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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

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Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#481

Post by fotbr »

I don't comment often. I came here following the dice purchase of slashdot, and found a quality tech oriented site without too much crap.

At the rate I (slowly) accumulate the imaginary internet points here, it will be the better part of a decade before I end up with the ability to "endorse" any other comments. I don't really care about that, except you're locking out those of us that don't have a following here, or name recognition. We, collectively, have seen how "voting" works -- here and elsewhere -- after a very short time, people just upvote based on who the person is, not the comment. Endorsements will work the same way.

Being limited to only one "pending" comment at a time, and the very high probability that I'll see significant delays between being able to comment, pretty much guarantees that I'll leave and find my tech news elsewhere.

Perhaps that's fine with you. But it's a shame to ruin a community to solve a problem that, quite frankly, doesn't exist.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#483

Post by jrlocke »

couchand wrote: post #454
pg wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Forgive me for asking what's probably a simple question: what's HN coded in? That's pretty clearly a flavor of Lisp... what's the square bracket predicate syntax?

Arc

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#484

Post by e12e »

neilk wrote: post #294
jamesaguilar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A good idea but race conditions could still cause both comments to be posted. Maybe if we decide the user can't do that reliably, we cod just let that case slide.

Surely allowing two comments to be pending (and posted) rather than one, isn't a big deal? I do wonder if this can scale, though. I usually open up the top 10-15 interesting (to me) stories, along with a list of my old threads, whenever I take the time to check hn. I then reply to old threads (if that seems to make sense), and post the occasional comment across the stories that I find interesting.

Do we really believe positive moderation will be in the range of a few seconds to a minute?

I know there's been really great experiences[1] with negative moderation/flagging -- but then all users could flag, not just a subset -- and flagging something that's clearly wrong (as in goatsex wrong) is much less effort and much higher incentive than approving a somewhat contributing comment to a story.

Which brings us to what the goal of a comment policy should be. Should we really work towards discouraging people to post things like github-links to stories missing them, because sometimes they'll be beat to the punch by someone else, and now have to wait before contributing to the discussion on a different post?

Perhaps allowing "one pending post per story" might work better?

[1] I'm not sure which talk this was from, but I think it was "building web reputation systems" with an example from Yahoo that touched on flagging (users flagged in sub-second time, much better than automated spam detection). Not sure if this is the same thing(s), but they seem relevant to this discussion:

Randy Farmer (I think this is what I remember) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn7e0J9m6rE

Bryce Glass (similar topic/similar takeaways) http://www.slideshare.net/soldierant/designing-your-reputati...

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#487

Post by [deleted] »

beloch wrote: post #274

My may concern with this system: Sledgehammer meets tack. The comments on HN aren't perfect, but they're far from bad when compared to other sites of this nature. There has been a downwards trend most probably due to the increasing popularity of HN. A response is warranted. However, this system has the potential to silence a lot of high quality comments on any threads that aren't on the front-page for an extended per…

[deleted]

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#488

Post by vacri »

angersock wrote: post #371
eogas wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN really loathes humour, doesn't it?

You have to be clever, topical, and insightful. Or just damned lucky. Like comedy anywhere else, really.

eogas is referring to my profile commentary. What eogas isn't recognising is that just because something has the trappings of humour doesn't also mean it's not crap.

HN has thankfully opened up a little in regards to light humour; that part of my profile was written quite a while ago.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#489

Post by mbesto »

minimaxir wrote: post #439
jonnathanson wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for HN to be increasing in popularity while decreasing in # of submissions. For instance, if more users are coming to the site, the site is growing in popularity. If the X percent of users who normally submit the most frequently are decreasing their submission rates, submissions will go down despite the user growth. Of course, this scenario assumes that # of submissions follows a power law distribution:…

Whoops, it should be noted that the spam algorithm changed at around the peak, which also explains the decrease. (I made the chart)

This data isn't relevant to the discussion.

IMO, the quality has degraded due to more people viewing the site, not the submissions. If I get my post on the frontpage of HN I can expect roughly 1,000 hits per hour. This wasn't the case 4 years ago when I first starting lurking here.

There are two problems with this:

1. More people (of poor quality) upvoting stories that attract the most attention (link bait, stories that aren't relevant, etc)

2. More people (of poor quality) upvoting comments that are not relevant to the discussion.

No graph will be able to chart this - it's purely subjective.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#490

Post by e12e »

redler wrote: post #365
brownbat wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One concern is that there's no direct feedback to the endorser, so he or she would have no sense of the relative importance of their endorsement to keeping the discussions rolling along. With visions of the Stack Overflow police, how high a bar should a comment have to pass? Although maybe that's a positive -- after all, we no longer directly see comment scores, only the derivative effect of thread reordering.

So, have a new meta-karma that is equal to the mods given to the posts you endorsed? (An alternative would be giving karma directly, or some fraction of karma).

[ed: spelling]

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