pg you founded HN, please don't destroy it before you leave. Whatever your paternalistic instinct led you to this, please swallow it and leave HN alone. You did humanity a great service by founding YC/HN, but its time to leave such drastic decisions to your successor. I implore you!
Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
781–790 of 854 posts
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#782Please don't push this live. It will significantly cut down on contribution, and create a lot of busy work and bureaucracy which gets in the way of people having a good discussion. If you want to improve the quality of comments then address the core algorithm or find a better way to harness user power.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#783I joined HN in Feb 2008 and I despite reading the site multiple times daily, I have a karma score of 71. So it looks like I'll need to ingratiate myself to elites to be able to vote.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#784I fear that this is going to have the effect of drowning out minority or contrary opinions, even those that are legitimate (non-trolling) and expressed in a respectful manner. Currently, the downvote button is only supposed to be used for unproductive comments - drivel, and the like. Of course, people use it to show their disagreement (even though that's not how it's meant to be used). As a result, people that post c…
Currently, the downvote button is only supposed to be used for unproductive comments - drivel, and the like. Of course, people use it to show their disagreement (even though that's not how it's meant to be used). No, that's wrong. Downvoting for disagreement is how downvoting is meant to be used, as pg has made clear on HN many times over the years. [I edited the previous sentence to make it less ambiguous.] The conf…
pg is wrong on this.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a bit confused by the wording of your comment. Are you saying that downvoting "is only supposed to be used for unproductive comments" or to show agreement? You use "it," but I can't tell which statement you are referring to.
Sorry for being unclear. What I mean is that downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN. I'm too lazy to dig up the many links where this was discussed, but the point is that if upvoting is a legit way to agree, then downvoting is a legit way to disagree. This is a good thing, because it provides a silent way to disagree when you don't have anything substantive to add to the di…
There is very little value in knowing that some people disagree with a comment, but there is tremendous value in learning other ideas. This is a bad policy.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#786The first big issue I see with this is in submission. When you submit something often you need to leave the first comment to give it context. So stories on the "new" page are likely to get a lot fewer upvotes. The second big issue I see is when responding to comments on a post about you/your company. I'm at 950-ish, and I suspect that is on the high side for a founder at a 2 year old startup. When posts about us hit…
One of the strengths of HN is that founders and creators of products can and do have the ability the ability to engage with people posting about them. The proposed rate limit and censorship-by-default largely eliminates this unless the response happens to be on a sufficiently high traffic thread.
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#787It's unusual how intolerant of experimentation entrepreneurs can be. This may or may not work. PG even acknowledges that it's likely to go wrong initially. Implicit in that is that they will work on fixing it until it's working better than the current system. In the end, it's guaranteed to either completely fail as an experiment (they'd probably roll it all back) or yield something working better. Yet there's so much…
This whole proposal is intolerant of experimentation; it's censorship-by-default of community members whose attempts to contribute aren't guaranteed to be viewed and endorsed by the top 5% of users within a short time frame.
It's entirely rational for entrepreneurs to oppose something which appears to be a dreadful idea, and especially to oppose initial implemention of it on a grand scale (a proposal to experiment with pre-moderating only brand-new users, low average karma users or threads which are flagged up as possible flamewars would, I suspect, be considerably less unpopular as the solution might actually be less harmful than the problem. Edit: looks like this now is the proposal.).
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#788Earlier quoted context omitted.
And frankly, it would make this site much less attractive to browse as an occasional commenter. I find myself wondering whether that's part of the unstated goal of this action - getting fewer "occasional commenters". I have no clue on the reasons but clearly that will be an effect of the change. I think we can all see how rushed this rollout was so it's possible that is an unintended consequence.
Maybe they're after the comments that require several hours of research and multiple drafts. Anybody who can make a couple comments over a short period of time isn't putting in a whole lot of thought and effort into their comments. I get the feeling they're looking for comments that resemble blog posts rather than the conversational type of comments.
Why would rendering your comment invisible to the majority of people reading the thread make you more likely to put effort into it
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#789How long until we see a new ShowHN post : "Alternative to Hacker News" or "Why I coded my own HN alternative"
lamernews monocle etc etc
Most interesting concept was the one where you needed an invite and everybody could see who had vouched for who. Can't remember the name and also found no one to ask for an invite ;-)
Re: Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
#790Would adding pending comments encourage a more diverse and inclusive user base, or a less diverse and exclusive one? Not only diversity of opinions, but of gender and background? Is anyone talking about this?
In ecology and nature conservation a diverse ecosystem is encouraged as this ensures the overall health of the system.
Edits: I wonder what percentage of the 1000 Karma users are women? How about less controversial attributes: What are their backgrounds, Where do they reside?