Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

I think it's a good idea, as the quality of comments have been degrading.

Perhaps after a post has reached a certain age (few hours) comments would slowly open up to users with less and less karma. Just a thought, but I agree a "show pending" toggle would be nice too.

I have posted some 10-15 comments here on HN and not one of them have appeared in the discussions. I don't know how a "noob" can have his comments actually appear and get some kind of discussion going. This will probably make it even worse. So more of the "toeing the party line comments" apparently. Just watch, this comment won't be seen either...

A checkbox that says 'Hide comments from noobs' would suffice.

I have 41 karma (rarely comment) but have been here 2546 days. Would appreciate being grandfathered in, thanks.

> Hmm, trust cperciva to find the thing I'd overlooked.

I don't understand. The whole point of not being able to post until your previous post is endorsed--which is strictly separate and independent feature from invisible-until-endorsed--would be that people stop and reconsider "hm is this really the best I can do" because if it isn't they'll be muted ... indefinitely?

Or can you delete your own pending comment if it seems that no one is going to endorse it for you?

If not, that's going to become a huge chilling effect on unique thoughts and ideas that may either be controversial, or simply unpopular. Quite a stifling gamble. And even if you do get to remove that post from pending-limbo so you're at least not muted indefinitely, that still means the unique idea hasn't been shared, and in fact has been self-censored.

And will controversial ideas be endorsed? Because you said that endorsing the "wrong" kinds of comments will get your endorsing-rights revoked. I'm assuming, like all moderator-actions on HN, the user will get absolutely no notice or feedback about this.

Endorsing slightly controversial comments will be like feeling your way in the dark, err on the side of caution, better to just endorse comments that align with the perceived HN-groupthink (which may very soon become much realer, with this new system).

This is not a question of "but we have to be better than that", because these processes run on the aggregate of a very large group of people. Very large groups of people are vanishingly unlikely to "be better than that", no matter how clever, smart, talented or well-intentioned their individuals are.

So that will happen.

And that's just the collateral effects regarding content of posts (I say collateral because they are at best orthogonal to the quality of discussion on HN).

Like cperciva points out, if people are going to hesitate posting if they are unsure they'll be stuck in pending-limbo for how long or indefinitely, they are going to adjust their behaviour with regards to all factors that may influence how long it takes before a post gets sufficiently endorsed.

Which includes very irrelevant ones, like whether it's a quiet or new thread. Or, you know, making contact, silly stuff like "drop me a mail at @gmail" between two sub-kilokarma users in a not-very-busy thread, risk locking their commenting privileges for quite a while.

Sorry if I dare to say so, but overlooking all these things, it seems like you just considered only the positive consequences of this big change, and none of the possible negative ones?

Then there's the final big negative one, which I think lacks a bit of self-reflection in order to overlook: HN already is quite the echo-chamber. These new rules are going to make that much worse. If, after a month or two of these new endorsing+feeling-in-the-dark+best-safest-to-conform rules do not make me feel like the quality of discussion turned into an ingrown toenail of monkey-discussion[0], then the most probable conclusion is: HN has turned into this echo-chamber (which seems quite inevitable), except it just so happens to be the kind of echoes I agree with. Which is probably worse than an echo-chamber you disagree with.

Hey, good luck. This community building is hard stuff.

Also watch out for the lure of power and control, it's also "hard stuff", of a different kind.

[0] your new rules are already making me doubt whether this is "gratuitous nastiness" or just a funny visual way of expressing a critique. this saddens me. it also makes me feel a couple of other things which I now don't even dare to express any more. that's bad.

> This will only work to increase the echo chamber that is HN. Any type of debate will now need to go through the HN elite.

I think that's not a bug, that's a feature. PG mentioned before that HN was growing too fast and that keeping up was hard. I'm guessing the problem trying to be solved is the Eternal September[1], and this feature does exactly that: you are only allowed to post once you learned how to behave the HN way.

[1] In case someone doesn't know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September