People sometimes ask us to remove all the points and karma stuff from what gets displayed. Do you think that we should?

I would advocate an even more radical change: Remove the username from posts and comments, at least by default.

If the purpose of this site is exchange of ideas (rather than personal interaction), who wrote something should never matter. Only what was written matters. Discussion threads become collectively sourced arguments rather than ego battles. Take the identity of posters out of the equation.

In the rare cases where it matters (e.g. "Show HN" threads where the author offers to answer questions), it should be no problem for people to explicitly identify themselves ("author here"; this is mostly already happening anyway).

With comments, HN is a community. Whiteout comments, HN is just a bunch of black pixels on a grey background.

I'm tracking in my head a few hundred of users. I don't know the exact number because I never made an written list. Some users make consistently good comments in some topics, and it's an important signal for a discussion.

For example. ColinWright is a mathematician like me. I usually skim the math posts but he reads the whole post. So when he make a comment in that post it's usually accurate. If he says that in page 3, second paragraph there is a huge error, I just go to page 3, second paragraph and there is surely an error.

Nobody is perfect, but some users have earned a good reputations in some topics. I classified others as clueless enthusiastic, others as troll/morons/crackpots. Other are just unclassified. It's topic specific, so I may think a user makes good comments in one topic and regular comments in other topics. (I don't remember any case of good comments in one topic and really bad comments in other topics, but I have no formal list to check, it's just a fuzzy memory list in my head.)

I think it's important for conversation to see if you're replying to the original author or a new participant. Both types of comments are valuable, but the original author can clarify their comments, whereas a new participant may be misinterpreting them, or going in a different direction entirely.

Also, for better or worse, I think people put more effort into making things (including written comments) that are attached to their identity in some way, so usernames increase quality.

An idea I had: Have some way to reflect whether the OP of a reply messaged the reply or not. i.e. If UserX posts a comment and UserY replies, under the UserY comment have a single, empty line for UserX's reply where UserX's comment will appear if UserX replies. Edit-Or text "no reply" then a "replied" link once done along with the other "top line" links.

I think that would underscore that what appears to be a conversation between two people is not. That's important and I think often lost in online discussion. If UserX doesn't reply they might have been persuaded to UserY's position and one way of signaling that is to not reply. Meanwhile there's very likely someone who will read a well reasoned and backed up comment and nonetheless disagree, and they're most likely to reply given their disagreement. More so in the age of bots. The aggregate effect is for discussions to be weighted harshly negatively to the point of destructively.

Edit-I'm not very aware of the "famous user" effect. Sure there are usernames I recognize, but it's few, and the UI doesn't seem to give them much weight. I 'worry' more about the criticality of the site.

Maybe usernames could be hidden at first and then be revealed after a timeout.

We do need a way to distinguish participants so we can correlate replies to earlier comments of the same participant; otherwise it's way too disorganized as you don't know which voice is which.

Revealing usernames eventually is right, I think, because clicking through to see how that person describes themself (job, hobbies, etc) is an interesting dimension to their comment.

How would you know it was Dang that was moderating, or some stripe ceo replying to yet another deplatforming post?

I don't really check anyone else's karma, so hiding others' wouldn't change my behaviour.

I am vain about my own karma though. Maybe a UI toggle to hide my karma so I would care less about it?

I feel like if karma was removed, the "created" date should be removed as well. I'd certainly welcome the change and do not see the benefits of karma. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

That is what I intended to point to. I believe karma/points could be hidden and maybe that semi-hidden leaderboard page as well. I would not even want to see my own karma really.

instead of a karma number, it would be better to have a different indicator. still count karma in the backend, but display only a percentile, or a number of symbols depending on the karma compared to other users on the platform. For example, relatively low karma would be `+`, high would be `+++`. Something that is very difficult to game and gameify, while still giving a nice little indicator of activity and whether someone's other comments are liked here.

Or just make the user karma a simple average over all their posts and comments. Anything but a straight number that goes up each time!

I use my own karma display as a way to check if its likely i have new replies.

This is an excellent suggestion. Coupled with hiding username (which is even more of a radical change) I think the forum will be even better.

usernames I do like, personally, since some people I know are on here, and sometimes a comment's content changes if the username is known to you, e.g. WalterBright.

Karma is still part of the skinner box that keeps me commenting. I'd rather keep my addiction.