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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

661 points pg | 1 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.

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tsycho ◴[22 Mar 14 00:33 UTC] No.7446121[source]▶

>>7445761 (OP) #

I fear this change will have some unintended consequences:

1. In a Ask/Show HN post, (which is often similar to a reddit AMA), the OP will not be able to reply to clarifications questions until their previous one is 'endorsed'.

2. Multiple (<1000 karma) people will post very similar response to a question, or other objective comment, since they would not be aware of other pending comments on that thread. This would lead to...

2a. Either moderators endorsing multiple such comments, due to race conditions and stale views during moderation, or

2b. Moderators would endorse the first (or "best") of them, and many people with reasonable comments will be in limbo in the rest of HN, for the fault of writing a similar response to another endorsed poster.

3. (NEW) If a user has something meaningful to say to two different posts, he/she is now more likely to choose the one with more activity since he can't post on both anymore, and he/she wouldn't want to wait for the moderators to see the less active post. As a result, the power law distribution on post activity is going to become even more prominent than before.

I would recommend the following changes:

1. Apply this policy on a per-page basis, rather than on a global HN basis.

2. Allow 2 or 3 pending comments per person, rather than 1. Anyone who needs more than that, and is not getting endorsed at all, is probably trolling or spamming, and can be dealt with other means.

3. Auto-accept pending comments after 24hrs for users with >250 karma (or some other lowish number that filters out absolutely green accounts).

4. Add a "showpending" option. Even if people can't upvote/reply to them, it's democratic to be able to see them.

5. (UPDATE, adding tantalor's suggestion) #1 above can be solved by auto-accepting the OP's comments instantaneously. I would even go further and give endorser rights to the OP on a Ask/Show HN post.

replies(4): >>7446200 #>>7446204 #>>7446363 #>>7447064 #

waterlesscloud ◴[22 Mar 14 00:43 UTC] No.7446200[source]▶

2b is not really an issue. Endorsing only the best of similar comments is a feature.

You can remove your pending comment after some time.

It may also have a second order "unintended" consequence over time- People would stop posting shallowly obvious responses, due to the negative feedback of never having them endorsed.

replies(3): >>7446281 #>>7446349 #>>7448056 #

tptacek ◴[22 Mar 14 01:02 UTC] No.7446349[source]▶

Eh. Yes, but not at the cost of wasting good-faith efforts to contribute and making it hard for them to contribute on other threads. I'd probably endorse similar comments on a thread, even though they were redundant, for that reason.

replies(1): >>7446476 #

waterlesscloud ◴[22 Mar 14 01:20 UTC] No.7446476[source]▶

I definitely won't, unless they're adding something unique.

Threads are cluttered enough as it is, and the idea isn't to encourage good faith efforts, but to improve comment quality.

replies(2): >>7446696 #>>7446794 #

1. jrs235 ◴[22 Mar 14 01:48 UTC] No.7446696[source]▶

But that's the problem. It's going to shut me up and out of conversations. I can ask a question but someone else may have already and I can't / don't want to risk not getting endorsed and not being able to comment else where.

I see this new feature as being a reason I stop participating altogether. I get not wanting reddit like comments and threads, but I fear this swings too much towards a "good old boys" club.