Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 157 posts

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#61

Post by minimaxir »

derefr wrote: post #50
minimaxir wrote: post #11

For note, here's a chart I just made of the number of Hacker News comments made over the last 3 years: http://i.imgur.com/4FwglA8.png The number of comments has been growing significantly; perhaps change won't be bad.

It'd be more useful if the graph was in terms of comments per story per month, I think. As it is, the data could just mean that stories hit the front page, get discussed, and disappear increasingly quickly.

Stories hit the front page and disappear as a part of Hacker News's time weighting for determining ranking. It's extremely, extremely unusual for an article to be on the front page more than a day.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#64

Post by evolve2k »

Radical suggestion: Add another list called say 'peanut gallery' which is where all the unapproved, unflagged comments live.

This way 'comments' filters out the noise yet HN still keeps all unflagged comments transparently available, avoiding accusations of censorship.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#65

Post by protomyth »

pg wrote: post #2

I suggest another option: wait to see what it's like.

I guess I'm just worried that I will go to the front page and see two or more interesting stories I want to comment on and know I will only be able to pick one. I comment in bursts during breaks. I will also probably not comment on stories on the new page because it will be iffy on them getting the attention needed to not block me for a long time.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#66

Post by brudgers »

My initial reaction was WTF?

But then I thought that pending comments are somewhat analogous to the "new" page for submissions. And it sort of makes sense.

My ambivalence is that I don't upvote every comment that isn't bad, and I'm not sure I want to be responsible for moderating comments. And I certainly don't spend a lot of time wading through the new stories.

On the other hand, these days interesting threads are often swamped with several hundred comments in the first hour or two, and it seems like a lot of the comments are the same noise.

In the long run I suspect it will be a win.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#67

Post by poulsbohemian »

Whether or not it will be an improvement remains to be seen. That said, I'm glad to see improvements attempted. One concern is that I've had some nasty unprofessional responses from people with high karma in the past - responses that made me question how they got the karma to begin with given their snotty behavior. What I noticed is that many had made very few contributions to discussions, but they'd racked up the points with a couple successful post submissions. So, I guess I'm a little concerned about putting moderation in the hands of people with high karma, as I'm not convinced the karma count is actually indicative of good, meaningful participation.

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#68

Post by _xhok »

pizza wrote: post #27

I don't know whether I like it or not, but I know for sure that we'll get used to it.

Point is, this isn't just some visual tweak to get used to or not. It's a structural change that will have visible effects on the quality of the comments.

(That being said, my answer is "wait and see.")

Re: Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?

#70

Post by jboy »

It might be worth waiting a month or two to see what it's like, and then running this poll again at the end of that trial period.

I think that many people (myself included) would feel more relaxed about the change if there were a commitment that the system would be reverted quickly at the end of the trial period, if a majority of users (perhaps 2/3 of poll participants) decided that they preferred the old system.

It seems that some of the deeper concerns about this change are: 1. These types of changes often seem to be made unilaterally, without any idea of what a significant majority might prefer. 2. Changes like this often seem to be one-way changes.

Post reply on HN