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    Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

    661 points pg | 11 comments | 21 Mar 14 23:49 UTC | HN request time: 1.107s | 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. eogas ◴[22 Mar 14 00:25 UTC] No.7446063[source]▶
    This seems like a rather hostile change to an already hostile community. HN has never felt like a welcoming place to me, and I don't think this will help. Maybe PG prefers the community to be small, so he's trying to trim it down? Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones he wants to keep out.

    Please noble 1000+ers, free my humble comment from the depths of the low-karma peasants. For I have but 522 karma, thus I deserve to be spat on and excluded from the flawless utopia which is the HN comments section...

    replies(6): >>7446165 #>>7446321 #>>7446555 #>>7446889 #>>7447451 #>>7447871 #
    2. noarchy ◴[22 Mar 14 00:39 UTC] No.7446165[source]▶
    I have to agree with you that this looks like a hostile change. There are, of course, many here who would prefer a smaller community. That's an elitist group, imo. I've always felt that the quality of discussion here has remained top-notch, even as the popularity of the site has grown.
    3. Wistar ◴[22 Mar 14 00:59 UTC] No.7446321[source]▶
    Exactly my thoughts. I know if my first comments had been voted off the island I would have swam away.
    4. vacri ◴[22 Mar 14 01:30 UTC] No.7446555[source]▶
    I'm not fond of the idea, but at the same time, playing the victim like you are here doesn't exactly do much for comment quality.
    replies(1): >>7446622 #
    5. eogas ◴[22 Mar 14 01:40 UTC] No.7446622[source]▶
    HN really loathes humour, doesn't it?
    replies(2): >>7446751 #>>7447212 #
    6. angersock ◴[22 Mar 14 01:58 UTC] No.7446751{3}[source]▶
    You have to be clever, topical, and insightful. Or just damned lucky.

    Like comedy anywhere else, really.

    replies(1): >>7447136 #
    7. tokipin ◴[22 Mar 14 02:18 UTC] No.7446889[source]▶
    I think it does have this risk, not in the sense of deliberately driving users away, but simply the fact that the cost of posting would be much higher and engagement would drop as a side effect.
    8. vacri ◴[22 Mar 14 03:02 UTC] No.7447136{4}[source]▶
    eogas is referring to my profile commentary. What eogas isn't recognising is that just because something has the trappings of humour doesn't also mean it's not crap.

    HN has thankfully opened up a little in regards to light humour; that part of my profile was written quite a while ago.

    9. dfc ◴[22 Mar 14 03:15 UTC] No.7447212{3}[source]▶
    In my opinion this is a feature of HN discussions and one of the things I detest about reddit discussions.

    Slashdot had the ultimate solution for our different tastes: you could configure a comment type (informative/funny/etc) modifier/threshold. You could say you wanted to see more funny replies and I could say I did not want to see them. It was a tiny bit complicated initially but I think the big impediment to adoption at other sites was the clunky UI. There is not a simple/unobtrusive way to display so many feedback options for each an every comment.

    10. GVIrish ◴[22 Mar 14 04:01 UTC] No.7447451[source]▶
    > Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones he wants to keep out.

    Absolutely. One of the benefits of the size and diversity of the HN community is that there are lots of subject matter experts in a myriad of niches that can provide useful commentary.

    If it becomes dramatically harder to have a comment be seen, these people will simply stop commenting here. The idea might be that infrequent but insightful commenters will get endorsed, but not every comment a valuable commenter makes is necessarily going to get endorsed. That's going to be frustrating enough that many will decide not to bother, and the discourse will be poorer for it.

    11. dredmorbius ◴[22 Mar 14 05:42 UTC] No.7447871[source]▶
    The goal of HN isn't to become large and popular. It's to be a useful forum for discussion. See the Guidelines and FAQ links on every HN page for more on this:

    http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    As for gaining points: given time and quality contributions (as well as winning the front-page lottery a time or two), it's possible to gain 1000 karma in a year or so, pretty easily, if you want to (and quite possibly faster). Which is as it should be: you need to make your bones.