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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

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Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#801

Post by dinkumthinkum »

gruseom wrote: post #416
ihuman wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused by the wording of your comment. Are you saying that downvoting "is only supposed to be used for unproductive comments" or to show agreement? You use "it," but I can't tell which statement you are referring to.

Sorry for being unclear. What I mean is that downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN. I'm too lazy to dig up the many links where this was discussed, but the point is that if upvoting is a legit way to agree, then downvoting is a legit way to disagree. This is a good thing, because it provides a silent way to disagree when you don't have anything substantive to add to the di…

I think you're wrong and are just trying up make some claim about Reddit. I don't think it is as simple as "upvoting in agreement is legitimate therefore the converse is true." Down voting as the effect of removing the comment from discussion and is even used to indicate there is something unfair, mean, or what have you. I think what you're talking is more for a site that shows the scores of comments but does not obscure them.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#802

Post by pbhjpbhj »

n09n wrote: post #750
AJ72 wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is important that we encourage new users to comment on HN. The reality is that early posts from new users may not make the grade set by 1000+ Karma users. Let them be visible as otherwise you may discourage such new users from re engaging/commenting further. Color coding comments to flag they as 'pending' is fine. But complete hiding them sounds too strong Its great to have the conversation on how to improve HN co…

Why is important to encourage new users to comment? That, too, seems to be solving a problem that doesn't exist.

I'd ask the converse - why inhibit new users from commenting? They seem almost as likely to have a contributing comment as established users.

Not all accounts are new users of course.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#803

Post by 1morewebdev »

hga wrote: post #771
beloch wrote: post #274

My may concern with this system: Sledgehammer meets tack. The comments on HN aren't perfect, but they're far from bad when compared to other sites of this nature. There has been a downwards trend most probably due to the increasing popularity of HN. A response is warranted. However, this system has the potential to silence a lot of high quality comments on any threads that aren't on the front-page for an extended per…

I'd also like to point out that plenty of us with plenty of karma also have some degree of RSI (repetitive strain injury, sometimes loosely called carpal tunnel syndrome (that's just one of many forms of RSI)), in part acquired by what allowed us to get so much karma. No way can I afford to spend a lot of mousing and clicking on a zillion "pending" comments to make them visible to the hoi polli . Heck, ignoring the g…

Good to see someone point out a flaw on basing the success of the site on the dependability of the 1k+ group. They need not all be benevolent dictators (or even interested) in spirit.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#804

Post by pbhjpbhj »

gruseom wrote: post #416
ihuman wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused by the wording of your comment. Are you saying that downvoting "is only supposed to be used for unproductive comments" or to show agreement? You use "it," but I can't tell which statement you are referring to.

Sorry for being unclear. What I mean is that downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN. I'm too lazy to dig up the many links where this was discussed, but the point is that if upvoting is a legit way to agree, then downvoting is a legit way to disagree. This is a good thing, because it provides a silent way to disagree when you don't have anything substantive to add to the di…

>downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN //

Um, no. You downvote when a comment doesn't contribute. If you disagree then you can state it and if that contributes it can get upvoted too.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#805

Post by pbhjpbhj »

senthilnayagam wrote: post #675

for negative voting you needed 500 karma's, I have been on hacker news for 1900+ days, currently have 438 karma's . though I read lot of posts and checks top and new posts every couple of hours. I don't submit many posts, or ask questions. I only comment where I see a value or I can contribute to the discussion in some form. but if for my comment to be endorsement needs someone with 1000karma, I will take anywhere be…

Presumably I could work through your comment history and just give you 62 upvotes ... wonder if there's a system in place to stop that?

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#807

Post by drivingmenuts »

wildfire wrote: post #259
pg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly what happens.

A shame. Whilst I am always intrigued with what hits the front-page, I rather more often than occasionally, find myself getting to page 10 or so on the weekends. Just to see what has been going on that I missed. Your change will basically mean that someone like me who might have something to add to an existing conversation might as well not bother. It'll be years before I have enough karma on ycombinator's hackernews…

I wasn't aware that there was a page 10.

In my experience, page 2 is inaccessible after carefully scanning page 1 for a minute or two, and maybe clicking on or two links and reading the articles. Some generated link to page 2 expires during the time I'm scanning page 1.

Five years, I thought that was by intent and not some bug. Equally frustrating, but damn.

TLDR: Yes, Virginia, there is a Page 10 of HN. You'll just have to take someone else's word on that.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#808

Post by TrevorJ »

pg wrote: post #329
cperciva wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might work... but only if people actually read that page. Given how few people look at /newest (as estimated by the fraction of votes which are cast before submissions hit the frontpage) I'm not optimistic. How about only placing comments into the "pending" purgatory if the submission they're attached to has received more than X comments in the past Y minutes? I assume it's the chatty discussions which you're co…

Let's see how much of a problem there is first. I wanted to start with the simplest possible thing. If it breaks in some cases I'll add stuff to fix those.

Looking at it statistically - there's always going to be a chance that a given comment will remain pending indefinitely. Over a long enough timeline, a greater and greater percentage of contributors will be unable to post.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#809

Post by TrevorJ »

jaredsohn wrote: post #559
cclogg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I like this idea quite a bit. I don't know how many users there are with >1000 karma, but will they be motivated to keep endorsing everyone else's pending posts? Sometimes good discussions do happen on quieter threads, or way down the list that the 1000+ users might not see. Well, I guess it really comes down to just how much (proper) endorsing ends up happening. One thing I like about HN is that it's open an…

>I don't know how many users there are with >1000 karma There are about 5500 such users. There have been around 245,000 users to ever post on Hacker News and around 85,000 users have posted over the last year. Source: I'm working on a fork of the Hacker News Karma tracker (not ready to be live yet) that uses Algolia's new HN Search API; I also downloaded every comment ever made similar to how minimaxir downloaded all…

I wonder how many upvotes we would collectively have to give each day to bring comments out of pending?

Looks like in the last 10 minutes we've had 30 comments on HN - that's about 180 and hour - that's 4,320 comments in a 24-hour period.

Let's say 50% of those are worthy of being seen. If we assume it takes two upvotes per comment to bring it out of pending status then that group of 5500 people need to cast 4,320 upvotes a day collectively to to stay caught up.

Given the fact that A: it's unlikely that all 5500 of these users are still active, and B: it's very unlikely that they would be upvoting the same comments then it seems almost certain that there will be a SIGNIFICANT backlog of pending comments created each day.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#810

Post by Mz »

As a woman who has long struggled to find a way to fit in on HN, I worry this will just make it harder for anyone who isn't already part of the "in crowd" and will just magnify problems for women, minorities, newbs, whomever.

I hope it works well but it does concern me. I don't know what else to suggest though since HN is a larger scale than I know how to moderate.

Edit: So count me as feeling kind of threatened and wondering if I will ever be allowed to comment again.

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