Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

I've been reading HN for over 3 years and I am more than happy to use my own judgment to ignore comments that do not contribute to the discussion. I rather have that than miss a comment that others have not deemed important.

(technically this does not apply to me as I have karma > 1000, but I am speaking from the viewpoint of somebody who hasn't)

We do not need rules like this. We need good judgment.

Good judgment cannot be enforced; it has to be cultivated. It'd be better to post reminders about etiquette somewhere prominently and trust that people tend to do the right thing (and most people do).

- 2908 is comment karma; 1804 is post karma. (The total adds up to a bit too much; I'm probably miscalculating.)

Out of the post karma, 1634 was gained by 5 submissions which made it onto the front page and acquired hundreds of karma. None of the posts I submitted, including those, were written by me. (I'd like to start a blog, but I'm too lazy and shy for now.) And in my opinion, the value I contributed to the community simply by submitting them is rather low; considering that I've frequently tried to submit a story I found especially likely to generate interesting HN discussion only to find it already submitted, it's more likely that I won a race. On the other end, it's well accepted that whether a post manages to get a few points to bring it out of /new before it gets buried is somewhat random - IMHO some of my other submissions were just as good, but they didn't bite for whatever reason - making the correlation between value and post karma even more skewed.

- The comment karma histogram is a bit less lopsided: my top 100 comments (i.e. the top 3%) are responsible for about half of it (1469). But on the other end, 48% of my comments ended up with 1 or 2 points; while many of my comments are bad, I suspect that the difference is more about being seen than the top rated comments being that much better than the 1 pointers.

Also, if you sort by comment length, which is to some extent a reasonable proxy for quality, only 537 karma was earned by the top 100. Many of my top rated comments are relatively simple rebuttals to (in my opinion) bad comments; in my opinion, these can be valuable (since articulating why a comment is wrong is much more useful than simply downvoting it, and most comments never get responded to), but aren't as valuable as the long ones.

It probably doesn't help that (I think) I'm much more likely to respond to other comments (and try to have a discussion, the very thing that this change makes difficult :() than to comment on the post itself.

In my not-so-humble opinion, if you have the time and volubility to constantly make long, good comments on popular posts, you'll be rewarded. But if you don't, because the vast majority of comments will net you nothing, you'll get more by optimizing for quantity and being first to the scene, hoping for a small number of posts and comments to semi-randomly get a large fraction of the karma, than pre-selecting for quality.

Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like how Y Combinator makes its money.

Oh, and submit a lot of posts.

What made HN great was that anyone could post both stories and comments. Now I can just think, will this comment ever be visible or will it disappear into the abyss and my time writing it was totally meaningless?

To really test this feature, I want to say what I really feel:

Fuck this feature and go shove pending comments in somebody else's ass.

If anything, I think the stories are the problem. Cool hacks and interesting science often fail to get the 2-3 upvotes they need to escape the new page. On page 2 of "New", I've found the following fairly decent stories that died recently: http://simplystatistics.org/2014/03/20/the-8020-rule-of-stat... http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/cassandra-...

Yet both of these are vastly more useful than Julie Horvath's "omfg, I had a workplace conflict" or "Yay basic income, no facts, no reasoning, yay" (currently 380 pts, 441 comments, was #1 for a while today).

I'd suggest that it's far more important to improve the stories than to improve the comments. The comments on a story like "JDK 8 Release Notes" or "Circuit Breaker" (about a distributed computing design pattern) are actually quite good.