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Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments

661 points pg | 4 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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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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booruguru ◴[22 Mar 14 03:26 UTC] No.7447283[source]▶
> 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.

Do you seriously not understand the point that I was making? You're basically saying that my comment is unworthy of an audience...not because it was nonsensical or rude or offtopic or abusive...but merely because I wrote in an angry tone. My tone offended your delicate sensibilities, therefore my voice does not deserve to be heard.

I'm sorry, but people like you are precisely the reason why this moderation policy is a bad idea.

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rmrfrmrf ◴[22 Mar 14 04:54 UTC] No.7447688[source]▶
I agree with thaumaturgy here; your comments are very emotionally charged for something as insignificant as a change to the moderation policy of a link aggregator's comment section. I hope that this new system will bring down the emotions that tend to run high in the comments.

In your first comment, you've criticized change, ridiculed the site's look and feel, and provided an opinion that was astutely refuted by thaumaturgy with a reasonable amount of data. In your latest reply, you questioned the grandparent commenter's intellect, created a strawman argument, and minimized the validity of the commenter's emotional reaction. You then made an inflammatory generalization about a group of people who shared the commenter's point of view and created some sort of strawman faction out of them.

All the while, I have yet to see a well-formed argument come out of your two comments; just, as thaumaturgy said, needless anger. Just because you can write in complete sentences and can write passionately does not mean that your comment is substantive.

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1. yeukhon ◴[22 Mar 14 06:42 UTC] No.7448059[source]▶
If you think people can comment on each other's comment without a single emotion that's a mistake.

People share stories about their past experience, anger and frustration with one another. He cares about his ability to express here thoroughly and fully. Clearly thaumaturgy is now the one getting upset and doesn't want to make direct response anymore after offending OP.

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2. Too ◴[22 Mar 14 07:32 UTC] No.7448163[source]▶
Yeah, if one wants a site without opinion, emotion or discussion there is always stackoverflow.com
3. rmrfrmrf ◴[22 Mar 14 09:16 UTC] No.7448393[source]▶
Well, I don't think I said without a single emotion. I do think, however, that you can express concerns without resorting to anger and negativity.
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4. thaumasiotes ◴[22 Mar 14 12:05 UTC] No.7448724[source]▶
I don't think there's a useful distinction to draw between the community where expressing any emotion is prohibited and the one where positive emotions, but only positive emotions, are welcome.