pg seems to have more of a problem with the "quality" of comments than many users who actually enjoy the use of deep threads for conversation. I understand pg's point of view that that is just noise to him, but to those speaking constructively it is the conversation they want. If this was a move to cut down on trolls I would understand. The question to ask is what is HN really for? Is it for the users to converse/think freely or for the site creator to wrangle/curate smart comments. It seems the later is more in tune with HN's mission as a business, and alas the direction it's heading.
Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
721–730 of 854 posts
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#722Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correction: it would require all users with over 1000 karma to read the comments of every post to HN. It seems like you are making the assumption that every user reads every post
If a comment isn't seen by many users with over 1000 karma then it isn't seen by many users period, and thus doesn't have much influence anyway.
It seems like a fallacy that if a comment isn't read and endorsed by users with over 1000 karma within a certain timeframe it will never be influential. Weren't most of the literary and artistic geniuses completely unappreciated by their contemporaries? We may not be a literary and artistic community, but I think the rule applies all the same.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#723It seems to me you're forgetting an important aspect of human psychology with this system. People generally don't like submitting to 'supervision', in what they feel should be free discussion. If you create an environment in which people feel they need 'permission' to post, then they simply won't.
Or at least, your average post will become more likely to be from an insensitive person, who doesn't care about such things as freedom of speech.
I think this change is a bad, bad idea, and will have subtle unintended but quite harmful consequences.
But of course, if the intent is to create a clique-controlled forum, in which only thoughts consistent with the majority views of long-established members can be seen, then this will probably achieve what you want.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#724 A configurable/optional karma filter which defaults to enabled could be the solution since there are genuine concerns for and against this feature.
Unregistered users may have karma filter enabled by default so that hackernews doesn't give a bad impression to the general public due to low quality comments; and registered users can switch it on/off at their preferences panel, then it could be interesting to analize the stats and see how many and who use it.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#725Someone 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…
So, now that pg has killed HN, where do you guys suggest we gather ?
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you feel like slashdot has high quality discussions? I don't. The problem isn't new, but it also isn't solved.
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…
Perhaps I misinterpreted you. When you said
> It baffles me that every site on the web keeps using simple up/down systems and then complains about how hard it is to generate quality discussion when this is hardly a new problem set.
It sounded like you were saying "if those sites just used a better moderation system, it would be easy to generate quality discussion". But the moderation system you propose does not generate quality discussion on slashdot.
If that's not what you're saying, then I'm not sure what particular benefit you think slashdot's sytem does have. What does it mean for a system to be good at directing discussion, but not at generating high-quality discussion? Why is it useful to be able to revoke mod privileges, if that doesn't generate high-quality discussion?
Or are you saying something like, it would be easy to generate quality discussion with slashdot's system given certain other factors (where simple +/- does not make this easy), but slashdot lacks those factors?
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, hopefully new users can hit the 1000+ mark quick enough to not have it affect them too much. But, I wonder how the lack of visible scores on comments has affected the overall comment scoring rate. For the average new user today, how long do they have to wait to get to 1000 karma? How long was it a few years ago? These would be interesting questions to answer.
I joined more than 2000 days ago. I don't have 1000 karma. This way I'll maybe never will reach it. Seems a bit of a high threshold to me. But maybe my commentary just isn't good enough.
Karma per post is not well correlated with the actual quality of your contributions. You can get hundreds of karma for posting superficial observations early on a post that become popular. Someone that has observed HN for long enough could probably get 1000 karma in a day from just trying to optimize for karma instead of quality.
If you really do want to reach some karma threshold I would suggest trying to get it from submissions instead. You can easily get hundreds of karma per submission if you submit the newest release of some popular software product or the latest Zed Shaw rant with very little invested. This also has the bonus that you are not actually lowering the quality of your commenting for more karma.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#728I apologize if I have missed the answer, but the thread is very long. Will clicking endorse automatically upvote the answer? It would only make sense to, and you wouldn't have to click twice.
No, they're separate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446344
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#729Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow do I ever disagree with that. Comments on HN have gotten genuinely awful.
I hear you express this sentiment often. Could you explain your thoughts on this? If anything, I think the stories are the problem. Cool hacks and interesting science often fail to get the 2-3 upvotes they need to escape the new page. On page 2 of "New", I've found the following fairly decent stories that died recently: http://simplystatistics.org/2014/03/20/the-8020-rule-of-stat... http://googlecloudplatform.blogspo…
I agree: as long as we restrict ourselves to tech stories in which (a) no startup is implicated in any way (lest the thread devolve into litigation of San Francisco real estate prices) and (b) no sharks/jets rivalry exists (rails v node, rust v go, mongo v cassandra), the comments on HN are pretty good.
Every other story has mean, uninformed, badly-written, unproductive comments
I also agree that the stories are the bigger problem.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#730What if we could flag comments, and then the professional moderators could make their decisions accordingly.
This already exists, but you have to click "link" on the comment first to see the "flag" link.