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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?

#101

Post by rmrfrmrf »

jonesetc wrote: post #59
pg wrote: post #2

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

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…

I come to HN to learn new things and to get the opinions of people who are well-trained in their fields. In that respect, I don't really care what a new user's, student's, or novice's opinion on something is unless they've had valuable firsthand experience, in which case the comment would definitely add to the discussion. IMO any change to this site that encourages listening over speaking is quite welcome.

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

#102

Post by MCem »

Disclaimer: I am a long-time lurker who has only logged in a handful of times but browses daily.

It seems to me that this change moves further toward a select group of individuals owning and controlling the dialog on this site. This is bad news for the people who are not in this select group.

Before this change, a hacker news thread represented the collective dialog of the users on this site. Now, even though everyone can still comment, a hacker news thread is the collective dialog of everyone who can approve comments.

This is a dramatization; of course people with 1K karma will approve any reasonable comments and do so without any sort of agenda. Still, we can afford to be knitpicky about this change because the current system isn't broken. There is, in my mind, not any significant problem with comment quality. Why make a change now when it can potentially make the site worse and doesn't offer that great of an upside?

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

#105

Post by dlubarov »

It seems like a very primitive solution to a nontrivial problem. Why treat comment quality as binary?

Reddit's approach is slightly more sophisticated and works well in practice. You generally see only quality comments, but you can read all of them if you want to. And you can contribute content without worrying that it may be delayed or outright rejected.

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

#106

Post by WiseWeasel »

jfoster wrote: post #89
amjd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, this is a kind of change which makes it difficult to know the real impact since the users who would have a problem with it are the ones losing their voice (until a karma elite user intervenes, of course). That's one of the reasons most people are opposed to this.

Everyone can see pending comments, though. At a minimum, everyone has the potential to find out if there might be a problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/pending

The problem will be the low signal-to-noise ratio, making that section unbearable.

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

#107

Post by BadCookie »

It's interesting that this "improvement" to comments was specifically mentioned in Sam Altman's recent blog post about potential female founders. For what it's worth, this change makes me (a female with <1000 karma) feel less welcome and considerably less likely to comment. I'm not saying that this feeling is tied to being female -- it (probably) isn't. But if you want to attract new people and new types of people to HN, then this change seems very much counter to that goal. The feeling that the insiders have to approve what you're saying before you can have a voice is not a good one.

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

#108

Post by milankragujevic »

I disagree. I don't have the time to get karma, but I would still like to comment sometimes (I'm a noob, but I've been using HN for a year already in read mode). Now with this system there's no chance for me to actually (on paper there is, but there are so many more quality comments than mine that mine will never ever be published). Back to read mode I guess...

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

#109

Post by panacea »

brudgers wrote: post #78
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…

HN is like EMACS not WordPad. It has a learning curve.To some extent, HN is unwelcoming to new comers by design. It filters out people who want to behave to the same standards as the rest of the internet. To put it in perspective, your post would several standard deviations above the mean both in length and content on most sites. Would have written so thoughtfully and carefully a year ago?

Having a $5 sign-up fee would be better than 'pending comments', IMHO.

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

#110

Post by panacea »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #56
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #16

It's worth comparing this poll to the one about whether HN should display comment scores: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 Only 38.5% of users were in favor of comment scores being hidden, but it was decidedly a positive change for the site.

> it was decidedly a positive change for the site. Was it? When things were transparent, there were no reason to upvote interesting trollish comments. Now they get blindly up-voted for being interesting. For example, consider this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7436401 About 5 facebook engineers are answering questions. They are of course buried by a meta discussion about whether facebook should use PH…

My most up-voted comment is this:

"2048 is HN's Flappy Bird"

Hardly enlightening or interesting.

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