The obvious big concern here is comments about minority groups and social justice. Are the 1000+ karma users going to shut down those voices?
The only reasonable answer to that is "if they can get away with it."
Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
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Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#82Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the current settings, a comment has a day to make it out of pending. If you delete a pending comment, it's no longer pending.
If the comment doesn't make it out of pending in a day, what happens to it and its poster then? Edit: Deletion is currently possible for less than that (2 hours?). Will this be different for pending comments?
Yes, deletion is possible for a pending comment as long as it's pending.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#84Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another. We're hoping that good comments will get endorsed so quickly that there won't be a noticeable delay. Is there some timeout? If not, commenting on a several-day-old thread will guarantee that you can never post another comment, since once threads drop off the front page it's not likely that many 1000+ karma users will even see those…
Hmm, trust cperciva to find the thing I'd overlooked. I'll add a pending page that collects pending comments. Maybe that will solve the problem.
For threads that have fallen off the frontpage, drop the required number of endorsements to 1 and let the parent commenter have the option to endorse the child comment regardless of the parent poster's karma. That will let back-and-forth continue in old threads.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#85"Since I'm going to check out of HN at the end of this YC cycle" To be clear, you mean you are going to stop maintaining the codebase of HN, not stop actively participating in the community, right?
It's impossible to predict the future perfectly, but I hope to leave completely. The only YC thing I'm going to do is office hours with the startups.
Any idea what you'll be doing next?
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#86This is nothing but a censorship and will make HN useless.
This is exactly the kind of comment I wouldn't endorse :)
Why? This is substantial and not nasty.
That's just a different point of view. Although it doesn't add a lot of context to his opinion.
That's the problem with moderation. People will tend to endorse what supports their beliefs. You can endorse a post you don't agree with.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#87I feel like this really discourages unpopular truths from the discussion. This is one of the worst options I've ever heard for a comment system.
Many users will endorse a comment whether it is popular or not, so long as it contributes to the discussion.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the kind of comment I wouldn't endorse :)
Guess what? your comment wouldn't be endorsed either.. You will not have any chance to even see that comment. It may be a good thing, but the current system has few issues one of them: it will be much harder for anyone to get to 1000+ karma so effectively current "crème de la crème" will be in total control. Remember how some news with NSA in the title were being censored? This new system is much worse than that.
How is it much worse? For a comment to be censored, literally every user with over 1000 karma must refuse to endorse the comment. That doesn't sound like centralized thought control to me...
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#89Every few months I find HN starts to impede my productivity, and I kill my account by removing the valid email address, and changing the password by mashing keys. Having breached the 1000 on at least one of those, possibly more, I kinda regret that. Especially since it obviously doesn't work, at least not for more than a week or two at most.
I'm also concerned because of the hive mind effect. Just because something is popular, doesn't mean it's quality. You attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, but you get a LOT more with a steaming turd. And sure, the turd is popular, but is it good eats?
And I find using the karma total is a poor choice. Reaching 1000 karma isn't that difficult, nor is it an indication of quality, it can be an indication of the age of an account, or the prolific nature of the commenter. Someones ratio is a far better way to ensure that the individuals deciding are also quality posters. A single troll with an account in the 1000+ can chose to use that to green light his other accounts, and other trolls.
I look forward to being proven wrong though.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#90Please consider making pending comments anonymous. Let the comment stand on its own.
Whether that makes sense depends on the context. Particularly in the case of someone submitting a link to their own (startup|open source code|blog post|etc), people often ask questions along the lines of "what does the author think about X" and the identity of the person replying matters a great deal to whether a reply is meaningful.