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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

news.ycombinator.com

241–250 of 854 posts

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#241
post #66

This sounds promising. I'm worried about two things: 1) Will a minimum number of endorsements lead to groupthink? Will a substantial, polite but unpopular comment still get endorsed? 2) If this works initially and improves comments immediately, could it have negative long term affects? Will new users find it confusing or intimidating? Will people comment less knowing that others are less likely to see it? And one que…

I am worried about this as well.

I believe it will likely kill decent and valid discussions. HN already is a little disconnected from reality sometimes, with this we will end up with a fake consensus. Besides, it will become harder to attain 1000+ karma, so we will be endorsing a small group of people of old users and will be unwelcoming for new folks.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#243
post #28

Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another. We're hoping that good comments will get endorsed so quickly that there won't be a noticeable delay. Is there some timeout? If not, commenting on a several-day-old thread will guarantee that you can never post another comment, since once threads drop off the front page it's not likely that many 1000+ karma users will even see those…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#244

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…

There's this attitude I see a lot, that I think started with Digg, then attached itself to Reddit, that a community should A. be about whatever its users want it to be about, and B. be free to join. These principles are usually claimed to be somehow representative of "democracy."

Together, however, these principles will invariably mean that the "community" will be reduced to a snapshot of the world-at-large, as new only-somewhat-related-to-the-community's-current-interests people join, and further expand/dilute the scope of the community. The eventual equilibrium consists mostly of partisan political debate, sex RP, and cute animal pictures, with nobody recognizing anyone else and nobody sharing any interests with anyone else--in other words, not a "community" in anything but name.

Digg was reduced to this. Reddit avoided it by shattering into postmodern everyone-gets-a-different-flavor subcommunities, but all the "frontpage-default" subcommunities then succumbed to this anyway.

If you want a community, you must moderate either participation or membership. Personally, I think moderating membership results in better communities. But--unless you follow the SomethingAwful strategy of "you can be unbanned as many times as you like, as long as you keep paying ten dollars"--moderating participation is easier at scale.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#246

So only popular posters with popular opinions will be allowed to endorse posts. This feels like you are walling off HN for those who are already established here. I've been here for years, I like to feel like I have a chance to contribute to discussions without hoping some karma overlord will approve. I believe this change will cause HN to stagnate and become an echo chamber of the thoughts of those who are already p…

Yes, this seems like the whole point of the "feature".

I'm really missing what problem is being solved..

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#247
It will be an act of service to the community (which will be amply rewarded by the community being a community of higher-quality comments, methinks) for the users with more than 1000 karma to regularly visit the new submissions page

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

and the active threads page

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

to keep track of which threads are most likely to need comment review. It looks like pg will also attempt to set up a pending comments page, from which it might be necessary to trace back to the original fine article to know whether or not a comment is good, but that doesn't sound like too much work to help build a better community. (I used to look at the noobcomments and noobstories view of the site from time to time, until automation pretty much took over spam-filtering here.)

Best wishes to all of you who desire to post good comments here. I'll do my best to use some of my recreational time to review those for general visibility as early and as often as I am permitted.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#248
post #217

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…

I wonder if this'll be a good idea to, but I'm willing to give it a try. My biggest worry would be that it slowed-down discussions too much. > 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? I like the look of HN, it has all I need and nothing else,…

> The only thing I'd like is a way to collapse comments (Reddit style) so I can easily get past a long chain in a discussion.

This is the only thing I want as well.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#250
post #28

Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another. We're hoping that good comments will get endorsed so quickly that there won't be a noticeable delay. Is there some timeout? If not, commenting on a several-day-old thread will guarantee that you can never post another comment, since once threads drop off the front page it's not likely that many 1000+ karma users will even see those…

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.

Is the lock on new comments not per-thread?
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