17 ms·

Pending Comments

• tmsh 13y ago
  I think curiously what this would encourage is a slower way of thinking. I.e., not quick comments, but longer, more thoughtful ones. I don't comment much, but when I do think back on the comments I have made that have been somewhat popular, they are of this longer type. Maybe there's something to this. But just be aware you're positioning yourself as kind of a catalyst in the opposite direction of most small, quick messaging fora. Maybe that's good for us. Maybe it will come to be appreciated. Maybe people will abandon it for something easier.
• minimaxir 13y ago
  The Pending Comments page is a secret test of character. Endorse the correct comment, and endorse wisely. Case in point: http://i.imgur.com/8Oa3z0H.png http://i.imgur.com/8Oa3z0H.png
  • imkevinxu 13y ago
    Testing ability to make second comment after being endorsed once. Hi Max! Update: apparently this comment was still pending http://i.imgur.com/KBuY5fx.png http://i.imgur.com/KBuY5fx.png Updatev2: I think I may have interpreted it wrong, PG wrote "Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another" so I guess all comments will be pending but after being endorsed once can comment again?
    • pg 13y ago
      I increased the limit to 5.
      • ajcarpy2005 13y ago
        ^This makes a lot more sense to me than the one comment at a time idea. It gives people some slack and if the community decides one of your previous comments was unworthy to be in the official discussion thread, there's an incentive to delete it but also not too much time pressure on the part of the endorsers in the community...and thus on the commenter. I predict this will reduce inane back and forth flamewars.
• imkevinxu 13y ago
  Interesting, I wonder if this page will give rise to unofficial "moderators" who decide to spend 5 minutes endorsing various comments. I'm also interesting in seeing where / how pending comments look on a specific thread, I guess posting this will show that
• jliechti1 13y ago
  The new system is live. Would it make sense to add a permanent "pending" link to the top navigation bar? HN users with > 1000 karma. Will you actively spend time to endorse new comments?
  • icelancer 13y ago
    >HN users with > 1000 karma. Will you actively spend time to endorse new comments? Yes, while I regularly read HN. I'm not going to go out of my way or anything, though.
    • ma2rten 13y ago
      Same here.
  • rjd 13y ago
    I more or less stopped participating a while ago due to decline in comment quality. I'm at 950 karma but if the system works I might make the effort reach 1000 lift the opinions I think are relevant to get this forum back to what I used to enjoy. The only issue I have is that it might make the groupthink that exists here even worse. Sometimes the descending opinions are very important not just the status quo. But will see how it goes, I just hope there isn't a rise in parroting comments like you see on stack overflow where people just start copying other people opinions to raise there own karma value, which would entrench the status quo. If that happens I'll probably be out for good.
• ztratar 13y ago
  I already dislike this. :[ Not to mention this won't get seen by anybody.
  • tim333 13y ago
    Seen it edit: just for research I noted how long this took to go from [pending] to not. It took 10 minutes for what it's worth
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• andrewmunsell 13y ago
  Is this system current implemented so that users with greater than 1000 karma are now "moderators", or is the limit lower than that? I have 910 at the moment, but after clicking "Endorse" on a comment it seemed to disappear from the page. It could be entirely coincidental, or was the limit lowered? Also, I can't see an "Pending" link in the top menu unless I'm on the "Pending" page already. Not sure if this a part of having less than 1000 karma or just a caching issue/bug.
  • lbotos 13y ago
    I saw it for a second as well, I assume it was a caching issue. Less then 1000 Karma here.
    • NamTaf 13y ago
      I'm seeing it at 761
  • 6thSigma 13y ago
    There is no 'pending' link on the top menu. If I click on 'comments' I see some pending posts that I can endorse. That would probably be a good test.
    • saulrh 13y ago
      Agree, I see the same. I see posts prefixed with "[pending]" and with an Endorse button in the grey at the top; I hit Endorse and the "[pending]" goes away. So I'm pretty sure the system is live.
• pandemicsyn 13y ago
  Just curious but, whats the reasoning behind not having a "Show Pending Comments" option along with the existing "Show Dead"?
  • pg 13y ago
    Mostly that I haven't implemented it yet.
