←back to thread

Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

661 points pg | 1 comments | 21 Mar 14 23:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | 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. ufmace ◴[22 Mar 14 01:15 UTC] No.7446444[source]▶
I'm a bit torn on this idea.

On the one hand, I think it would be great for some of the bigger threads, that often go to hundreds of comments, many of which say the same thing over and over again. It could do a lot of keep those shorter, more insightful, and more on-topic.

On the other hand, what about the smaller threads, that tend to get one or two dozen comments, if that, and probably not many page views? Would discussion there become essentially impossible unless a >1k-er deigns to drop in and bless a few of the posts with some endorsements? Has anybody actually checked what proportion of users are >1k and how willing they are to drop in on every thread on the site and endorse comments? Or constantly reload bigger threads and scroll all around to see new comments for that matter?

If it were up to me, I'd do a sliding scale. Something like no endorsement/auto-endorse all for under 20 total comments in the thread. At >50 comments in the thread, users with under, say, 100 karma need endorsement. At >100, you need maybe 250 karma, 200 posts 500 karma, etc. Maybe users under 5 or 10 karma always need endorsement. Maybe some formula to compute it that you can tweak the factors on as needed if there is too little discussion or too much fluff.

Another point - say I make a comment that sucks. Oops, happens to all of us sometimes. What happens then? Does it stay unendorsed and stuck forever? Can I just delete it, or will it auto-delete or something? Does it get downvoted without ever being endorsed?

Hey wait a second, I think we're just getting closer to slashcode here...