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Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?
title says all
- teacup50 13y agoCall me cynical, but this sure seems like an effort to enforce groupthink on the company news outlet. I suppose we'd do well to remember what business YC is in, and how critical public messaging and perception is to that business, not just in terms of their existing investments, but also ongoing recruitment.
- dchichkov 13y agoThere is a chance that YC had already crossed the threshold of not being money-hungry and now is in the community-building mode. And if not. Oh well. Anyone who matters is likely to be intelligent enough to detect company bullshit/groupthink and this would be the end of it.
- chippy 13y agoThere is no such thing as the threshold of "threshold of not being money-hungry and now is in the community-building mode". What on earth is that idea from? Is it a capitalist view, that if you becoming immensely wealthy that your wealth confers benefits automatically on society? I'm curious. Y Combinator is not turning into a charity or a non-profit. How does that make logic? It's primary intention is to make a profit. It is a business. Part of that business is public relations and community management, but it's a business first and last.
- dchichkov 13y agoEven if you'd drop completely selfless motives out of the picture (rich and eccentric folks sometimes fancy these and in particular this hackernews site seems to be pg's pet project), as far as I understand it, the long term success of YC as a business depends upon the long term success of Bay Area / Silicon Valley. If this is indeed the case (and if they don't need to squeeze every cent out of ppl right now), they may as well be in the 'community building' mode. The original post had said "how critical public messaging and perception is to that business". Hmm. In my opinion, what is somewhat critical to them (business-wise) is this upcoming 10B DropBox IPO. Everything else doesn't look that critical to me. I doubt that a change to a comment system here can have any observable interaction with the IPO process. So I doubt that 'enforcing groupthink on a news company outlet' is critical to them and that it was it. Just pg working on his pet project seems more like it.
- pg 13y agoI suggest another option: wait to see what it's like.
- ryannevius 13y ago...is YC open to reverting to the current system if/when it doesn't work out?
- wcummings 13y agoBy what metric do we determine if it "works out"?
- pg 13y agoOf course. We'd be pretty stupid not to revert something that wasn't working. Plus in any case if you tweak parameters like the number of endorsements a comment needs and how much karma you need to endorse, you can approach current HN as closely as you want.
- dperfect 13y agoI'd venture to guess that the difference between a requirement of just 1 endorsement from users with karma >= 1 and the current HN is fairly significant (a downvote differs conceptually from a nonexistent endorsement), so you may not be able to approach it too closely. I suppose only time will tell though.
- rahimnathwani 13y agoThis reminds me of the 'penny gap problem': that the steep drop-off in users from raising the price from zero to a penny is much larger than the (much smoother) drop from further price increases.
- omegaham 13y agoThis is an excellent observation. It takes effort to downvote someone; it takes zero effort to ignore a pending post that doesn't meet whatever your standard is for endorsement. Basically, it turns the system on its head; it's no longer "Bad posts will be removed," it's "Your posts will automatically be removed unless someone decides that they are good." I'm actually really optimistic about this change; it will force people to be more civil if they actually want to participate. However, it will only work if lots of people are willing to put in the effort of endorsing quality posts.
- shasta 13y agoI disagreed. What's the new HN comment system?
- eam 13y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
- bane 13y agotoo early to tell?
- minimaxir 13y agoFor note, here's a chart I just made of the number of Hacker News comments made over the last 3 years: http://i.imgur.com/4FwglA8.png http://i.imgur.com/4FwglA8.png The number of comments has been growing significantly; perhaps change won't be bad.
- derefr 13y agoIt'd be more useful if the graph was in terms of comments per story per month, I think. As it is, the data could just mean that stories hit the front page, get discussed, and disappear increasingly quickly.
- minimaxir 13y agoStories hit the front page and disappear as a part of Hacker News's time weighting for determining ranking. It's extremely, extremely unusual for an article to be on the front page more than a day.
- derefr 13y agoRight, but they can be on the front page for much less than a day, depending on how quickly we move onto discussing the next thing. And that "much less" can shrink further over time.