    • Crito 13y ago
      Out of curiousity, how do/will dead posts interact with the endorsement system? Will dead posts that are not endorsed still be visible to users below 1k karma? Is endorsing a dead post (perhaps a good comment by a usually poor poster) a no-op, or will endorsement allow the dead post to be seen by users who are below 1k karma but have showdead turned on?
• arfliw 13y ago
  Not sure if this is a bug or not but I was able to endorse a bunch of comments and my karma is only 11. Question: if a comment is never endorsed does that mean that user is effectively banned?
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• omegaham 13y ago
  For now, things are going to be pretty silly, as everyone is paying attention to it and probably just endorsing for the hell of it. My guess is that PG started with the threshold being really low, meaning that a single endorsement will actually post the comment and that an endorser needs very little karma to give a good comment. As the karma and endorsements required go up, it will become harder and harder for bad posts to actually become viewable. I really like this way of doing it; it starts off with the default HN and then makes the filter more and more selective.
  • pg 13y ago
    That is exactly the plan. To prevent the change from being too disruptive I set all the parameters controlling pending comments very loose. I know a lot of people are worried that this will break HN socially. I frankly am relieved it didn't break HN literally. The new code touches so many things. I'm amazed it works. But if it does seem to be breaking HN socially, we'll tweak it till it doesn't, and if that's impossible, we'll turn it off. I'm not wedded to having pending comments. I just wanted to try it to see if it can eliminate the very worst comments.
    • alecsmart1 13y ago
      We already have upvoting/downvoting of comments. Why do we need to moderate each and every comment? A non-popular post will have no comments at all as all will be pending and no 1000+ karma users to endorse the comments. :(
      • dsrguru 13y ago
        Or, if the purpose is to have high karma users function as semi-moderators, why not just keep the upvote/downvote system but make a comment's precedence a function of weighted upvotes based on the karma of those voters? I guess that still wouldn't prevent a very deep off-topic tangent off of an ancestor post that's high up on the page, but it seems like a simpler and safer solution with much less potential downside, and there are always specific solutions to the above problem such as collapsable threads.
• Bud 13y ago
  I like pg constantly thinking of ways to improve the site. But in my opinion, this is going to kill a lot of real-time commentary on posts that are only moderately popular, and it will kill discussion on scrolled-off posts almost completely, for obvious reasons. I think pg is overestimating the number of >1000 karma users who are actively available to moderate and interested in moderating at any given time. This number needs to be fairly sizable for this system to work. I doubt it's very sizable at all.
  • gk1 13y ago
    I could be wrong, but I think the karma threshold for endorsing has been lowered. I'm at ~850 and I'm able to endorse comments.
    • pdq 13y ago
      It's at least above 300, because I can't endorse.
      • tricolon 13y ago
        It's also above 429.
    • pg 13y ago
      It's 500 at the moment.
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    • kafkaesque 13y ago
      Yup. I'm at 935 points and I can endorse comments. I feel like this is going to be such a dilemma for me, and HN, as a community, will soon discuss what really can be endorsed, even though PG already set some rules. I feel bad that comments posted just to say they agree with someone/something cannot/will not be seen. This type of 'noise', as long as it is sprinkled lightly throughout, isn't so bad, in my opinion. I mean, I understand HN is meant to reward thoughtful comments, but at what point does this concept go into Less Wrong-type of ridiculousness? I'm totally not trolling, but we're only human. To deconstruct all aspects of a community/forum to only allow strict logical/cerebral behaviour seems like a community I would rather not be a part of. In the end, I'll probably not endorse any comments, or at least extremely little, because I don't know if I agree with the concept and would rather not get involved. I'm probably in the minority here, though.
• jasonlotito 13y ago
  The UX is very bad on that page. You click endorse, and then you have to wait for the page to load (which takes some time, I might add). So, I get to endorse one comment at a time on that page.
  • reitzensteinm 13y ago
    You know, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. If there's a bit of work involved, you'll be unlikely to endorse marginal comments. Of course, you can just middle click, so maybe that's not so effective.
    • mschuster91 13y ago
      Middle click doesnt really work on mobile and not at all on the various HN interface apps which people use due to HNs layout being 1990-era style and not usable at all even for reading on mobile. Also, for the fuck of it, if I see ten good but un-endorsed comments, I have potentially ten tabs to load (hello latencies on UMTS links) and ten tabs to close! My netbook doesnt have enough pixels for the tabs, let alone RAM. Text-based browsers dont even have tabs. The HN community may be great and all, but the technological part of it Just. Plain. Sucks. YC is hunting for startups, and every single one of all the YC-backed companies has a better website UX than HN/YC itself. What a shame.
