't read people's minds and find out the real reason that they voted for something. However, it's not true that there weren't signs that herd voting was going on. I've spent quite a bit of time on HN, and have monitored many popular threads and have seen how comments fared when they've gotten lots of up or down votes. It was my feeling (though just a feeling, without hard data to support it) that comments would tend to get upvoted substatially more when they already had a relatively high rating, and downvoted when they had a relatively low rating. Also, I noticed many comments that I considered to be of high quality get passed over for low quality comments with higher scores, and what I considered to be kneejerk downvoting on valuable comments with lower scores. Now that comment scores are no longer visible, it's harder to gauge these trends, but not impossible. HN still tends to place higher rated comments near the top, and lower rated comments near the bottom, so you can get a feel for how people are voting on a given comment by making note of how the comment moves up and down the page. The scores of your own comments are also visible. So you can draw some conclusions from monitoring voting on them. I would certainly love to see public release of anonymized HN voting data, and some good analysis of these sorts of trends (also on voting patterns in relation to how long a given user has been on HN, and how active that user is, etc..). Until then, all we have are our own subjective interpretation of what we've seen happen on the site. |