371–380 of 854 posts
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I'm not fond of the idea, but at the same time, playing the victim like you are here doesn't exactly do much for comment quality.
HN really loathes humour, doesn't it?
Like comedy anywhere else, really.
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It's not that hard to get to 1000+ slowly. All you have to do is hang around for years and make the occasional decent comment. If anything this is biased towards old timers.
It's not currently that hard to get to 1000+ slowly. By slowing down commenting and making it harder to even get comments through, this is presumably going to make it harder.
Since commenting is such a huge aspect of these sites for me, I'll probably frequent HN much less often since I won't be able to participate in conversation. PARTICULARLY, I won't be able to get in the early comments that are necessary for making high-karma. You can't have your comment show up an hour or so later after "approval," you'll only net a handful of upvotes, because you'll be buried under the high-scoring top comments by senior HN users.
Perhaps make a mid tier, say 500 karma, where you can't endorse users, but don't need endorsement?
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Fair enough. I would much prefer fixing the long comment thread problem with 5 lines of JavaScript than implementing this bizarre system.
If you have a solution to this particular problem, whether in 5 or 500 lines of JS, I think it would be novel. I've yet to see any discussion forum solve the problem of long threads with lots of useless fluff floating to the top.
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So now we have to wait years to be considered good enough posters to be allowed to fully participate?
Not, years, months; assuming a couple of decent comments per day, with a couple of points per answer( my definition of a couple is ~ 2-4 here ).
Then again, I only say something whenever I feel I have something to add, rather than just blasting comments and hoping to get upvotes (and now, endorsements)
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Do you have any examples? This thread (and some other recent activity) notwithstanding, I'm not really active on HN anymore.
The most striking aspect I can see is how consistent almost all comments are: I’d made the same reproach to TED, or any ‘democracy’ without a scandal. Everyone agrees that MtGox are clueless and ill-intended, women founders are too few because female hackers are, Musk is a hero… I believe that too, to be honest. But it feels like too little surprises to my taste. I like being wrong; I rarely change my mind on HN, cer…
It's tough to draw many conclusions from reactions to just a few comments. There are too many variables: tone, time of day, subject matter, who happens to be browsing the site at that time. And people can suffer from argument fatigue, even if it's a totally civil debate.
So I'm not yet convinced that this will be a huge problem for contrary opinions, and if such a problem already exists, this change might even fix it a little by removing some of the noise that's distracting people from better comments.
a) it WILL kill off those who want to remain (pseudo/ano)nymous and create throwaway accounts for discussing sensitive stuff (like the multiple "my startup is failing" posts in the last months)
b) Sorry, but I (and many others) have actually lives to live and jobs to do. 1000+ karma users are not moderators, and many simply will be too lazy / too occupied to click "endorse" all the time.
c) Discussions live on the "live" part - and <1000 karma users will have to endure MASSIVE waiting times, effectively killing discussions.
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.
Make a dummy comment? I won't be able to see the pending comments of others, since I'm not one of the HN elite.
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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.
So, will this be only for top-level comments, or will each and every reply in a thread require this sort of endorsement?
Sounds like a system very slow to change, nearly self-perpetuating, like more of an echo chamber, like stew without garlic or pepper, like ignoring that a stream bed is cold and uncomfortable, full of mud and gravel, but also one of the best places to look for gold. Fundamentally the high karma people pleased the masses at HN and/or have been commenting at HN for a long time and maybe have made the better comments bu…
The thing about losing your ability to endorse supports your claim. Even endorsers that are not holding to the right echo chamber can be worked out of the system. So it does seem "self-regulating" in that sense.