Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

There's something like a "scrolling cost" -- people are only willing to skim so much of a comments thread, without seeing something interesting to them, before closing it.

This is why HN dislikes humorous fluff-posts: they both easily rise to the top, and encourage humorous fluff-replies, which means the first few screenfuls of comments will be guaranteed to induce the kind of "scroll-pain" that makes people close the tab.

I found a user with approximately 1000 karma and used http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/ to get the number of active users.

There are ~6000 with more than 1000 karma and ~9000 with more than 500 karma.

Or it will allow people to silence those with a differing opinion that the OP doesn't agree with...

I agree about the nesting issue. But i hate the new HuffPo discussion interface because it breaks the reading flow.

I think it is horrible to use. What would have been better is use the same system but without this horrible pop-up window.You can totally open/close a comment tree without having the feeling you are going to a new page just to see the comments.

I think the way disqus works is a good compromise.It's perfectly ok to limit the depth of the comment tree to 2/3 sub comments no more.And even limit the number of sub comments.

There are a lot of other stuffs I hate about the HuffPo ,the fact that HuffPo tries to trick you into clicking the same link multiple times by changing the title and the picture of an article I already visited makes me angry ,it's just click bating ,and makes me feel HuffPo thinks i'm an idiot, i dont have time to waste with these tricks,and I think it's borderline dishonest.

Anyway that was my little rant about Huffpo UX. I really wonder if your userbase is growing thanks to these choices. People use to come to HuffPo for its content, and there is a lot to say about its quality too today.

This is an interesting feature, and certainly not something I would have expected as the "next" feature to add. When I read "pending comments" I expected something similar to slashdot's old "preview" feature so one could double-check spelling, formatting, etc. i.e. preview the post before submitting to HN. I would not have expected "pending" to mean "pending moderation" given the successful voting feature here.

I would ask what the goals of the change are, but they seem obvious:

1) Limit nastiness and negativity

2) Encourage deeper and pensive comments

3) Cynically, it seems like a private goal would be to limit criticism of YC, though I know this would never be a stated goal. The criticism may simply have increased the priority even though HN has seemed more civil in recent months as an outside observer.

While the change may achieve these results, I would expect the following effects:

1) Fewer comments overall (there is a new "tax" to post, so-to-speak) and as a result there will be fewer visitors in the medium term (sites like HN, reddit, slashdot, huff post, etc all thrive on both the quality _and_ quantity of comments since that's what entertains people). Without controlling the number of front-page stories, you will in effect decrease the available content for viewers to consume. The demand will be filled elsewhere. I always assumed there was a private, invite-only forum for YC and that you would leave HN alone as a great PR platform... this move makes me wonder some more.

2) Comments will trend towards the quality of bane, tokenadult, ChuckMcM, patio11, cperciva, etc (we all know them) at the risk of fewer "provocative" posts. Often the greatest quality posts, however, are in response or to contradict simple-minded or provocative posts.

3) I am concerned by this line: People who regularly endorse comments that fail one or both of these tests will lose the ability to endorse comments. I like meta-moderation and all, but I don't like being reminded that all actions are recorded and tied back to my account. I would ask for some separation between "endorsing" and "agreeing" -- as a continual skeptic, I like reading and promoting contrarian views since it helps us learn.

I look forward to watching the experiment, and as a parting request, would you be able to record and measure the goals? There must be a YC company that can help with that, and I imagine it would be a wonderful blog write-up!