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
• fuddle 13y ago
  1000 Karma points seems quite high. I've been here 3 years and I've only got 115 points!
  • Edmond 13y ago
    quit your job and get to work racking up karma points :)
  • vacri 13y ago
    I've been here three years and have 9000 points. We have a similar karma average, so our comments are basically seen as the same quality. If you want community privileges, then contribute to the community! :)
    • pbhjpbhj 13y ago
      Shouldn't it be about quality of contribution far more than quantity? If your quality is high then you should get equal privileges with those who merely contribute a lot (like me, my av. is down to 1.6 because I can't help but have my say ...).
      • vacri 13y ago
        It is. A commentor who only makes 10 comments worth 100 points each is valued as much as a commentor that's made 100 comments valued at 10 points.
        • pbhjpbhj 13y ago
          A commenter that makes 3 comments valued at 300 points isn't valued as much as commenter who makes 2002 posts at an average of 0.5 points each though.
          • vacri 13y ago
            Such examples would be in the extreme edges of the bell curve though, and rules designed to suit those rarities are often not suitable for the people in the main part of the curve. And even so, a single commentor that only has 3 comments might make valuable comments when they pipe up, but the 2000-commentor is more a part of the community simply for having more frequent conversations. You say you have a low average and therefore aren't as valuable a community member, but I recognise your handle and have a general idea of the flavour of your previous comments. In business parlance, you have 'brand recognition' :). If some wunderkind blows in tomorrow and posts a couple of popular posts (popular gets the votes, not insightfulness) and afterwards departs or lurks forever, I'm not going to remember them or their 'flavour', despite the high average. They might have made an interesting observation, but they wouldn't be as strong a part of the community as yourself. Besides, getting back to context, who would I trust more when it comes to this 'endorsement' process, silly as it is? Someone who breezes in and out and mostly lurks, or someone for whom talking on the site is a frequent occurence and who knows the ins-and-outs of it? A lurker is an unknown quantity, but for someone to hit [number] karma, they generally have to have chatted or posted a bit (a few exceptions, sure).
• sthatipamala 13y ago
  One problem I foresee: It is hard to judge some comments without context, which the pending comments page does not provide.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    • georgemcbay 13y ago
      My karma is >10k and my comments are still going into "pending" state. I don't know if they are being endorsed by other users or the system just automatically endorses them, but I do see a [pending] on them for at least a minute after I post them -- haven't tried to make a quick post while another is showing [pending].
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• georgemcbay 13y ago
  There is way too little context in most of the comments in pending comments for me to decide if they should be endorsed, I really can't imagine scrolling through that page and then clicking 'parent', etc to figure out the context; particularly during rush hours when I'm already worried any click I make on this site might result in seeing the "HN Status" twitter history page.
  • ma2rten 13y ago
    There is a bug on this comment. It says [pending], but there is no endorsements button, it says endorsed instead.
    • georgemcbay 13y ago
      My karma is >10k, so maybe the system still puts my posts into a pending state but then auto-endorses them? Not sure, but pg did say in another post that users with karma >10k were exempt.
    • mortenjorck 13y ago
      I'm attempting to endorse georgemcbay's reply to your comment, but it just sends me to the reply page.
• cheeze 13y ago
  I wonder if taking the age of an account into consideration could help. I feel that there are probably quite a few lurkers who have been here for quite some time, but haven't massed much karma since they very rarely comment, although are here all the time. Thoughts?