- noarchy 13y agoWhy is it necessarily a bad thing that the number of comments has grown? This only matters if the overall quality of posts has decreased. More comments can also mean more good posts.
- mkr-hn 13y agoRemember when a chorus said hiding comment scores would be the end of HN?
- hayksaakian 13y agoComment scores are actually irrelevant. The relative score is all that matters, and a comment's position on the page tells you all you need to know.
- derefr 13y agoRank is only apparent when a comment has siblings. When two people are having a reply-to-reply back-and-forth debate, I'm usually left very curious to which side HN agrees with.
- hayksaakian 13y agopersonally, i'd rather that be unknown to avoid encouraging hive-mindedness.
- derefr 13y agoIt just occurred to me that it'd actually be nice to display scores on threads when they become archived--in other words, when knowing the score can no longer encourage you to upvote.
- TheLoneWolfling 13y agoTo me, there is a major difference between this: --comment A (1000 karma) --comment B (2 karma) --comment C (1 karma) and this: --comment A (1000 karma) --comment B (999 karma) --comment C (1 karma) Consider if A and B have opposing opinions.
- sillysaurus3 13y agoIt's worth comparing this poll to the one about whether HN should display comment scores: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605 Only 38.5% of users were in favor of comment scores being hidden, but it was decidedly a positive change for the site.
- paulrademacher 13y agoIs there a follow-up poll showing that it's "decidedly a positive change"? :-)
- tripzilch 13y agoAccording to rkuykendall-com, that actually was the follow-up poll, held after the change was implemented. So no, it was not widely regarded to be a decidedly positive change.
- rkuykendall-com 13y agoA few notes: 1) That poll was conducted well after the change. That makes it a very different type of poll. 2) This change has half as much support, if you ignore the wait-and-sees.
- ryannevius 13y agoWhy on earth would you ignore the "wait-and-sees"?
- rkuykendall-com 13y agoIt was hard to compare a yes/no poll with a yes/no/idk poll. So I dropped the idk. They didn't think it wouldn't work, and they didn't think it would work, so there was no parallel to the other poll.
- lbotos 13y agoAs a fun aside, the other day a coworker and I noticed that HNsearch actually shows comment scores when you view per author: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sillysaurus3#!/comment/forever/prefix/0/author%3Asillysaurus3 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sillysaurus3#!/comment/forever/pre... (I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but interesting none the less.)
- hayksaakian 13y agoI'd give it a few days. I want to see what happens in the comment thread of the next popular controversy.
- cmbaus 13y agoCan someone vote me up so I can get my karma above 1000 :)
- hmsimha 13y agoIs it possible to restrict a poll to users with >1000 karma, since they are clearly the ones who will be inheriting both the power and the burden? edit: additionally, it sounds like they will continue to see all posts to Hacker News (since they will have to endorse the one they approve of) so I'm not sure what they stand to benefit from this change.
- notatoad 13y agodisagree: I just don't see the problem it's trying to solve. HN doesn't have a fluff problem or a flamewar problem - it happens, but not frequently enough to really be a problem. The problem with HN's comments is the overwhelming negativity. Anything new, any change to something that already exists, is met with a reaction of fear or anger in the comments. I'd like to see effort go into fixing that problem, rather than wasting effort trying to solve a problem that other forums have and this one doesn't. And yes, I know i'm being part of this problem right now.
- WestCoastJustin 13y agoFYI -- Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
- ExpiredLink 13y agoWhy not pending delete instead of pending acceptance? Any comment is posted immediately but can be marked inappropriate by >1000 users within a certain (short) time span. If the comment reaches an inappropriateness threshold within that span it's deleted automatically.
- pizza 13y agoI don't know whether I like it or not, but I know for sure that we'll get used to it.
- brandonhsiao 13y agoPoint is, this isn't just some visual tweak to get used to or not. It's a structural change that will have visible effects on the quality of the comments. (That being said, my answer is "wait and see.")
