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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#91

Post by jfoster »

jonesetc wrote: post #73
jfoster wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how a test might cause permanent damage? Keep in mind that it should be clear whether significant damage is occurring quite soon after it rolls out. (Eg. Whether comments are getting approved, rate of comments, etc.)

I meant it to go along with the rest of the paragraph. I think you'll see people turn around at the door with this policy. I would have.

That's certainly a possibility. It would show up in HN's metrics. (perhaps not visible to you and I, though)

On the other hand, you might also see more people coming in the door. What if this makes conversation on HN so much better that more people want to get involved?

The one thing that is certain with the new system is that if your comments are abusive, they will probably not get endorsed. Perhaps at first they will (protesting 1k+ karma users) but eventually anyone who is endorsing poor quality comments would likely lose the ability to endorse.

At a minimum, I think this a really interesting experiment.

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

#92

Post by rkuykendall-com »

ryannevius wrote: post #42
rkuykendall-com wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few notes: 1) That poll was conducted well after the change. That makes it a very different type of poll. 2) This change has half as much support, if you ignore the wait-and-sees.

Why on earth would you ignore the "wait-and-sees"?

It was hard to compare a yes/no poll with a yes/no/idk poll. So I dropped the idk. They didn't think it wouldn't work, and they didn't think it would work, so there was no parallel to the other poll.

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

#93

Post by derefr »

hayksaakian wrote: post #76
derefr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rank is only apparent when a comment has siblings. When two people are having a reply-to-reply back-and-forth debate, I'm usually left very curious to which side HN agrees with.

personally, i'd rather that be unknown to avoid encouraging hive-mindedness.

It just occurred to me that it'd actually be nice to display scores on threads when they become archived--in other words, when knowing the score can no longer encourage you to upvote.

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

#94

Post by 001sky »

jfoster wrote: post #72
jonesetc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's just a test, it seems a reasonable scenario that just the test will cause permanent damage. I understand trying to promote better discussion, but this system is downright unwelcoming to any newcomers. When I registered to comment I thought the downvote restrictions were odd and I was willing to try it out, but if this was in place I'd have closed the tab and never come back. Maybe subject-matter experts…

Can you elaborate on how a test might cause permanent damage? Keep in mind that it should be clear whether significant damage is occurring quite soon after it rolls out. (Eg. Whether comments are getting approved, rate of comments, etc.)

Eg, if this policy precludes 1-on-1 dialogue between sub 1k users, that would (arguably) be a dis-service. It would be "permanent" in the sense that the rules# logically don't allow a two party conversation (ie, absent a 3rd party "endorsement"). So this meets the test of "damage" and "permanence" at some threshold.

# The original ones, at least.

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

#95

Post by derefr »

minimaxir wrote: post #61
derefr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, but they can be on the front page for much less than a day, depending on how quickly we move onto discussing the next thing. And that "much less" can shrink further over time.

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

#96

Post by noarchy »

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.

Why is it necessarily a bad thing that the number of comments has grown? This only matters if the overall quality of posts has decreased. More comments can also mean more good posts.

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

#97

Post by meursault334 »

rory096 wrote: post #81
jonesetc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's just a test, it seems a reasonable scenario that just the test will cause permanent damage. I understand trying to promote better discussion, but this system is downright unwelcoming to any newcomers. When I registered to comment I thought the downvote restrictions were odd and I was willing to try it out, but if this was in place I'd have closed the tab and never come back. Maybe subject-matter experts…

As a (mostly) lurker who's quite wary of this change, I agree that stifling newcomers and longtime but quiet users could deprive the HN community of something real. That said, Hacker News is a high enough quality forum that it could fare quite well for some time even if it completely cut off registrations. I don't think the experiment will be catastrophic by any means; though it'll undoubtedly result in at least some…

The worst aspect of this change for me is the knowledge that because of my sub-500 status I am not even allowed to see pending comments. I am cut off from the full discourse.

PG indicated that he might add show pending/dead comment buttons so maybe that concern will be alleviated.

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

#98

Post by dchichkov »

teacup50 wrote: post #47

Call me cynical, but this sure seems like an effort to enforce groupthink on the company news outlet. I suppose we'd do well to remember what business YC is in, and how critical public messaging and perception is to that business, not just in terms of their existing investments, but also ongoing recruitment.

There is a chance that YC had already crossed the threshold of not being money-hungry and now is in the community-building mode.

And if not. Oh well. Anyone who matters is likely to be intelligent enough to detect company bullshit/groupthink and this would be the end of it.

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