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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#321

Post by pg »

pg wrote: post #28
cperciva wrote: post #19

Someone 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.

This was all the code it took:

  (newsop pending () (pending-page user))

  (newscache pending-page user 60
    (listpage user (msec) comments* [if (and (cansee user _) _!pending) _]
              "pending" "Pending Comments" "pending" nil))
In this project I've really benefited from having kept the code tight.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#322

Post by dinkumthinkum »

tptacek wrote: post #265
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one compromise could be to remove this restriction from users with > x karma. It's not ideal to me but it is something ...

A bad comment is a bad comment whether I write it or a green-named user does. Jerkface.

um ... ok. But the thing is I don't think this necessary so I would like some way for the echo chamber to not hold. Obviously, the ideal would be to not have the restriction. :)

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#323

Post by User8712 »

This is the wrong approach, and it's going to help deteriorate an already small community.

1. HN doesn't have an issue with comment quality.

2. HN should be concerned about growing the community, and increasing comments. A lot of discussions already suffer due to a lack of activity. This is going to do the opposite, it's going to decrease comments.

3. We live in an instant world. Pending comments is a step backwards for user experience.

4. Occasionally I see a topic with 10 comments, the majority of which were written back and forth within the first hour of the topic. You're going to kill these discussions.

5. Manually moderating topics doesn't work for communities like HN. It works on a blog, where your article from last year gets another two or three comments every month, half of which are spam.

6. You're creating unnecessary work for members in the community. People come here to enjoy the community, not to moderate.

7. It's a poor method of moderation. You can have 99 users decide not to endorse a comment, then one person decides to click the endorse button. 99% against, and yet it's approved.

8. I'll have to question every comment I write, and avoid spending time on any detailed responses, because they might never leave the pending stage.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#324

Post by c23gooey »

pg wrote: post #264
yajoe wrote: post #199

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 wo…

It wouldn't limit criticism of YC. A comment only needs a few people to endorse it to become visible. To suppress comments on any specific topic would require all the users with over 1000 karma to agree not to endorse them, which is hard to imagine.

Correction: it would require all users with over 1000 karma to read the comments of every post to HN. It seems like you are making the assumption that every user reads every post

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#325

Post by JoshTriplett »

babuskov wrote: post #150
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please, please do make this. I have exchanged very useful information with other commenters on HN this way. Sometimes I ask a question in the comments, and it gets answered days later. I go through "comments" in my profile periodically to see if someone replied to those. In this process I also see if someone asked my something and reply there as well. IMHO, HN should have a "private message" feature if comments get p…

> Sometimes I ask a question in the comments, and it gets answered days later. I go through "comments" in my profile periodically to see if someone replied to those. In this process I also see if someone asked my something and reply there as well.

I use http://hnnotify.com/ , and it works incredibly well for this case.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#326

Post by brownbat »

cclogg wrote: post #112
cperciva wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think I like this idea quite a bit. I don't know how many users there are with >1000 karma, but will they be motivated to keep endorsing everyone else's pending posts? Sometimes good discussions do happen on quieter threads, or way down the list that the 1000+ users might not see. Well, I guess it really comes down to just how much (proper) endorsing ends up happening. One thing I like about HN is that it's open an…

If endorsing comments too hastily risks the loss of that privilege, but endorsing comments correctly has only a social benefit...

I'll try to do my part, but I worry about the tragedy of the commons here. The current incentives may actively discourage endorsements.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#327

Post by dangrossman »

pg wrote: post #291
rabino wrote: post #186

> 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.

Comments don't have to be brilliant. All they have to be is not stupid or mean.

"Don't say something mean" is a lower bar than "say something substantial", which is what your post said the standard of endorsement should be. There's going to be a mental tax involved, asking "would PG be OK with me endorsing this? is my threshold for 'substantial' higher or lower than his?" to each comment, weighing the risk of losing the privilege for guessing wrong. I've apparently already mis-judged what you think warrants endorsement. The meta-moderation aspect of someone subjectively reviewing my endorsements is a disincentive to participating in that moderation.

The number of people that can upvote is very high, yet most comments probably sit at 1 point despite not being mean or stupid. Now restrict that pool to 1000+ karma users, add a mental tax to the task, how many of those same comments are going to get two people to click "endorse" if they couldn't get one person to click "up"? I wouldn't put money on the rapid-fire sub-second moderation materializing, especially outside the top 10 stories or at odd hours.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#328

Post by eogas »

vacri wrote: post #305
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'm not fond of the idea, but at the same time, playing the victim like you are here doesn't exactly do much for comment quality.

HN really loathes humour, doesn't it?

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#329

Post by pg »

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…

Let's see how much of a problem there is first. I wanted to start with the simplest possible thing. If it breaks in some cases I'll add stuff to fix those.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#330

Post by michaelwww »

tokenadult wrote: post #247

It will be an act of service to the community (which will be amply rewarded by the community being a community of higher-quality comments, methinks) for the users with more than 1000 karma to regularly visit the new submissions page https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and the active threads page https://news.ycombinator.com/active to keep track of which threads are most likely to need comment review. It looks like pg…

Maybe users with over 1000 could get a point each day they review a new submission on the new page and lose a point for each day that they don't do a review.
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