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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

661 points pg | 3 comments | 21 Mar 14 23:49 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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. acjohnson55 ◴[22 Mar 14 00:24 UTC] No.7446059[source]▶
I honestly think the overall quality of comments is quite good on HN. Besides the quality of the articles (which is also top notch), it's a big reason why HN is a thrice daily part of my routine.

The bigger issue is that nesting is a poor format for displaying comments, once a discussion gets large enough. I've been a part of the team revamping Huffington Post's discussion interface, and I think it's a great solution for giving people the option to switch between breath-first and depth-first exploration of the comment tree as they see fit. It's not a perfect solution, but I do think it beats some of the worst problems of nesting.

replies(1): >>7446280 #
2. camus2 ◴[22 Mar 14 00:54 UTC] No.7446280[source]▶
I agree about the nesting issue. But i hate the new HuffPo discussion interface because it breaks the reading flow.

I think it is horrible to use. What would have been better is use the same system but without this horrible pop-up window.You can totally open/close a comment tree without having the feeling you are going to a new page just to see the comments.

I think the way disqus works is a good compromise.It's perfectly ok to limit the depth of the comment tree to 2/3 sub comments no more.And even limit the number of sub comments.

There are a lot of other stuffs I hate about the HuffPo ,the fact that HuffPo tries to trick you into clicking the same link multiple times by changing the title and the picture of an article I already visited makes me angry ,it's just click bating ,and makes me feel HuffPo thinks i'm an idiot, i dont have time to waste with these tricks,and I think it's borderline dishonest.

Anyway that was my little rant about Huffpo UX. I really wonder if your userbase is growing thanks to these choices. People use to come to HuffPo for its content, and there is a lot to say about its quality too today.

replies(1): >>7447856 #
3. acjohnson55 ◴[22 Mar 14 05:38 UTC] No.7447856[source]▶
Well, I should specify that I work for an agency that does work for HuffPost, so I don't make strategic decisions and can't represent their point of view. From a personal standpoint, I agree that there are definitely ways to improve upon what we've built. My point is just that nesting is broken, and that I'm all about alternatives.

I find Disqus great for content with only a small amount of commentary, but extremely unpleasant to use on articles that have more than say 400 comments (and CNN regularly has articles in the thousands of comments). At that point, if you're viewing either the oldest or most liked comments, it's damn near impossible to browse the comments that are directly on the article. I think even HN's low tech interface is better.