Why don't you focus on making comments load faster than 30 seconds. This site is slowww. Additionally, after making a 2nd comment the site tells you that you're commenting too fast... Really? With what I just read above and my experience with this site I have to say you're the last person who should be coding and making decisions, thank god you're giving it away.
Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
521–530 of 854 posts
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#522Earlier 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.
Furthermore, how about auto-accepting pending comments after 1 day? And maybe, not having the pending state for threads which are more than 1 day old? The above will allow people to submit comments even when the thread has lost its popularity.
I think this goes against the ideas the curators of HN have for HN. For the simple goal of furthering (meaningful) conversation, I think dropping comments would be better.
On the other hand, I think it'll drop the number of really good comments -- those where commenters go out and lookup a few (possibly obscure, but very interesting) references. Doing that kind of work, just to have the text be deleted with hardly anyone seeing it doesn't seem worth it.
Which brings us back to the question of "What should HN be, for whom -- and how do we achieve that?".
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#523I don't have a Facebook page, gave up on twitter, only lurk on Reddit, but here is where I occasionally comment. I sit at only 102, not nearly enough to past the pending comment threshold. Not sure if I'm going to participate much anymore :(
I'll hangout for awhile and give this experiment a shot, but I don't expect much.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#524PG THE SILENCER.
Y COMBINATOR THE TOOL OF SILENCING.
oppressors. can't handle the truth? hide from it. run away. get to karma 1000 and you can control the fate of many. is this scientology now? do i need to buy an e-meter before i can post?
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#525Someone 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.
A site I used to work for had a pre-moderation system for pictures posted on the site that worked like this, to the best of my memory: There was a moderation queue and various volunteers (here it could be the >1000 karma people, I guess) went through it and gave their vote. A picture had to reach all positive 3 to go live or positive six to go live if there were any negative votes. Moderators were awarded points based on how many of their votes matched the consensus. This encouraged them to keep doing it, even though it's kind of boring. Here that could be karma bonuses.
If you really want to make sure that every post gets voted on you may need to do something like that to incentivize endorsements.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough. I would much prefer fixing the long comment thread problem with 5 lines of JavaScript than implementing this bizarre system.
If you have a solution to this particular problem, whether in 5 or 500 lines of JS, I think it would be novel. I've yet to see any discussion forum solve the problem of long threads with lots of useless fluff floating to the top.
What's wrong with (old) slashdot (I mean, technically) ?
While I'm usually a kind of hard core html-first, ajax/js/webapps later kind of guy -- I'd love for the comments to be served up in a json-blob, with a couple of user-settable preferences ("Show only comments rated higher than N, hide threads with lower (median/mean) rating than N, show all direct replies to my comments -- and similar).
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Does a comment need to be seen by many users to be worthwhile? If it contributes to the discussion of a small group of users (who may not have over 1000 karma), is that not still valuable discussion that you would want to continue? I understand the goals of trying to promote healthy discussion, but I fear that this will have many unintended consequences.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#528Consider how many people disagree with you here. Well-respected users.
If we disagree with you here on what you may have thought a well-regarded idea, who is to say how many well-regarded comments we are now going to miss?
How many excellent comments are headed for the dustbin because of a misunderstanding?
This might work, but it will turn HN into a community that is very inward.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#529This 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…
> Well, and no offense intended, but hopefully not, since your comment is a good example of the problem this is trying to solve. It's unnecessarily angry.
Do you seriously not understand the point that I was making? You're basically saying that my comment is unworthy of an audience...not because it was nonsensical or rude or offtopic or abusive...but merely because I wrote in an angry tone. My tone offended your delicate sensibilities, therefore my voice does not deserve to be heard.
I'm sorry, but people like you are precisely the reason why this moderation policy is a bad idea.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
An additional suggestion- don't show username on pending comments. Let the comments get approved solely on their own merit. That should cut out a lot of concern about a ol' boys club, and honestly should do a lot to improve comment quality as well.
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