censor-by-default is such a bad approach. if people are passive (very common) then HN censors. defaults matter, like with mailing list opt-ins, etc, b/c ppl frequently don't want to bother changing the default.
Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
571–580 of 854 posts
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if I write a comment that people don't want to endorse – let's suppose it's actually bad – then it's pending forever and I can never post again?
PG mentioned somewhere else that there's a 24 hour timer, after which point the pending comment is deleted -- and one can post again. It does sound to me as a rather steep penalty for wandering off the beaten path. One would be free to self-censor of course, which I suppose is the intention. We'll see how it goes, but it does sound like it'll likely work against HN being somewhat heterogeneous, and (even more) toward…
ok that's a bit less bad but i still think i'll pretty much quit :/
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#573Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#574I'm commenting here because of the restrictions on reddit. It has nothing to do with this news post.
V
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#575I've had an HN account for over two years.
I have 328 karma.
That's a whole lot of comments I'd have to post to get to 1000 karma. I don't feel that invested in HN, so it's more likely I just won't comment again.
This seems like a pretty good way to freeze the current set of commenters in stone.
edit: It also occurs to me that, while endorsing may be novel now, there's not really any incentive for people to keep doing a boring rote task into the far future. Plus you're threatening bans for people who do it badly. So why would anyone do it at all?
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#576[deleted]
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#577Why not have this feature turned on only for threads in the front page instead of all threads.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#578This seems like a rather hostile change to an already hostile community. HN has never felt like a welcoming place to me, and I don't think this will help. Maybe PG prefers the community to be small, so he's trying to trim it down? Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones he wants to keep out. Please noble 1000+ers, free my humble comment from the depths of the low-karma peasants. F…
> Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones he wants to keep out.
Absolutely. One of the benefits of the size and diversity of the HN community is that there are lots of subject matter experts in a myriad of niches that can provide useful commentary.
If it becomes dramatically harder to have a comment be seen, these people will simply stop commenting here. The idea might be that infrequent but insightful commenters will get endorsed, but not every comment a valuable commenter makes is necessarily going to get endorsed. That's going to be frustrating enough that many will decide not to bother, and the discourse will be poorer for it.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
2b is not really an issue. Endorsing only the best of similar comments is a feature. You can remove your pending comment after some time. It may also have a second order "unintended" consequence over time- People would stop posting shallowly obvious responses, due to the negative feedback of never having them endorsed.
The problem is that people are being penalized for writing something completely reasonable because someone wrote something slightly better or wrote it first, even if they were unaware of the other comment existing at the time of posting. As a penalty, they will have to go back and delete their pending comment from whatever thread they were on, if they came back to HN after a break. cperciva's auto-purge or my auto-ac…
Perhaps another feature is needed: mark redundant. So when you mark one of several similar comments as good, you can mark a others as redundant -- so that the owner can retract it.
I suppose preferably you'd link it somehow, so that the author of a "redundant" comment would get a "deemed redundant due to: comment.
Why list: maybe 1kkarma-user #1 found commend x to be best, #2 found y to be best, and both found your comment, z, to not be best.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#580While I certainly understand your goal here, wouldn't you have a better moderation regime if you hired people to do this as their jobs? Metafilter is my example of a hired-mods-done-right setup. I fear that a 1000 karma policing setup will make this place more like slashdot. Not that I'm taking a strong stance against slashdot, but is that the culture we want from this website? Just my two cents.