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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

#331

Post by 3rd3 »

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.

Maybe the verb 'to endorse' is a little bit too strong then. How about a button that literally says 'not stupid or mean' or 'appropriate', so that one doesn't have to indentify with that action as much.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#332

Post by yeukhon »

[deleted] wrote: post #227
yeukhon wrote: post #182

I think this is a horrible decision. I've never seen this work. My biggest objection is based on the fact I have to wait for someone to endorse my comment. I post a lot of comments here, regularly. Some of them get hot and turn into a linked-list O(n) depth tree... I also post during time when few people are around. By the time I want to say something interesting and hope someone can engage with me my comment would b…

[deleted]

I am probably too young to think of one with the same restriction. It doesn't work because there is no real gain.

The point seems to be to improve the quality of comments.

Look. The intention is good. But I don't like this feature. Since most comments will be endorsed eventually, we won't gain much from this restriction.

Some people don't understand sarcasm (I am with this group!). Sarcasm is not necessarily a bad thing and can be quite fun to read. This is not a forum where people post scholarly comments. As long as the comment is genuine I personally consider it a good comment.

Now some people have a more compelling reason to "karma-whore".

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#333

Post by vacri »

pg wrote: post #231
japhyr wrote: post #225

When I endorse a comment, does that also upvote the comment? Or is voting completely separate from endorsing?

Separate. Endorsing just means you think a comment is substantial, not that you agree with it.

Can you find a different term for it? To 'endorse' something means that you support it, and that you put your name behind that support. The action you're describing is more like 'publish' or 'pass' or 'authorise'. Probably 'release' is a good term, given the concept of 'pending'.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#334

Post by thaumaturgy »

tptacek wrote: post #316
bmelton wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering Patrick's tendency for amassing huge amounts of karma (not a dis), even on older threads, I'd be surprised if that poses any issue whatsoever.

I'm just wondering if there's maybe an atypical gap between the time Patrick tends to post comments and the time those comments tend to soak up their comment, so that the endorsement delay could be an issue.

There will probably be a nonzero negative impact. Patrick and a couple of other users recently tag-team-assisted someone with a website problem in the middle of the night, and this new feature probably would have about killed that.

I still think it's a net win though.

A few of us with very broken sleep patterns can put a little more effort into checking comment threads.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#335

Post by corin_ »

pdq wrote: post #283

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.

There already is downvoting, it just isn't enabled until you hit a certain karma (I think 500, could be completely wrong as it's late and I'm tired)

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#337

Post by pg »

c23gooey wrote: post #324
pg wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If a comment isn't seen by many users with over 1000 karma then it isn't seen by many users period, and thus doesn't have much influence anyway.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#338

Post by xg15 »

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.

I believe this is not hard to imagine at all. It's unlikely that all >1000 karma users will take the time to review every comment. So it'll be enough if the few users who happen to browse a thread have the same views on that particular topic.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#339

Post by 6thSigma »

rdl wrote: post #267
pg wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separate. Endorsing just means you think a comment is substantial, not that you agree with it.

So one might endorse a substantial comment which is incorrect just so one can downvote it for being wrong.

I can't wait for the first "I endorsed this just so I can tell you how stupid you are" comment.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#340

Post by drakaal »

The first big issue I see with this is in submission. When you submit something often you need to leave the first comment to give it context. So stories on the "new" page are likely to get a lot fewer upvotes.

The second big issue I see is when responding to comments on a post about you/your company. I'm at 950-ish, and I suspect that is on the high side for a founder at a 2 year old startup. When posts about us hit 3 months ago I didn't have 500 points. I "hustled" to get to this level so that I would not look like a noob, but if these rules had been in effect 3 months ago I wouldn't have seen comments and questions about our product, and I wouldn't have been able to reply.

I'm a "noob" as I have under 1000 points, but I have been a top 100 contributor in many other communities, it doesn't sound to me like this is a good idea. I think it will limit discussion and feed back by Authors, Founders, and others who find they are suddenly getting traffic from a site called ycombinator that they have never heard of.

Basically I think this is a move away from community and towards elitism. If that is the goal, then I think you should do it, but it feels like it is counter to the stated goals of this change.

@PG if you want an automated system for determining the quality of a comment I make one. We could probably work something out to leverage our technology at HN to prevent all the negativity, and to do some sort of blend of the quality score of the comment and the user karma to calculate if the comment "passes".

Edit:

I posted a history of Digg and how changing the way powerusers and noobs were treated lead to its downfall.

http://www.xyhd.tv/2014/03/industry-news/hackernews-change-t...

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