Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

Do the first two links I listed here count? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7451438

I wouldn't say it's ever been agreed on; I'm pretty sure people disagreed about this from day one. And downvoted each other about it :)

> Does that make it true?

It makes it true that it's the site policy, yes.

Silence those with opinions that are not popular. Even if their points are valid, censor them. how many innocuous comments (ones that may not be quite worth an up-vote, yet add a sprinkle of thought) will be lost forever? In this scenario, all those comments who were left at 1 point now are never heard. Casual users (which must make up quite a large percentage of HN) will not be readily heard.

Those comments with even an air of controversy will not be approved because if it ends up with down-votes, that will go toward the approving member's record and may end up getting them banned eventually.

Controversial points and less popular opinions and facts will never be seen to counter. PG, you are building a Censorship wall so that controversial or unpopular comments now don't even exist to refute/debate. There is a reason that anytime you take away people's free speech or expression, they eventually revolt.

Why do comments that are not mainstream have to go away (as in never be seen). Why not engage in debate about them. I never understood this. Sure I can see censoring comments containing personal threats or vulgar content, but this is ridiculous. Keeping information from someone's eyes just because one group does not agree with it is censorship.

Honestly, the way that disagreeable comments are handled now are quite refreshing and are one of the reasons that HN is so popular. Anyone can post their opinion. If people don't agree with it, they can engage in civil opposition. If it is inappropriate, they can down-vote.

Perhaps the biggest reason for not pending comments is that you are going to dramatically change what shows up here. You have members of one group (or classification if you will) who are very active and will all have 1000 points, this group now is the voice of HN. Those who post more occasionally, post late, or don't pad their numbers by replying to the hot thread (rather they create their own which drops 3/4 down the page) now have a limited voice. Other groups likely have many differing opinions than the over 1000 class, they now have no voice. You see, your over 1000 (certainly the minority of your members) mostly all have common opinions, ideologies and viewpoints about things. This group now has the power to silence those others (though perhaps even larger in numbers) groups.

I would have liked it if you ran a poll before coding something like this. A last minute pseudo-courtesy notification shows just how much HN is really all about you and does not really belong to the people who actually own it (the public). Without us, you've got and idle server. No stories posted, no comments, nothing. Your totalitarianism attitude put a bad taste in my mouth.

I actually found it optimistic, in the "destroy a village to save it"[1] sense. HN, as it currently stands, will cease to exist. I suspect the volume of submissions pointing directly to old wikipedia articles will dry up. I consider this a good thing.

I suspect the volume of submissions that are reposts piling onto something already on the front page (Erlang, Erlang, Erlang, Erlang, Haskell, Haskell, Haskell, Go, Go, Go, Snowden, Snowden, NSA, Erlang, Lisp, Lisp, Lisp, Lisp-flavored Erlang, NSA, Erlang, Erlang, Bacon and Spam, Javascript, Framework, Framework, NSA, Erlang, Haskell, Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, 2048, will dry up. I consider this a good thing.

I suspect I will spend less time on the site, either because conversations will become static expressions of views or because I won't have to filter through as much content, even though much of which marginalia I find quite engrossing. I consider this a good thing.

What comes next is open to conjecture. It could be a more mature salon full of reasoned discussions or it could become a ghost town with lots of great, old, discussions.

[1] I know, apocryphal at best.

Hmmm, in this thread the dead comments are some of the best. Or at least, the ones with which I best agree.

Only a few more days to go before April 1st. Did PG accidentally post a little early? If he's indeed serious, then his idea strikes me as similar to the person tossing a grenade back into the room they are just leaving. Either that, or an attempt to permanently cement in place the discourse control privileges of the Ancien Régime before their figurehead steps down.

Another problem I have with HN's structure, is that the control/censorship details don't seem to be laid out clearly anywhere. The post order sorting algorithm still mystifies me, and I only learned of 'dead/showdead' recently, when it was discussed in a thread. After that I leave showdead permanently on, and notice a distinct ideological bias in the killing of posts.

Seems likely the details of the 'pending' system won't be documented clearly for new users either. How do you think new arrivals will feel, when their posts are segregated and they don't even fully understand why?

Are there other existing regulatory schemes in HN I'm not aware of? For instance after I first started participating my karma count was going up sensibly. Then I made one comment mentioning the J and Z words, and got almost instantly smashed to negative karma. (Maybe that was before hell banning was implemented?) Since then I still seem to have random posts voted down, that seem reasonable and positive to me. My tiny karma grows very very slowly, and doesn't appear likely to ever reach 1000. So effectively, HN with the 'pending post' scheme implemented would be closed to me.

If the objective is to restrict forum participation to actual startup principles and their invited friends, why not just say so, and enforce that directly?