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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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ruswick ◴[22 Mar 14 14:15 UTC] No.7449121[source]▶
I agree with this entirely. As it currently stands, implementing this policy in such a abrupt way will hurt discussion and negatively impact the quality of the community.

And although there are ways to improve the actual implementation of the system, I still think it is fundamentally flawed for a few reasons.

First, any system in which a comment is assumed to be spam or trash until proven otherwise will produce less meaningful discussion. Maybe most of the good comments will be filtered through; but some will invariably be missed, and people with valid ideas will not have their comments seen by anyone. Moreover, from my understanding, the HN user base is primarily in North America. (I could be wrong.) If this is true, won't users in other countries be disproportionately affected by this kind of oversight because there are simply fewer high-karma users in the rest of the world?

This is fundamentally a debate over whether HN should have 50% fewer good comments and 100% fewer bad ones, or whether we should just get everything. I believe that latter.

Second, this program places excess responsibility in the hands of high-karma users. HN is now moving from a passive system (eg. one where everything is visible and the best stuff gets voted to the top), to one where every comment must be scrutinized and evaluated just to be visible. Logistically, I don't see how this works. Users with over 1000 karma are rare. From what I've seen they are less than 5% of the total HN user base. This minority is now going to be responsible for evaluating every single comment?! I truly do not see the small number of high-karma users on HN being able to sort through every comment. Many, many comments will be missed or ignored.

Overall, I believe that any effort to stop spam on HN should be given consideration, but this system poses substantial logistical problems and will, in all likelihood, hurt the community.

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1. dllthomas ◴[26 Mar 14 06:39 UTC] No.7471962[source]▶
"Users with over 1000 karma are rare. From what I've seen they are less than 5% of the total HN user base of."

But a much higher percentage of people who actually post. The top 10 posts on this page (for me, right now) are about 50% from such users, and of the top 10 newcomments right now there's only 3 from users with 1000+ Karma, but several more from >900. If you're participating on the site for a while, it doesn't take that long.