- rdl 13y agoI'd rather see it rolled out on some articles but not all, so we can see it in parallel with the old system.
- sixothree 13y agoI think the thing that would best help the comment system would be to have all comments in a thread begin collapsed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- arthurcolle 13y agoDisagree
- staunch 13y agoI like trying new things.
- icu 13y agoI read HN everyday and I value the commentary as much as the articles. This change has the potential to censor my contribution to that commentary. So while I think there is a lot going for the idea, I think there will be a lot of good comments that won't ever be displayed so on balance I think HN will lose more than it gains.
- postit 13y agoFor those who doesn't spend his whole life hanging on HN for increasing karma. That's pretty unfair.
- jw2013 13y agoI disagreed, and am pretty happy with the openness of current HN system. I'd rather see some negative comments than missing out a few inspiring ones. What I do find annoying is (as some have mentioned days/weeks ago)- the OP can delete his own post, even though there are many replies below. So now the other hackers have no idea what the rest of people are replying to.
- tyleregeto 13y agoI'm not a big fan of the change. In theory there is nothing wrong with the new system, but I generally think HN has one of the best online communities around. Overall the average comment is polite, intelligent, and generally worth reading. So maybe I'm just not seeing the problem that it is trying to fix.
- heurist 13y agoI don't like it. I don't mind waiting to see what happens - I'm actually kind of curious to see how it changes the community - but my guess is it will decimate the number of comments per thread because it filters the signal as well as the noise. 1000+ karma users aren't going to endorse even 10 comments per thread on average (unless they are exceptionally enthusiastic), so only the most popular threads will have any possible discussion. In my experience the most popular threads are often the least interesting so I probably won't be able to read or participate in worthwhile discussions while this system is in place, though this depends on the balance of comments vs. upvotes which pg et. al have at their disposal to tinker with. I think this solution approaches the problem backwards. Instead of blocking all comments until they pass some endorsement threshold, why not make 1000+ karma users' downvotes count as 'denouncements' and hide the post if they get three or four denouncements? This should have essentially the same effect on noise levels without filtering out massive amounts of quality posts.
- ilaksh 13y agoThis may be difficult for some people to understand such as famous users, but quite a few of my best comments were never upvoted. So I believe that this will also filter out many valid comments.
- lucb1e 13y agoI'm by no means famous, but I have over 2.5x the karma requirement and very well understand your point.
- mehwoot 13y agoWhy would you think you absolutely know how this will turn out before seeing it in action? Wait and see.
- nostromo 13y agoFirst law of the internet: everyone hates changes. Second law of the internet: nobody will remember in a week.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- PavlovsCat 13y agoAn option to display non-endorsed posts (like "showdead") to everyone who wants to see them might be a good idea?
- jpeg_hero 13y agoI am not sure I lake that
- tim333 13y agoWhy not a limited trial? Have a new comments system day or week, then return to the original and compare. edit: I saw [pending] pop up so I guess the trial is on
- evolve2k 13y agoRadical suggestion: Add another list called say 'peanut gallery' which is where all the unapproved, unflagged comments live. This way 'comments' filters out the noise yet HN still keeps all unflagged comments transparently available, avoiding accusations of censorship.
- brudgers 13y agoMy initial reaction was WTF? But then I thought that pending comments are somewhat analogous to the "new" page for submissions. And it sort of makes sense. My ambivalence is that I don't upvote every comment that isn't bad, and I'm not sure I want to be responsible for moderating comments. And I certainly don't spend a lot of time wading through the new stories. On the other hand, these days interesting threads are often swamped with several hundred comments in the first hour or two, and it seems like a lot of the comments are the same noise. In the long run I suspect it will be a win.
