Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments • Hacker News Board

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#151

Post by networked » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 12:39 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #83

networked wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see. You said above that a comment only has a day to make it out of pending. Why not auto-delete it when it doesn't? Edit: Never mind that question. Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446005 this seems to be the case (i.e., you won't have to delete a failed pending comment manually).

On a related note, the new system may prevent people from posting in the feature suggestion thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363). Since it's already a special thread that never closes for comments perhaps comments posted there should not be made pending.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#152

Post by noarchy » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 12:39 AM UTC

eogas wrote: post #97

This seems like a rather hostile change to an already hostile community. HN has never felt like a welcoming place to me, and I don't think this will help. Maybe PG prefers the community to be small, so he's trying to trim it down? Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones he wants to keep out. Please noble 1000+ers, free my humble comment from the depths of the low-karma peasants. F…

I have to agree with you that this looks like a hostile change. There are, of course, many here who would prefer a smaller community. That's an elitist group, imo. I've always felt that the quality of discussion here has remained top-notch, even as the popularity of the site has grown.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#153

Post by baddox » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 12:39 AM UTC

diminoten wrote: post #121

baddox wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, so much for 1-on-1 comment threads that are deeply buried and are not intended to be prominently displayed to anyone else. I've had lots of interesting conversations like that.

As I understand it, that's kind of the point.

To kill conversations which are deemed useful by all participants and have no negative impact other than the negligible cost of hosting them?

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#154

Post by corresation » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 12:39 AM UTC

dudus wrote: post #49

bsamuels wrote: post #14

I think this change makes the mistake that people with lots of karma are good contributors. I think it should be based on weighted karma/comment in addition to total karma. Imagine two users - one with 1500 karma & 1.1 karma/comment versus one with 600 karma & 10 karma/comment, which one would you trust to be able to judge what is a good comment and what isn't? The total karma weight is to give at least some favor to…

Karma/Comment is not a very good metric as well. As someone that posted a big post that stayed in the Front Page for long can amass a lot of karma in little time. Giving them a very high Karma/Comment. You would have to remove the outliers.

Karma/Comment is a poor metric, I think, because it encourages the strike attack comment style.

If I post something and people post counterpoints or questions or concerns, I will respond. But the truth is that from a pure karma average perspective, by far the best action would be to simply leave the threads hanging, the single post floating at the top of karma heaven. That works great from a pure karma perspective, but it subdues conversation because every point is a single attack.

It also encourages the stealthy comment editor. While Paul mentions this, it is something that happens regularly -- people make a comment, someone responds unfavourably, and the original person subtly edits their comment to make them look unfairly attacked. This is a specific problem on HN given that quoting is generally discouraged. So everyone piles on the downvotes and upvotes, respectively, to right this seeming injustice.

Karma on HN is easily gamed, as it is elsewhere. It is unfortunate when we care too much about it because it leads to completely artificial conversations.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#155

Post by babuskov » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 12:39 AM UTC

diminoten wrote: post #121

baddox wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, so much for 1-on-1 comment threads that are deeply buried and are not intended to be prominently displayed to anyone else. I've had lots of interesting conversations like that.

As I understand it, that's kind of the point.

Adding a "private message" feature could solve this for all the people who don't want to give a public e-mail in their profile.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#156

Post by camus2 » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 12:40 AM UTC

Just my 2 cents : often the top comment becomes the root of the discussion for all the "thread". Would be great if top comments were shuffled so all the discussion is not concentrated on the first comment of the "thread". Bad comments can still be pushed at the bottom of the page.But the top comments with the most karma should not stick at the top of the page.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#157

Post by pygy_ » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 12:40 AM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #67

pg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That might work... but only if people actually read that page. Given how few people look at /newest (as estimated by the fraction of votes which are cast before submissions hit the frontpage) I'm not optimistic. How about only placing comments into the "pending" purgatory if the submission they're attached to has received more than X comments in the past Y minutes? I assume it's the chatty discussions which you're co…

> How about only placing comments into the "pending" purgatory if the submission they're attached to has received more than X comments in the past Y minutes?

Fluff will pass through.

Another option would be to enable the pending machine on big stories for the time they are on the home page, then auto-validate everything (but mark the unendorsed comments as such).

It would be nice if users with a lower karma could validate the replies to their own comments, once they have been validated.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#158

Post by mcintyre1994 » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 12:40 AM UTC

gruseom wrote: post #57

donatj wrote: post #47

I 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.

As I understand the idea, endorsing a comment doesn't mean you agree with it. It just means you think it deserves to be in the thread. That should leave room for unpopular views as long as they're respectfully expressed.

"Don't downvote if you disagree" doesn't seem to work very well anywhere, so I'm not sure this will be any better in that regard.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#159

Post by waterlesscloud » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 12:40 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #135

rdl wrote: post #105

Some thoughts: 1) It would be fun to try this on only a subset of articles posted, so we could get real A/B testing on how well it works. The same issues get posted under multiple submissions, so we could see if the quantity and quality of comments is improved by pending, independent of the topics. 2) "showpending" to allow 3) These's now a huge incentive to farm a few 1001 karma point alt accounts. You can do that w…

+1 for showpending. At least allow people some way to choose read what's being intentionally kept out. Might be interesting.

I keep showdead turned on for purposes of the hellbanned folks, some of whom really don't deserve the ban.

I wouldn't turn on a showpending, though. If you can't get a few users to endorse you, it probably wasn't worth saying.

I suspect anything remotely substantial will get the endorsements it needs. The userbase here is more diverse than is readily apparent.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#160

Post by twic » Sat, Mar 22, 2014, 12:41 AM UTC

How about instead of only allowing a single pending comment, allowing some number, where that number is managed in a similar way to the TCP sliding window. Start by allowing a single pending comment, allow an additional pending comment if that is endorsed, and so on, up to some maximum number of pending comments. However, if a comment is rejected, reduce the window size. You could employ all sorts of heuristics here - reduce the window by one per rejection, halve the window if there are two consecutive rejections, reset the window to its initial size if there are three, whatever.

One obvious problem here is that we are not getting a way to positively reject comments; rejection is simply not being endorsed after 24 hours. That is probably too noisy a signal to base a mechanism like this on. Oh well.