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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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yeukhon ◴[22 Mar 14 00:48 UTC] No.7446237[source]▶
I think this is a horrible decision. I've never seen this work. My biggest objection is based on the fact I have to wait for someone to endorse my comment.

I post a lot of comments here, regularly. Some of them get hot and turn into a linked-list O(n) depth tree... I also post during time when few people are around. By the time I want to say something interesting and hope someone can engage with me my comment would be so deep down. This is not really karma whoring. But I want to be able to express myself instantly, right away so anyone reading the article at that moment may check out my voice too.

I don't see why we need this restriction. This should be restricted to people who have a history of getting downvoted and people who are new to HN. That makes sense. But people who have been here long enough and with a good record shouldn't be penalized.

Call me impatient but I read and write quickly. I can't wait an hour to get one comment approved.

Note I am well above 1000 karma and I don't like this...

And if the whole point is to promote comments that can contribute to the discussion, then downvote will work just fine. Any uncivil or harsh comment usually get to the bottom of the page quickly. If I express similar or even same opinion as someone else, should my comment be approved? If the answer is yes, then almost every comment should be endorsed. Then what is the whole point of this pending feature?

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dinkumthinkum ◴[22 Mar 14 01:05 UTC] No.7446373[source]▶
I think one compromise could be to remove this restriction from users with > x karma. It's not ideal to me but it is something ...
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tptacek ◴[22 Mar 14 01:12 UTC] No.7446428[source]▶
A bad comment is a bad comment whether I write it or a green-named user does. Jerkface.
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yeukhon ◴[22 Mar 14 01:46 UTC] No.7446672[source]▶
The number of bad comment is relatively low. And what kind of bad comments are we after?
replies(1): >>7446690 #
tptacek ◴[22 Mar 14 01:47 UTC] No.7446690[source]▶
Wow do I ever disagree with that. Comments on HN have gotten genuinely awful.
replies(2): >>7446796 #>>7448049 #
yummyfajitas ◴[22 Mar 14 06:37 UTC] No.7448049[source]▶
I hear you express this sentiment often. Could you explain your thoughts on this?

If anything, I think the stories are the problem. Cool hacks and interesting science often fail to get the 2-3 upvotes they need to escape the new page. On page 2 of "New", I've found the following fairly decent stories that died recently: http://simplystatistics.org/2014/03/20/the-8020-rule-of-stat... http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/cassandra-...

Yet both of these are vastly more useful than Julie Horvath's "omfg, I had a workplace conflict" or "Yay basic income, no facts, no reasoning, yay" (currently 380 pts, 441 comments, was #1 for a while today).

I'd suggest that it's far more important to improve the stories than to improve the comments. The comments on a story like "JDK 8 Release Notes" or "Circuit Breaker" (about a distributed computing design pattern) are actually quite good.

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1. netcan ◴[22 Mar 14 10:22 UTC] No.7448518[source]▶
I don't think that 'general' topics that most people have something to say about are inherently bad (in my opinion). They just have a few problems.

First, On 'developing statistical methods' the average HNer has more insightful things to say than the average person. On alternatives to social welfare the average HN commenter is not much more insightful than the average person. The only reason to do it here is because here is the community where they discuss things online.

Second some articles contributes no more than just the topic ("Yay basic income, no facts, no reasoning, yay"). HN isn't for that so it fails. It works for discussing articles or specific facts and news items, not for discussing 'topics.^' ATM it looks like there are 2-3 of these on page one.

^BTW, is there any software specifically designed to allow discussion of these "forever topics." IE, the topics that keeps popping up in every forum and get pinned in the traditional BB forums?