- poulsbohemian 13y agoWhether or not it will be an improvement remains to be seen. That said, I'm glad to see improvements attempted. One concern is that I've had some nasty unprofessional responses from people with high karma in the past - responses that made me question how they got the karma to begin with given their snotty behavior. What I noticed is that many had made very few contributions to discussions, but they'd racked up the points with a couple successful post submissions. So, I guess I'm a little concerned about putting moderation in the hands of people with high karma, as I'm not convinced the karma count is actually indicative of good, meaningful participation.
- adam419 13y ago-- Possible compromise for you to consider PG -- Make the high karma approved comments be the core design feature of the commenting section, yet have some filter to view all if one desires.
- jboy 13y agoIt might be worth waiting a month or two to see what it's like, and then running this poll again at the end of that trial period. I think that many people (myself included) would feel more relaxed about the change if there were a commitment that the system would be reverted quickly at the end of the trial period, if a majority of users (perhaps 2/3 of poll participants) decided that they preferred the old system. It seems that some of the deeper concerns about this change are: 1. These types of changes often seem to be made unilaterally, without any idea of what a significant majority might prefer. 2. Changes like this often seem to be one-way changes.
- sigvef 13y agoHere is a live chart of the poll: http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=7447055 http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=7447055
- a3voices 13y agoDisagree. Don't fix what's not broken.
- brudgers 13y agoOk, the $4 meta question: How many of the comments on the page would you endorse?
- ronnier 13y agoI'm afraid that comments that don't jive with the HN world view will never be endorsed. It's a good way to keep the opposition shut up! Hopefully I'm misunderstanding how it works.
- praxeologist 13y agoThat is what I think. Probably at least half of my posts are advocating libertarian anarchy, revisionist history and non-mainstream economics, so I feel like I am going to be censored. Just as a user, if I had 1000 karma I feel like I would be too lazy to go down a whole thread and evaluate the worthiness of each post and approve it too. I'll wait and see but it seems like it will be a failure.
- mburst 13y agoI'd maybe agree if the issue was dealing with comment spam. The system kind of gives me the feeling of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I think it'll be much tougher to get to that 1000 karma threshold which will make sub 1000 users less likely to comment if their comments aren't actually getting posted. 1000+ users may also get bored of having to endorse other peoples comments. From what it sounds like it could seem like a job. One alternative could be to only allow 1000+ users to upvote and all other users can only downvote comments. That way you still get your idea of having top karma users pick what everyone else reads. In either case I'm a fan of the Reddit model for all users. There are lots of ideas that I think are dumb that still manage to do well so it'll be interesting to see. The free market will decide soon enough.
- lucb1e 13y agoI suppose with 2.5k I'm one of the rich guys here. I would love to prevent what you describe as the rich getting richer, but the regulators will be regulated. If I don't do exactly as some superadmin wants, I'll be banned from comment approving myself. My only options seem to be, to put it bluntly, to become pg's bitch and do as the model requires, or get out.
- kbar13 13y agoI'm not entirely sure how someone with under 1000 points will ever be able to get over 1000 points anymore.
- stefan_kendall3 13y agopg isn't dumb. I'm pretty sure this is the point.
- noarchy 13y agoAs I've said elsewhere, this is a solution without a problem. The discussions on HN have tended to be one of the highlights of the site, and I worry that they may take a major hit with this change.
- MCem 13y agoDisclaimer: I am a long-time lurker who has only logged in a handful of times but browses daily. It seems to me that this change moves further toward a select group of individuals owning and controlling the dialog on this site. This is bad news for the people who are not in this select group. Before this change, a hacker news thread represented the collective dialog of the users on this site. Now, even though everyone can still comment, a hacker news thread is the collective dialog of everyone who can approve comments. This is a dramatization; of course people with 1K karma will approve any reasonable comments and do so without any sort of agenda. Still, we can afford to be knitpicky about this change because the current system isn't broken. There is, in my mind, not any significant problem with comment quality. Why make a change now when it can potentially make the site worse and doesn't offer that great of an upside?
- shapeshed 13y agoWhy prioritise this over an API for HN? 2014 and we are still screen scraping.
