291–300 of 854 posts
> Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another. This is kinda crazy. You can't expect 100% of our comments to be brilliant. There needs to be some timeout or something, if not, people will start creating new accounts every day.
Wow, this seems like a rather large change -- with a lot of dynamics and moving parts -- for what seems like a relatively minor problem on HN. Not that there aren't bad comments, but bad comments get a lukewarm response, and insightful comments seem to do pretty well. Comments that get more airtime than they might deserve will still get approved by someone (and upvoted/downvoted accordingly) The bigger problem to me…
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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.
Another option would be to allow the withdrawal of pending comments by the submitting user. Reply -> you already have a pending comment (with a link to the explanation of the system). Would you like to withdraw your comment X in thread Y and post this comment? -> Y/N.
If you lower the moderator karma threshold to try to handle the load, then most readers will be moderators and what's the point? Moderation exists to benefit non-mods. Personally I would rather not have that power.
I argue upvote solves "say something substantial" and downvote solves "be civil". This form of moderation is easy and works.
Here's a simple solution to this whole moderation hammer: add a downvote for poor comments (ala Reddit). The spam and garble comments will automatically be moderated by the community as a whole. Turning HN into Wikipedia Moderation Politics is not a smart idea.
This is ridiculous. It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions, but now our comments need to be vetted by the elite HN users before they can be shown to the rest. I don't get it. This site looks like something made in 1996 (with absolutely no regard for readability), but the big new upgrade we're getting is a draconian (and wholly unnecessary) comment moderation feature/policy? A lot of HN user…
Well, I wouldn't endorse it. But, since some of your points are often raised... > It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions That particular disease doesn't seem to have taken hold here yet. Comments that are downvoted below 1 more often are angry, abusive, trollish, or devoid of content. > ...but now our comments need to be vetted by the elite HN users... An "elite" group of, by a rough estima…
> That particular disease doesn't seem to have taken hold here yet. Comments that are downvoted below 1 more often are angry, abusive, trollish, or devoid of content.
Some of the comments voted below 1 are, indeed -- but a more relevant metric to respond to that critic would be: How many well articulated contrarian opinion expressed on HN are voted above 1? There are other, less draconian ways, to avoid abuse. The one chosen here would do that, and more -- too much if PG, YC and HN goals remains to take more risk. My impression of actively commenting for the past month is that contrarian opinions are already extremely unwelcome, while passive-agressive abuse roams.
"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.
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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.
Hacker News has a pretty strong history of being apolitical, and for good reasons. I don't see how stronger moderation of comments by the community is worse than encouraging political discussions. FWIW I'm strongly against the NSA stuff, but I understand that it starts to become a discussion similar to ones religious people hold rather than actual intellectual discussions about how to solve a problem or discover some…
> Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another. As currently stated, if a comment's never endorsed out of pending, the commenter will never be able to post again?
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.
Also some visiable indication on near the user/logoff part of the page indicating if can post or awaiting approval of a pend - say a "+" indicating can add a post and a "-" indicating you can't as have pending post.