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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

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Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#831
" And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"

"..and we in the haste of a precipitant zeal shall make no distinction, but resolve to stop their mouths, because we fear they come with new and dangerous opinions, as we commonly forejudge them ere we understand them; no less than woe to us, while thinking thus to defend the Gospel, we are found the persecutors."

"For if they fell upon one kind of strictness, unless their care were equal to regulate all other things of like aptness to corrupt the mind, that single endeavour they knew would be but a fond labour: to shut and fortify one gate against corruption, and be necessitated to leave others round about wide open. If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing of dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth, but what by their allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato was provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers to examine all the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every house; they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed what they may say. And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whisper softness in chambers? The windows also, and the balconies, must be thought on; there are shrewd books, with dangerous frontispieces, set to sale: who shall prohibit them, shall twenty licensers? The villages also must have their visitors to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebec reads, even to the balladry and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for these are the countryman's Arcadias and his Monte Mayors."

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#832
Apologies if anyone has already made a similar suggestion... but, 1000 seems like an arbitrary amount of karma. What do you guys think of a fluid amount of karma required to post a non-pending comment. Popular stories on the front page can play by PG's rules. However, to encourage discussion on new submissions, scale back the karma requirements. The kinds of people who post obnoxious comments are looking for a crowd anyways.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH that's the only use of votes I've seen agreed on as valid here. Despite your relative long-standing I'll bow to your claim of factuality and request citation of that fact?

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 :)

Both of those links (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117118 [actually 117171 for the pg comment], https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683) appear to be simply pg saying people do downvote when they disagree rather than him endorsing that activity.

Indeed the first link says in part:

>"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement."

Which reads to me as having an implicit "also to express agreement" especially in the context of the thread. The thread consensus appears to favour not downvoting for mere disagreement (but I would say that !).

In the past when we had votes visible we'd have been able to tell better the general consensus from that information.

So, I upvoted you for making your point well; presumably you downvoted me as you disagreed.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is very little value in knowing that some people disagree with a comment, but there is tremendous value in learning other ideas. This is a bad policy.

That's a good point. But let me ask you: do you think HN actually has this problem, i.e. of ideas being suppressed because people disagree? If so, I'd be curious to see examples. Most of the downvoted stuff I see has some other readily available explanation; usually some form of rudeness.

It's not about being suppressed in an active way. For the problem I'm talking about, it's completely sufficient for the disagreed-with posts to simply not rise to the top of the discussion.

Remember, HN doesn't even show the vote counts on posts, so you can't extract hardly any agreement-disagreement info from a post (other than it's not so bad as to be downvoted to oblivion). The true and important function of the votes is to control visibility.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#836

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 eve…

I promised not to comment on HN again due to this policy but I logged in one last time just to upvote this comment from NextUserName. I don't care how much karma he/she has or doesn't have, the words hit the nail right on the head. I hope that the HN folks realize that this decision to pend comments has left a bad taste in many visitors mouths. The path goes against the social expectations of today. Whether other platforms do it or not, is not and should not be the issue. I can see that user experience is not high on the task list with this decision, but please listen and care about us who are now leaving but still wish to return when a more social policy is in place.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Both of those links ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117118 [actually 117171 for the pg comment], https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683 ) appear to be simply pg saying people do downvote when they disagree rather than him endorsing that activity. Indeed the first link says in part: >" I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. " Which reads to me as having an implicit "also to exp…

Those two comments are far from the only data points, though. But now I really am too lazy to look any more up.

My memory is simply that PG always said downvoting for disagreement was fine and many users have always thought he made the wrong call. Still, it's his site, so his call to make.

The interesting thing to me is how confident these users are that they're quoting the site rules, when really they're contradicting them, de facto if not de jure. Just like a lot of us Canadians think that famous U.S. laws (e.g. Miranda rights) apply here, because we've seen them many times on TV, so a lot of HNers assume that this Reddit rule exists on HN.

> presumably you downvoted me as you disagreed

Couldn't! Also wouldn'tve.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#838

This is ridiculous. It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions, but now our comments need to be vetted by the elite HN users before they can be shown to the rest. I don't get it. This site looks like something made in 1996 (with absolutely no regard for readability), but the big new upgrade we're getting is a draconian (and wholly unnecessary) comment moderation feature/policy? A lot of HN user…

Well, I wouldn't endorse it. But, since some of your points are often raised... > It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions That particular disease doesn't seem to have taken hold here yet. Comments that are downvoted below 1 more often are angry, abusive, trollish, or devoid of content. > ...but now our comments need to be vetted by the elite HN users... An "elite" group of, by a rough estima…

The tone and emotion police on HN, like you, are tedious and stultifying.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#839
This sounds like a very rash idea, and an unwarranted imposition of the view point of a small number on a majority. I've been using th site for 3 yrs only, not since the good old days when all the commenting was pure and holy. And yet, I find the standard of commenting here wonderful. It doesn't need this sort of illiberal policing by the 1k elite.
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