- e15ctr0n 13y agoI believe an API already exists[1] and a number of people have already built some cool apps[2] on top of it. [1] https://hn.algolia.io/api https://hn.algolia.io/api [2] https://hn.algolia.io/cool_apps https://hn.algolia.io/cool_apps
- linuxhansl 13y agoI won't repeat my comment, but I maintain what I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447882 This is about good judgment, which cannot be enforced by rules.
- dlubarov 13y agoIt seems like a very primitive solution to a nontrivial problem. Why treat comment quality as binary? Reddit's approach is slightly more sophisticated and works well in practice. You generally see only quality comments, but you can read all of them if you want to. And you can contribute content without worrying that it may be delayed or outright rejected.
- BadCookie 13y agoIt's interesting that this "improvement" to comments was specifically mentioned in Sam Altman's recent blog post about potential female founders. For what it's worth, this change makes me (a female with <1000 karma) feel less welcome and considerably less likely to comment. I'm not saying that this feeling is tied to being female -- it (probably) isn't. But if you want to attract new people and new types of people to HN, then this change seems very much counter to that goal. The feeling that the insiders have to approve what you're saying before you can have a voice is not a good one.
- milankragujevic 13y agoI disagree. I don't have the time to get karma, but I would still like to comment sometimes (I'm a noob, but I've been using HN for a year already in read mode). Now with this system there's no chance for me to actually (on paper there is, but there are so many more quality comments than mine that mine will never ever be published). Back to read mode I guess...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- chetanahuja 13y agoI have pretty high (but < 1000) karma. Even so, this sort of move smacks of consolidation of power into the existing high status group. Another way to look at this is that this is a classic "next-step" for an established player in the market and the market of course is ripe for ... ugh... disruption.
- geuis 13y agoI do not think this is a good idea. I've already looked through the list of noobcomments and without any context, I have no interest in looking to see if they are relevant or not. The issue with the current model is that all I see is a list of green comments. What articles are they related to, what other discussions are they replying to? Realize my comments come from the perspective of someone with 8600+ karma. I won't be silenced by this, but most people that come afterwords will be. Its a bad, bad idea.
- ximi 13y agoMaybe I misunderstood the system (and with no way of checkin it out myself, having below 1000 karma myself), but I thought users with 1000+ karma would see all comments appear directly on each post and could then decide whether they are "worthy" or not to be shown to everyone. Thinking about this again I realize that would kind of defeat the whole idea as established users would still see all the "bad" comments, maybe someone can elaborate on how exactly it's supposed to work.
- markwillis82 13y agoI only have 50 karma, however I have been here for quite some time. I don't normally comment but now that all my comments will be pending it makes my comments on new stories less likely to appear. Unless they get more coverage and land on the front page. Shame :(
- cs02rm0 13y ago1000 karma seems like an awful lot (from my lowly perspective). What proportion of the site's users is that?
- ksikka 13y agoI wonder if the YC partners took bets on what the ratios would be
- petemc_ 13y agoIf I maintain my current levels of posting/karma receiving, I should be eligible to post unfettered comments in 84 years or so.
- ggordan 13y agoI think this would make more sense if comment karma, and link karma are a different (like on reddit). For example, I have nearly 1000 karma points, but most of those points came from links I have posted. And then there is bob who has 500 karma, but has never posted a link and most of his karma comes from contributing to discussions. I pass the 1000 point threshold, and now I have the ability to decide whether bobs comment is good enough to be live when I haven't proved that I can contribute to the discussion.
- AJ72 13y agoWe will never be able to have such an open debate like this again. Future conversations on how to improve HN will be filtered by 1000+ karma users. That seems at odds with what HN news stands for. While I have confidence in the abilities of these 1000+ karma users, it doesn't seem the right way. I am confident that with some refinements a good outcome will be reached.
- dragons 13y agoI've read a number of pretty interesting comments by posters who wanted to remain anonymous by using throwaway accounts. I'd never see these with the new comment system. FWIW I have showdead set to "Yes"; I want to see everything.
