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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

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Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#111
post #32

Please consider making pending comments anonymous. Let the comment stand on its own.

Whether that makes sense depends on the context. Particularly in the case of someone submitting a link to their own (startup|open source code|blog post|etc), people often ask questions along the lines of "what does the author think about X" and the identity of the person replying matters a great deal to whether a reply is meaningful.

It should be obvious whether such an answer sounds authoritative or not, and it sounds like a comment could still be downvoted once endorsed. So I don't think this is as big of a problem as users endorsing (or not endorsing) based on username.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#112
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, trust cperciva to find the thing I'd overlooked. I'll add a pending page that collects pending comments. Maybe that will solve the problem.

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…

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 and fast to use. Having a pending mode on everyone's comments affects not only the troll-users, but many of the normal ones too who aren't abusing the system ><.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#113

I think this is a great change. It's great that you're still iterating on HN and changing the fundamentals. Can someone with over 1,000 karma start replying to a fresh comment before it's endorsed? Or will the reply link not be there until it's endorsed? If it's the latter, I'm worried that this might stifle the (admittedly rare) back-and-forth discussion between two experts, such as tptacek and cperciva. People who…

> If it's the latter, I'm worried that this might stifle the (admittedly rare) back-and-forth discussion between two experts, such as tptacek and cperciva

Why wouldn't they just endorse each other's comments and continue a meaningful dialog?

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#114
Comments get from pending to live by being endorsed by multiple HN users with over 1000 karma.

By "multiple", does this literally mean 'by at least two', or by a fixed number that you may or may not want to divulge, or by some other more complicated factor? I think the answer to this will heavily impact the 'unpopular (but not bad) comment' concerns.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#116
post #57
post #47

I feel like this really discourages unpopular truths from the discussion. This is one of the worst options I've ever heard for a comment system.

As I understand the idea, endorsing a comment doesn't mean you agree with it. It just means you think it deserves to be in the thread. That should leave room for unpopular views as long as they're respectfully expressed.

In principle, this should work.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess what? your comment wouldn't be endorsed either.. You will not have any chance to even see that comment. It may be a good thing, but the current system has few issues one of them: it will be much harder for anyone to get to 1000+ karma so effectively current "crème de la crème" will be in total control. Remember how some news with NSA in the title were being censored? This new system is much worse than that.

How is it much worse? For a comment to be censored, literally every user with over 1000 karma must refuse to endorse the comment. That doesn't sound like centralized thought control to me...

At least few 1000+karma users must endorse the comment for it to become visible.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#118

I think this is a great change. It's great that you're still iterating on HN and changing the fundamentals. Can someone with over 1,000 karma start replying to a fresh comment before it's endorsed? Or will the reply link not be there until it's endorsed? If it's the latter, I'm worried that this might stifle the (admittedly rare) back-and-forth discussion between two experts, such as tptacek and cperciva. People who…

> If it's the latter, I'm worried that this might stifle the (admittedly rare) back-and-forth discussion between two experts, such as tptacek and cperciva Why wouldn't they just endorse each other's comments and continue a meaningful dialog?

It sounds like each comment requires multiple endoresements.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#120
Seems great! I'm wondering what the incentive is for users to endorse comments, beyond improving HN's quality?

There is a malus for endorsing bad comments, shouldn't there be a built-in bonus for well-behaving endorsers, to compensate and make the system self-sufficient?

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