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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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beloch ◴[22 Mar 14 01:15 UTC] No.7446449[source]▶
My may concern with this system: Sledgehammer meets tack.

The comments on HN aren't perfect, but they're far from bad when compared to other sites of this nature. There has been a downwards trend most probably due to the increasing popularity of HN. A response is warranted. However, this system has the potential to silence a lot of high quality comments on any threads that aren't on the front-page for an extended period of time. Thus, you get a feedback loop. Good posts require quality discussion to stay on top, but must stay on top to get quality discussion going with this added approval lag.

I think you should ease these changes in as conservatively and gradually as possible. For example, apply it only to the top page at first, and reduce the number of endorsements required for display to 1. You might also consider merely greying out comments that have not yet been endorsed, as currently happens to down-voted comments. Another option would be to apply the endorsement system only after threads have reached a certain age so as to jump-start discussions. Additionally, I would recommend that authors of a parent post should be able to see all child posts regardless of their karma. Below, Babuskov raised the point that the endorsement system will obstruct useful back-and-forth discussions between sub-kilokarma users in buried threads that often takes the place of a private messaging system on HN. This would fix that more effectively than merely reducing the endorsement requirement.

You should not entertain any illusions that you can flip the switch and watch this system work perfectly, and that you will therefore be able to avoid confusing people with many changes over a lengthy period of time. Tweaking will almost certainly be required.

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mintone ◴[22 Mar 14 03:03 UTC] No.7447144[source]▶
I'm not sure that I qualify to contribute a reply (and that may be a problem here) - I've read HN for 4+ years and have only started actively contributing very recently on this account - I have neither karma nor history of posting in my favour.

One of the most powerful things about HN is that it is currently not like reddit - we don't end up with 400+ comments that sit at the bottom of the page gathering dust and downvotes. I feel that a system of pending comments plays better in a more moderated community - especially so as sometimes the most seemingly innocuous comments here can be important or generate discussion that would not otherwise occur.

If the system were to be brought in immediately I'd like to see something along the lines of a 24 hour window; all comments are published after 24 hours with karma directly correlating to the reduction of that window - i.e. Those users with karma of 1440+ can comment with relative impunity on the assumption that their past contributions merit their voice being heard instantly, whilst users with lower karma must either wait for their comment to be 'approved' by a higher user or of course wait out the period of 1440-karma. A relatively simple fix, I would hope, given that you are willing to let 1000+ karma users basically moderate the comments.

I absolutely agree with beloch that these changes should be eased in as conservatively as possible: the worst thing that can happen to HN, and the tech industry as a whole, is presenting itself as a closed community in which you must gain favour to advance - we all quite literally live on the new blood that so often disrupts the status quo.

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1. obituary_latte ◴[22 Mar 14 04:10 UTC] No.7447492[source]▶
Interesting proposals all around.

Perhaps the best idea might not involve trying to determine the best path to take. At least we're asking, right?