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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: 0.022s | 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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booruguru ◴[22 Mar 14 00:45 UTC] No.7446212[source]▶
This is ridiculous. It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions, but now our comments need to be vetted by the elite HN users before they can be shown to the rest.

I don't get it. This site looks like something made in 1996 (with absolutely no regard for readability), but the big new upgrade we're getting is a draconian (and wholly unnecessary) comment moderation feature/policy?

A lot of HN users bitch about Reddit, but they would never implement something this ridiculous since it would kill their community. But I guess that's the whole point of this exercise...to cull the userbase.

Ironically, this comment is precisely the kind of thing that may never receive an "endorsement."

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thaumaturgy ◴[22 Mar 14 00:57 UTC] No.7446310[source]▶
Well, I wouldn't endorse it. But, since some of your points are often raised...

> It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions

That particular disease doesn't seem to have taken hold here yet. Comments that are downvoted below 1 more often are angry, abusive, trollish, or devoid of content.

> ...but now our comments need to be vetted by the elite HN users...

An "elite" group of, by a rough estimate, 50% of the site's users. A lot of users, anyway.

> This site looks like something made in 1996 (with absolutely no regard for readability)...

This mistakes graphic design for community value. Reddit was also (and still also, by most measures) one of the ugliest sites online.

> ...but the big new upgrade we're getting is a draconian (and wholly unnecessary)...

I think the most common complaint on HN, especially among its longtime users, has been the diminishing quality of comment threads. So this is an update that's dealing with the #1 problem on HN.

> A lot of HN users bitch about Reddit, but they would never implement something this ridiculous since it would kill their community.

On the contrary, some of the Reddit communities with the most recognition for high quality discussions are the ones with the heaviest moderation. /r/askhistorians is consistently great; /r/askscience is another good one.

Some people finally seem to be coming around to the realization that you don't have to hear everybody's opinion on everything to have a worthwhile community.

> Ironically, this comment is precisely the kind of thing that may never receive an "endorsement."

Well, and no offense intended, but hopefully not, since your comment is a good example of the problem this is trying to solve. It's unnecessarily angry.

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bertil ◴[22 Mar 14 01:27 UTC] No.7446526[source]▶
> > It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions

> That particular disease doesn't seem to have taken hold here yet. Comments that are downvoted below 1 more often are angry, abusive, trollish, or devoid of content.

Some of the comments voted below 1 are, indeed -- but a more relevant metric to respond to that critic would be: How many well articulated contrarian opinion expressed on HN are voted above 1? There are other, less draconian ways, to avoid abuse. The one chosen here would do that, and more -- too much if PG, YC and HN goals remains to take more risk. My impression of actively commenting for the past month is that contrarian opinions are already extremely unwelcome, while passive-agressive abuse roams.

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thaumaturgy ◴[22 Mar 14 01:30 UTC] No.7446553[source]▶
Do you have any examples? This thread (and some other recent activity) notwithstanding, I'm not really active on HN anymore.
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1. bertil ◴[22 Mar 14 01:49 UTC] No.7446705[source]▶
The most striking aspect I can see is how consistent almost all comments are: I’d made the same reproach to TED, or any ‘democracy’ without a scandal. Everyone agrees that MtGox are clueless and ill-intended, women founders are too few because female hackers are, Musk is a hero… I believe that too, to be honest. But it feels like too little surprises to my taste. I like being wrong; I rarely change my mind on HN, certainly not in the comment sections. Comments are great for the moment if you want implementation details, gritty bug fixes and it’s fine in a community of doers where thinkers aren’t the priority.

The only recent examples that I can give -- because I only have access to number for those -- are my own comments. I get 5 or more points for saying something obvious that I know most of HN agrees with and knows; I get nothing for saying something original, or based on my own exclusive work; I get downvoted for challenging (with an argument line and question marks all along) what I consider to be… local bias. That’s often under the guise of being negative, while I clearly offer constructive solution. I don’t really expect upvotes for the later kind, just response that don’t miss my point.

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2. thaumaturgy ◴[22 Mar 14 01:59 UTC] No.7446758[source]▶
Fair 'nuff. FWIW, HN has always been like that on some subjects, for as long as I've been a user here. But, the echo-chamber problem might have gotten worse lately, since some key people have fled the site.

It's tough to draw many conclusions from reactions to just a few comments. There are too many variables: tone, time of day, subject matter, who happens to be browsing the site at that time. And people can suffer from argument fatigue, even if it's a totally civil debate.

So I'm not yet convinced that this will be a huge problem for contrary opinions, and if such a problem already exists, this change might even fix it a little by removing some of the noise that's distracting people from better comments.

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3. bertil ◴[22 Mar 14 11:11 UTC] No.7448599[source]▶
We are back to my original point (and, really as a statistician ‘Data’ scientist what has been my main focus for the last 15 years), poorly expressed by the story about the guy searching for his keys where there’s light, not where he lost them:

You can’t make progress by using exclusively your archives. You need to imagine how people from whom you haven’t heard anything make decisions.

‘The community has always agreed on most points’ (“HN has always been like that”) and ‘there is no problem for contrarian opinions’ (“I'm not yet convinced that this will be a huge problem”) should be considered violently contradictory statements. That policy might not make things worst because there has never been that much discussion -- but it won’t fix the reason for bad comments which are usually two-fold:

* people don’t know how they could phrase one (I’ve turned every one of “Aha-ha! You are dumb…” into a more insightful questioning dozens of times on other sites.);

* contrarian feel excluded, powerless, and react poorly or violently. I would love to see Hacker News clarify if it is the internal communication tool of Y Combinator, or the leading source of hacker-focused information on-line. Any reader who isn’t a US resident feel disempowered by this contradiction, for instance (and don’t give me the ‘but there are non-US applicants…’ that is the equivalent of ‘But I have a black friend…’)