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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#671

Post by Too »

yeukhon wrote: post #661
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with thaumaturgy here; your comments are very emotionally charged for something as insignificant as a change to the moderation policy of a link aggregator's comment section. I hope that this new system will bring down the emotions that tend to run high in the comments. In your first comment, you've criticized change, ridiculed the site's look and feel, and provided an opinion that was astutely refuted by thau…

If you think people can comment on each other's comment without a single emotion that's a mistake. People share stories about their past experience, anger and frustration with one another. He cares about his ability to express here thoroughly and fully. Clearly thaumaturgy is now the one getting upset and doesn't want to make direct response anymore after offending OP.

Yeah, if one wants a site without opinion, emotion or discussion there is always stackoverflow.com

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#672

Post by grey-area »

You use karma as a measure of quality (here as a way to indicate someone should have rights to endorse). One other change which I think would help comment quality is to separate or cap points for submissions (which can be disproportionate), so that users do not gain karma from posting popular stories. One person posting some flamebait article can easily get over 1000 points just by posting a link, and they are encouraged to post sensational or gossipy articles by the current system in order to get around karma limitations.

Popularity is not the same as quality, and the divergence will only grow as more users join the site.

It will be interesting to see how this change plays out, but you definitely need a solution to the problem cperciva points out - at present anything not on home simply doesn't recieve sufficient attention for this scheme to work. The new page is regularly full of articles with less than 3 votes.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#673

Post by Too »

megablast wrote: post #631
simonsarris wrote: post #528

Consider how many people disagree with you here. Well-respected users. If we disagree with you here on what you may have thought a well-regarded idea, who is to say how many well-regarded comments we are now going to miss? How many excellent comments are headed for the dustbin because of a misunderstanding? This might work , but it will turn HN into a community that is very inward.

We can try it out, and if it doesn't work switch it back.

How can we try it out? How can all non moderators know what they are missing?

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#674

Post by bsder »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #255
babuskov wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, please do make this. I have exchanged very useful information with other commenters on HN this way. Sometimes I ask a question in the comments, and it gets answered days later. I go through "comments" in my profile periodically to see if someone replied to those. In this process I also see if someone asked my something and reply there as well. IMHO, HN should have a "private message" feature if comments get p…

It does: put an email address in your profile. I don't entirely disagree with you guys, but I wonder why these discussions aren't being taken to email (or whatever you kids are using these days) anyhow.

Because anyone who stumbles on the thread later can't see the resolution.

Email isn't public discussion.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#675

Post by senthilnayagam »

for negative voting you needed 500 karma's, I have been on hacker news for 1900+ days, currently have 438 karma's .

though I read lot of posts and checks top and new posts every couple of hours. I don't submit many posts, or ask questions. I only comment where I see a value or I can contribute to the discussion in some form.

but if for my comment to be endorsement needs someone with 1000karma, I will take anywhere between 5-10 years to get to 1000+karma and be able to endorse other comments

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#676

Post by bsder »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #355
wildfire wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A shame. Whilst I am always intrigued with what hits the front-page, I rather more often than occasionally, find myself getting to page 10 or so on the weekends. Just to see what has been going on that I missed. Your change will basically mean that someone like me who might have something to add to an existing conversation might as well not bother. It'll be years before I have enough karma on ycombinator's hackernews…

> Your change will basically mean that someone like me who might have something to add to an existing conversation might as well not bother. That is already the case. Very few people read or participate in threads more than 24 hours old. You're already walking into an empty room and having a conversation with yourself; all this change does is lock the door.

> Very few people read or participate in threads more than 24 hours old.

I don't reread the thread, but I will pay attention to someone replying to my comments even after several days.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#677

Post by throwaway5752 »

Hm. I was on the fence after reading this thread a few hours ago, but coming back to and seeing some of the responses I have come firmly down on the side of this being a good idea.

Apparently a number of commenters are under the misapprehension that Hacker News' raison d'etre is to provide an egalitarian community some (very loose) definition of hacker. This is first and foremost a forum and recruiting venue for an elite tech incubator. Some people have gotten relatively comfortable using it as their personal soapbox, but it exists to benefit Y Combinator.

As a long time user, it has been disappointing to see the decay in community quality in roughly three waves: Bitcoin, the women in tech controversies, and Snowden/NSA. There used to be more substantive tech/science/math discussions here. For whatever reason, a lot of the newcomers have poorer writing skills, present less coherent thoughts, have less domain knowledge, and are less well adjusted socially.

I hope that this works.

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#679

Post by lmm »

pg wrote: post #46
nicklovescode wrote: post #12

"Since I'm going to check out of HN at the end of this YC cycle" To be clear, you mean you are going to stop maintaining the codebase of HN, not stop actively participating in the community, right?

It's impossible to predict the future perfectly, but I hope to leave completely. The only YC thing I'm going to do is office hours with the startups.

So you're making a radical change to a site you don't even intent to carry on using, like a student society president changing all the rules just before they graduate?

Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

#680

Post by bsder »

Has anybody actually done the math?

Is the ratio of superK users to subK users sufficient such that they won't spend all of their time approving comments?

Back of the envelope calculations from where I sit suggest that this has no choice but to slice the number of comments by at least an order of magnitude (and I actually think it is closer to 2 orders of magnitude).

If that's really the goal, why not just implement a comment killer that every now and then just randomly stomps on a posted comment and blocks someone from posting for 15min/30min/hour/whatever when it fires.

If you tie the probability to karma and karma ratio, it would do almost as good a job and not inconvenience the superK folks. And you could tune it to get the comment posting rate that you want.

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