- supercoder 13y agoI like the community here, can't see exactly what problem is trying to be fixed.
- greg5green 13y agoAt first glance, I'm not a fan, but after thinking about it, I'm thinking it might help new users gain karma quicker if they are good citizens, which would help deal with some of my concerns. Those with greater than 1000 karma will now have more of a reason to upvote comments, whereas before, they might have mildly found a comment not awful but not upvoted it because there was no reason to. We'll see what happens.
- TheLoneWolfling 13y agoHowever, it will prevent being able to post multiple comments in a burst (which is true of a lot of people - lunch break / etc). I think this will overwhelm that effect.
- blablabla123 13y agoWith such a system in place, writing comments is not much fun. Even right now I wonder, whether someone is going to approve. I hope I conform to the common opinion with this comment, so others can read my thoughts. Luckily this is not the only tech/startup forum on the web.
- greatsuccess 13y agoHonestly, I think its great that your community thinks so fucking highly of itself that its a privilege to comment on the self absorbed drivel that this board contains. Seriously if you think this place is so fucking special you have mental issues, fuck you and fuck your comment system
- nzp 13y agoWhen I first learned today about this change my knee jerk reaction was the same as with most people commenting on this---it will be horrible, it will enforce groupthink, it will stifle discussion, and so on. But after some thinking, I realized it's just a knee jerk. The thing is, HN doesn't have a problem with rudeness or bad comments that existing voting can't solve (as far as I can see). But, I do think that HN has a problem with the amount of comments on popular submissions, and of a huge amount of comments which are nominally OK (i.e. not rude, not wrong, not trolling...) and therefore cannot in good conscience be downvoted, but whose information content is near 0. With low total amount of comments, this wouldn't be a problem because most of these kinds of comments are a consequence of there being a non-manageable amount of total comments for the speed at which content goes through HN---most people don't have the time to go through the whole lot and check what has been said/pointed out/asked, and that leads to a lot of redundancy. This is very exhausting to read through, and really is a problem of signal to noise ratio, but the "noise" on HN is not the stupid or the rude (those get blasted away quickly), it's just the well meaning, decent but redundant comment made because one has something to say but can't be bothered (rightfully so when there are 300+ comments already!) to check if it's been said already. A recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7427542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7427542 This was just horrible! Comment after comment telling him the exact same thing (change your CV) with almost the exact same specific advices. I went through the whole thing because I was interested and wanted to see what people have to say about this, but I was completely exhausted at the end because there was so much redundancy. Why do I think pg's plan with pending comments would improve this? The first order effect would probably be a dramatic decrease in number of comments. The second order effect would then be that it's much, much easier to go through the whole thing and see if there's any new information you can contribute to the topic, which, if we are sane people, will lead to a dramatic decrease in noise (redundancy) (I say "if we are sane" because I take it that a sane person won't repeat already stated ideas just for the sake of repeating). This is why I'm currently strongly in favour of the way the idea was presented originally with some tweaks that have been mentioned in the original thread yesterday. I see now that it's off by default and only per item tree, thus only serving as a weapon against rudeness and flame wars. As I don't think HN has that problem so I don't see the point of the whole thing as it stands now. I would much rather if the original form was given a chance with the mentioned fixes and attentive parameter tweaking. As for fears of "echo chambers" and such, I don't see that currently on HN and I'm willing to give people here the benefit of the doubt that they would in aggregate do the right thing. If, on the other hand the community is so bad to end up using this as a tool for censorship then I don't think it would be a shame to have it fall apart anyway. So I don't think there's anything to lose. Useful back and forth discussions would still be able to go on with parameters reasonably tuned. Also, I notice that a lot of people mistakenly think that 1000+ karma means your posts get auto-approved. But that's not the case, it requires 10k+ karma! Realistically, most people will never reach that even with the system as it is now, so that's completely irrelevant. Users with 1000+ karma would not be in any particular commenting advantage if the proposed change went through.