This is great. HN used to be a real community, but lately there has been no incentive to post anything intelligent because every comment gets buried in a sea of crap, and there are so many throwaway comments that it's impossible to find the ones by regular contributors. The amount of noise also just brings out the worst in everyone. I know you can't step on the same stream twice, but hopefully this at least makes it readable for a while.
Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
551–560 of 854 posts
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]
Perhaps that could work, although it goes a bit down the road toward heavier and more explicit mechanics, as at Slashdot and Stack Overflow. In another comment somewhere in this thread, pg mentions that he'd like to keep it as simple as possible. Unspoken is the "...but no simpler" part.
It's fun to consider that a dynamic system could provide someone on the back end (or a smart algorithm) with a variable nozzle controlling comment flow.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#553This 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…
HN comment quality has decreased a bit as it's grown, as you would expect. Some people don't have a problem with that, other find it bad enough to leave (and, ironically, sometimes leave a particularly low-quality comment in doing so).
I do have a problem with 'only one pending comment', which I think is a particularly bad part of the upcoming change. It effectively means that you can't participate in two different conversations happening in the same post. If you have karma 10k+ you are (currently planned to) 'auto-endorse', so those people can have multiple conversations.
One clear example - there was a post recently where an immigration and tax lawyer (can't remember the handle, sorry) did an AMA-style comment, which was massively popular with the community, and he answered a lot of raised questions.
If he could only make one pending comment at a time, it would not have worked: 1) Respond to a question. 2) Wait until enough people have freshly loaded the page to have the new comment in it. 3) Wait until enough people have scrolled to the right place to see his particular comment amongst all the other pendings. 4) Wait until enough of those people were endorse-capable and endorse-willing. 5) During all this waiting, keep on refreshing so you know when you're good to post the next comment.
That lawyer's one posting spree provided many people with pertinent, site-relevant, professional information... but the new system would have made it so onerous that he probably would have decided that he deals with enough boilerplate micromanagement in his day job.
Having only a single pending comment at a time will decrease the sense of community, simply by significantly reducing the number of conversations you can have.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#554My 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…
You might also consider merely greying out comments that
have not yet been endorsed, as currently happens to down-
voted comments.
Either way, I'd advocate for a "showpending" toggle for users with under 1000 karma.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#555Why not implement a simple algorithm:
If your past 5 comments have not gotten more than 3 cumulative upvotes from ranking users then your commenting is throttled to 1 comment per day
If your past 5 comments have a cumulative negative score your commenting is limited to 1 comment per week
There is no pending comments list, only a message telling you: sorry, try to post higher quality content to be able to comment more often. You will be able to post another comment tomorrow / next week
New users are limited to one comment per day until they get at least 3 cumulative upvotes in the last 5 comments
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
They'll just keep submitting stories to get to 1,000 karma instead of participating in commenting or be shut out so only old users can talk.
I'm sure there are different types of HN users, but I would never have reached 1k karma by submitting stories. I go to HN to read news, not make news. Now, that might be good or bad, depending on your perspective.
I guess my point is that it will be much harder to reach 1,000 karma by commenting. Since it seems like this is board wide and not story based then you really need to think which of two or more interesting stories you are going to comment on.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 deli…
Y'all really need to get over yourselves and your belief that, "my dribble deserves to be heard, no matter how inane it is." I don't have delicate sensibilities, I just don't care for you pissing in the metaphorical swimming pool, and unfortunately, people like you have made this moderation policy worth trying out. This'll be my last reply to ya.
Some issues are worth getting upset over, whether doing so helps or not. People get passionate about things. We're not robots.
Calling someone's opinion "dribble" in the context of this moderation system is completely hypocritical. Is this forum not about informed opinions and logic thought processes? Where does "dribble" fit in?
He's apparently correct in assuming that people like you are going to be selectively crafting the comments of the site to your personal liking, as opposed to now where everyone gets a voice, even if unpopular.
I think, if anything, you just proved his point.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#558I can very easily see this going either way. It's so hard to tell what the effect is going to be before it is tried out.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#559Earlier 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…
>I don't know how many users there are with >1000 karma
There are about 5500 such users. There have been around 245,000 users to ever post on Hacker News and around 85,000 users have posted over the last year.
Source: I'm working on a fork of the Hacker News Karma tracker (not ready to be live yet) that uses Algolia's new HN Search API; I also downloaded every comment ever made similar to how minimaxir downloaded all of the submissions.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 deli…
Y'all really need to get over yourselves and your belief that, "my dribble deserves to be heard, no matter how inane it is." I don't have delicate sensibilities, I just don't care for you pissing in the metaphorical swimming pool, and unfortunately, people like you have made this moderation policy worth trying out. This'll be my last reply to ya.
Inane dribble? I thought I was the angry one?