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.
This is kinda crazy. You can't expect 100% of our comments to be brilliant. There needs to be some timeout or something, if not, people will start creating new accounts every day.
The number of people that can upvote is very high, yet most comments probably sit at 1 point despite not being mean or stupid. Now restrict that pool to 1000+ karma users, add a mental tax to the task, how many of those same comments are going to get two people to click "endorse" if they couldn't get one person to click "up"? I wouldn't put money on the rapid-fire sub-second moderation materializing, especially outside the top 10 stories or at odd hours.
I'm getting a stronger and stronger feeling that there is plenty of room for focusing the stated goal of this change, and then perhaps redesign the solution.
Please see references at my other comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447122
(quoted to avoid readers having to click through):
[the following] seem relevant to this discussion:
Randy Farmer (I think this is what I remember) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn7e0J9m6rE
Bryce Glass (similar topic/similar takeaways) http://www.slideshare.net/soldierant/designing-your-reputati...
You can wish all you want, that people will use the endorse button in exactly this way and not the other.
Easier is, to simply wish that all comments will be thoughtful and constructive as they are posted.
You have about the same chance of seeing either fulfilled. Good luck!