Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

To me a problem with karma systems that are based on a specific relatively well-defined ruleset is that you still end up with a score that doesn't really convey much. For instance, the karma I have is made up of meaningful discussions, which involve telling others about relevant facts, as well as one liner jokes and a few quotes from random dead folks that are smarter than I am.

I always wonder how useful it is to really try to get down to defining what it is you want out of the conversations, and then giving the ability to narrow based on that. Obviously, the narrowing would have to be quick, because it's hard enough to get people to click an up/down arrow once, but if it were to include even two or three more specific categories, or flags, could you put enough information into the system to automate some of the problem folks.

For instance, having a way for users to flag a post as vitriolic, or not containing real information, and then collating the data and either stopping that user from posting, or putting them into a state where their posts are pending.

I also wanted to mention that it seems as though he does address not having illusions in the last sentence: "I hope this will improve the quality of HN comments significantly, but we'll need your help to make it work, and your forbearance if, as usually happens, some things go wrong initially."

I think all of that spitballing is predicated on having a well-defined course you'd like conversations to follow with well-defined rules that don't block the flow of useful discourse, or stifles the community.

This isn't a topic I've done any research on. Just throwing some thoughts out there. I appreciate the parent post, though, because it raised a lot of notions I hadn't thought of immediately when I read the pending idea. I think I tend to lean toward giving people with higher karma the ability to flag people into a status that makes there posts go into pending, according to a set of defined criteria (like were posted) rather than starting folks in that state. I think it would be less impactful to the rate of conversation, but obviously then you have people who make accounts to get around it, which would be solved by the solution to be implemented.

Also everything I'm suggesting is complicated and possibly overkill/overengineered. I wonder if there's an elegant way to get more useful classification information into the voting system to give it more focussed goals.

Well. Enough rambling on my part.

My immediate thoughts were very similar to cperciva's. In the status quo, there's already a disincentive (for those who care about average karma) to comment on any posts that require scrolling down, especially if posts above them are heavily nested or if they themselves are. I can think of a particular discussion I had with a well-known HN user who has professional/financial incentive to care about his karma statistics, and as our two person back-and-forth got slightly too nested but very much unresolved, he merely liked my final comment and never replied.

If pending comments are applied to anything except the top-level, I could see this having disastrous effects on the quality of response in discussions since responses in low-traffic branches will likely not even show up.

Okay. But what is a bad comment then? Maybe your standard is very different from my standard.

In which case, a "time out" is redundant if the goal is to simply avoid locking users out.

This system seems to skew discussion toward already popular / active topics, though, since there is less risk of being stuck pending there. Perhaps allowing for multiple pending comments per user (with a limit based on karma, or length of time on the site) would make it less "risky" to post comments in unpopular discussions.