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    Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

    661 points pg | 14 comments | 21 Mar 14 23:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.759s | source | bottom

    A surprisingly long time ago (2013 was a busy year) I mentioned a new plan to improve the quality of comments on Hacker News:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6009523

    Since I'm going to check out of HN at the end of this YC cycle, this was my last chance to get this done. I didn't want the people who are going to inherit HN from me to have to build it as their first project, because it interacts with so many different bits of the code in such subtle ways.

    So I found time to implement pending comments this past week, and with any luck it will launch tonight. Since it's a big change, I wanted to warn HN users in advance.

    Here's how it currently works. From now on, when you post a comment, it won't initially be live. It will be in a new state called pending. Comments get from pending to live by being endorsed by multiple HN users with over 1000 karma. Those users will see pending comments, and will be able to endorse them by clicking on an "endorse" link next to the "flag" link.

    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.

    You can currently beat the system by posting an innocuous comment, waiting for it to be endorsed, and then after it's live, changing it to say something worse. We explicitly ask people not to do this. While we have no software for catching it, humans will notice, and we'll ban you.

    Along with the change in software will come a change in policy. We're going to ask users with the ability to endorse comments only to endorse those that:

    1. Say something substantial. E.g. not just a throwaway remark, or the kind of "Yes you did, No I didn't" bickering that races toward the right side of the page and no one cares about except the participants.

    2. Say it without gratuitous nastiness. In particular, a comment in reply to another comment should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.

    People who regularly endorse comments that fail one or both of these tests will lose the ability to endorse comments. So if you're not sure whether you should endorse a comment, don't. There are a lot of people on HN. If a point is important, someone else will probably come along and make it without gratuitous nastiness.

    I hope this will improve the quality of HN comments significantly, but we'll need your help to make it work, and your forbearance if, as usually happens, some things go wrong initially.

    1. mstrem ◴[22 Mar 14 00:02 UTC] No.7445860[source]▶
    This seems quite drastic to me. Personally I don't have a lot of Karma (and I don't really care to) but every known and again I post a comment and usually I hope it provides a good contribution.

    Like this the system is putting a lot of weight on the users with more Karma... and I am guessing there are "many" more users with less than 1000 compared to those with more? Some people may never have a chance to state their opinion like this.

    Rather, the opposite approach might work? Users with more than X karma can completely remove some comments, and say if your comment has been removed, you are not allowed to comment again for a specific period of time. If you post x rejected comments in a row then potentially you get banned.

    EDIT - maybe a little off topic: another "comment" about comments - I notice you can up vote and down vote comments. I see this functionality sometimes is used to indicate agreement (or lack of) towards a comment. This as far as I cant tell is not the intended functionality, I am unsure however how this can be fixed easily.

    replies(4): >>7445950 #>>7445959 #>>7445966 #>>7446068 #
    2. Comkid ◴[22 Mar 14 00:12 UTC] No.7445950[source]▶
    I think this would result in a worse off situation because by allowing users with X karma to remove comments and prevent other users from commenting, it is effectively censoring them.
    replies(1): >>7445994 #
    3. jamesaguilar ◴[22 Mar 14 00:13 UTC] No.7445959[source]▶
    http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders shows at least a hundred with over 1000, and probably many more than that considering the falloff in points becomes more gradual as you go down the list. My comments are nothing special and I have >6000 karma. Even if only 10% of those people are still active, there will be no shortage of endorsers for the livelier discussions.
    replies(1): >>7446255 #
    4. thaumaturgy ◴[22 Mar 14 00:14 UTC] No.7445966[source]▶
    The HN leaderboard shows 100 users with > 15500 points, they mostly all seem to be active users, and the scores seem to be doing the usual long tail dropoff that such distributions tend to do.

    So I would expect there to be a ton of active HN users with more than 1000 points.

    replies(1): >>7448650 #
    5. mstrem ◴[22 Mar 14 00:17 UTC] No.7445994[source]▶
    True, however you could require say 4 users to block a comment out and this maybe would mitigate the problem a little?

    I think the point I was trying to make was that by turning it around it would require "less" active participation from the users and by default everyone gets a chance, but the really bad comments would still get removed I think. Anyway we shall see how it works out!

    6. skybrian ◴[22 Mar 14 00:25 UTC] No.7446068[source]▶
    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.
    replies(2): >>7446144 #>>7446152 #
    7. makomk ◴[22 Mar 14 00:36 UTC] No.7446144[source]▶
    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.
    replies(1): >>7446752 #
    8. heurist ◴[22 Mar 14 00:37 UTC] No.7446152[source]▶
    So now we have to wait years to be considered good enough posters to be allowed to fully participate?
    replies(1): >>7446394 #
    9. pgrote ◴[22 Mar 14 00:49 UTC] No.7446255[source]▶
    Why is there a blank line in the list between jrockway and cwan? Is it someone whose account was deleted?
    replies(1): >>7446294 #
    10. derefr ◴[22 Mar 14 00:56 UTC] No.7446294{3}[source]▶
    It's just top-10.
    11. deletes ◴[22 Mar 14 01:08 UTC] No.7446394{3}[source]▶
    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 ).
    replies(1): >>7446756 #
    12. MAGZine ◴[22 Mar 14 01:58 UTC] No.7446752{3}[source]▶
    I browser HN daily, been around for coming up on a year, and I'm not even half way there.

    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?

    13. MAGZine ◴[22 Mar 14 01:59 UTC] No.7446756{4}[source]▶
    I've been around for 250 days or so and am not even halfway there.

    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)

    14. chippy ◴[22 Mar 14 11:37 UTC] No.7448650[source]▶
    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.