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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: 0.242s | 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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danso ◴[21 Mar 14 23:59 UTC] No.7445836[source]▶
Wow, this seems like a rather large change -- with a lot of dynamics and moving parts -- for what seems like a relatively minor problem on HN. Not that there aren't bad comments, but bad comments get a lukewarm response, and insightful comments seem to do pretty well. Comments that get more airtime than they might deserve will still get approved by someone (and upvoted/downvoted accordingly)

The bigger problem to me seems to be that great comments that come in a few hours after the posting of a hot submission will almost never reach the top of the comment stack, because older comments that are decent enough will inevitably keep getting upvotes by every new reader of the thread. I'm not sure what the best tweak for that is, but the proposed feature at hand would seem to exacerbate the situation.

Note: OK, I've realized I made the archetypical dickish HN comment ("OK the OP is interesting but on a tangent, why don't we all discuss this other thing I care about?")...but I do think the proposed feature will have a direct impact on the circulation of fresh, insightful comments. I'm a 1000+ Karma user, but after I've read a thread a couple of times, I probably won't re-check it...I can't be the only HN'er who has this lack of attention span...and so this queue, even if perfectly implemented, would seem even more to suppress new comments (unintentionally)

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baddox ◴[22 Mar 14 00:27 UTC] No.7446085[source]▶
It sounds to me like an excuse to drastically slow down discussion under the guise of improving the community. Imagine this scenario, which feels plausible to me: "good" discussions on HN don't offer much value to HN stakeholders, but "bad" ones (whether regarding employment discrimination, or bad press for YC companies, etc.) pose a credible threat to HN stakeholders. Then, anything that simply dampers discussions, even if it does so at a constant rate across all types of discussions and comments, if good for HN stakeholders. Shutting HN down altogether would do the same, but might itself result in bad press throughout the community.
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1. cinquemb ◴[22 Mar 14 04:47 UTC] No.7447651[source]▶
While I am willing to give pg and company the benefit of the doubt, I would consider what you said to probably be the most noticeable difference that would matter to the bottom line of the parties involved who have felt the brunt of such situations.

With this new system, I can't imagine YC companies being called out on their dirty closets like they have in the past (any maybe indirectly large swaths of people who are employed by big co's who are power users on HN with those stories, or in general up and coming companies people engage with in the community).

I know some may feel I'm over exaggerating (because there are the passive bans through blocking upvoting/downvoting effects for comments/posts/polls, filters, hellbanning, etc.) , but I feel like until now, I have taken the information access, discussion that goes on here and all the interesting people this board attracts for granted. I just don't see it being the same place to discus/mention ideas/concepts and ask questions if pg and co decide to stick with it, and it just becoming more watered down onanism that it can increasingly be and has been on track to becoming more of up until today. But this is the internet, and moments like these may inspire someone to offer other environments.

On another note: I'm finding it really fascinating to be able to experiment with social systems like this. I'm excited to see the posts of people analyzing the affect of a change like this via the search api or scraping.