Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

Maybe this will strike a better balance between comment quality and participation?

* A comment by a person with karma * Once 5 or so successive comments by this user have been endorsed, he/she can comment freely

* Now, if a new comment by this user gets flagged, every subsequent comment goes into pending state until 5 or so comments have been endorsed again

Of course, the numbers and the algorithm can be tweaked. But the basic idea is: reward users once a certain threshold of their comments are endorsed, and punish them if a comment gets flagged.

We are back to my original point (and, really as a statistician ‘Data’ scientist what has been my main focus for the last 15 years), poorly expressed by the story about the guy searching for his keys where there’s light, not where he lost them:

You can’t make progress by using exclusively your archives. You need to imagine how people from whom you haven’t heard anything make decisions.

‘The community has always agreed on most points’ (“HN has always been like that”) and ‘there is no problem for contrarian opinions’ (“I'm not yet convinced that this will be a huge problem”) should be considered violently contradictory statements. That policy might not make things worst because there has never been that much discussion -- but it won’t fix the reason for bad comments which are usually two-fold:

* people don’t know how they could phrase one (I’ve turned every one of “Aha-ha! You are dumb…” into a more insightful questioning dozens of times on other sites.);

* contrarian feel excluded, powerless, and react poorly or violently. I would love to see Hacker News clarify if it is the internal communication tool of Y Combinator, or the leading source of hacker-focused information on-line. Any reader who isn’t a US resident feel disempowered by this contradiction, for instance (and don’t give me the ‘but there are non-US applicants…’ that is the equivalent of ‘But I have a black friend…’)

Just one more reason to not comment at all.

If your intent is to turn this site into something more like Designer News or Echo JS, then doing this is the right start.

Both of those sites have great links and almost no commenting whatsoever, despite having the functionality.

according to a comment in this thread, there are 5500 users with over 1000 points. Whether they are active or not is unknown. Whether they want to view pending comments or just read and comment like normal users is unknown.

If you are in this >1000 karma club, please approve this comment. I have been a user for 1044 days.

I haven't visited Slashdot on a regular basis in the better part of ten years, but it tended to 15 years ago. Back then, it was the kind of place where you'd find people like John Carmack randomly chiming in on a thread.^1

And that's also entirely beside the point.

Does HN have the same level of comment quality as reddit? They both use simple up/down systems.

The point is that Slashdot's metamoderation system better leverages the community as a means of directing discussion. The initial upvote has a reason attached to it, and the meta level moderation allows the community to filter out people that are moderating inappropriately. What constitutes appropriate is going to depend on the standards in place for that community.

I wouldn't expect to see an option to moderate a comment +1, Funny on HN, for example. The system itself, however, is designed specifically to bring quality content to the top.

But I think you're making the mistake of conflating the design of a system that is meant to address one problem with the state of a site that declined for other reasons years ago.

[1] - http://floodyberry.com/carmack/slashdot.html#s19991123x08382...