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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: 0.293s | 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.

1. kapowaz ◴[23 Mar 14 13:06 UTC] No.7453171[source]▶
I think I can see the intent behind requiring comments be endorsed by ‘users with over 1000’ karma: this is a somewhat arbitrary way of saying ‘users who themselves are good contributors to the community’, but I think that specific way of measuring is naïve.

Using an incrementing value to represent karma means that you can slowly accrue and work your way towards achieving that state of being a good community contributor in principle, whilst in fact still behaving in all the negative ways you are hoping to minimise.

There are quite a few metrics that could be of relevance when looking at people who comment on HN. How often do they reply? Do they post the first comment, or only replies? Do they only reply to controversial subjects? Do they upvote often?

I'd propose that the solution be more subtle. As others have pointed out, you shouldn't implement a system that acts as a positive feedback loop for the most popular topics; that will simply filter out things that aren't in the zeitgeist (and god knows HN doesn't need any more of that).

My suggestion would instead be that all comments are visible immediately, but will be automatically hidden after a period of time, unless they become sufficiently popular. The length of time before they become hidden will depend on the another value, associated with the poster, which would be something akin to the ELO rating system; all users start with the same score, and then that score is modified based on how many people approve of / disapprove of their comments.

Obviously just using these things ignores context, so I'd encourage some more clever introspection of the other things I mentioned above to determine whether they're just posting on a controversial subject (maybe the first reply gets a bonus to the length of time it's visible, or controversial subjects — measured by the frequency of up vs downvotes — don't reduce your personal ELO rating as much).

Of course, these ideas could be equally terrible but I think thought should be given to testing them before committing, and using something more subtle than just slamming the door in the face of people who aren't able to get their comments into the eye line of the HN elite.