  • halter73 13y ago
    I understand the viewpoint that greater moderation power should go those who contribute more. But as a fellow long-time lurker, I think accounts like ours make up for the long tail of HN contributions particularly in the form of comments. I also think that long-time lurkers account for most of HN's readership. The goal of HN isn't to please the majority, and pg seems to think that giving more moderation power to those with more karma will foster better discourse. I urge pg to reconsider this. While it doesn't take any real effort to have an old account. And while it often feels that power, even moderation power, ought to be earned. I think giving long-time users the ability to endorse comments, even if they have little karma, won't degrade HN's discourse but instead improve it. Lurkers post less, and therefore have less karma. Lurkers understand that when they don't have anything worthwhile to contribute, they aren't obligated to add to the noise in order to score internet points. I don't think that lurkers who have enjoyed HN for years without much individual activity are going to go out of their way to endorse pending comments that are low quality. I hope that most would respect the higher standard HN holds comments to compared to some other sites. I suspect that those higher standards might be what has kept them coming back. Oh. And since I'm posting this past 11 PM PDT on a Friday night, I doubt this comment will earn me much in the way of karma even though this is the type of constructive commenting that pg wants on HN, or so I hope. I think this goes to show that karma isn't a perfect stat for determining who can endorse comments. And while account age might not be perfect for this either, I think some combination of both would be better.
• alecsmart1 13y ago
  This completely breaks the commenting feature in both ios & android mobile apps.
• willtheperson 13y ago
  So have I lost the ability to comment or is this for new users?
  • rkuykendall-com 13y ago
    Your comments will need to be approved by a few users with ~1000+ karma before others on the site can see it. You can read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
    • tsm 13y ago
      As of right now it's 500 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447701 I'm curious about how many endorsements are needed. My endorsement caused your comment to go live, but I don't know if you'd been previously endorsed by someone else or not.
  • infogulch 13y ago
    If you're under about 1K karma your comments will be invisible until someone with >1K karma endorses it.
• nanidin 13y ago
  My issue with pending comments requiring endorsements is that I have been here for several years and I only have 247 karma. I browse regularly but only tend to comment when I have something good to add. I don't try to game the system, and I don't try to comment immediately on new posts. I'll probably never hit 1000 karma, and now I'm even more disincentived to post since the chances of someone actually seeing what I post will now be even lower.
  • endorsetest 13y ago
    I created a new account to test out the system, and within 4 minutes of you posting your comment, I was able to see it and reply to it. For what it's worth, it was also the top comment of this thread.
    • rkuykendall-com 13y ago
      This thread, and the day or so following, will be very different from the usual case. Today, everyone is playing with the endorse system. We will need to see how quickly it works when it's not the shiny new toy.
      • yukichan 13y ago
        How does it work? Do people with over 1K karma also need to be endorsed?
        • rkuykendall-com 13y ago
          It's not 100% clear yet since a lot of the lines are still being drawn, but it seems like users over ~10k karma do not need endorsements. You can read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
          • yukichan 13y ago
            If your comment never gets endorsed and the delete goes away, does that mean you can't comment anymore? Like what happens if a pending comment is still around 48 hours later?
• avalaunch 13y ago
  It would be nice if the page didn't reload when you click endo rse. I lost my place on the page and my first thought was, "Well I won't be doing that again."
• meursault334 13y ago
  I was driving back from meeting with my co-founder so came late to the party. I posted then deleted this in the old thread. As a long time lurker and reader of HN I really hope that you reconsider this change. I made an account just to explain why I dread the impact of this change on the quality, openness, and character of discourse at HN. Put bluntly this change inspires a visceral feeling of loss and disappointment in me. I have viewed HN as a community where anyone can participate fully if they have something useful to say. This change feels like it will destroy this character of HN and turn it into a system where elites will have all the knowledge of a discussion and the rest of us will not. They will be able to incorporate ideas into their own posts before others can and can choose which ideas get general airtime. Particularly in low traffic stories this feels unjust and noninclusive. I really enjoy reading the comment threads at HN and some of the best comments come as replies to comments that are unlikely to get endorsed in this system. This is because this system contains powerful disincentives for approving anything other than comments that will universally be viewed as high quality. If you approve enough comments that are viewed as low quality by moderators you will lose your ability to even view non approved comments and therefore your ability as an elite to fully participate in discourse at HN. When this goes live hopefully people will be very very liberal with approving comments and people will do the public service of approving most comments in a pending global queue quickly. For me it will be very sad that I cannot read the lone, often very informative, comment to a story that will never make it to the front page but that nonetheless I and other lurkers want to see any response at all to the story. I am willing to read the trolls if I am allowed to read those who will be neglected by +1000 karma users.
  • ronyeh 13y ago
    I agree that sometimes the best comments are replies to otherwise "bad" comments, simply because the person replying is trying to correct/educate the bad commenter. It's similar to Cunningham's Law – "the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is ... to post the wrong answer." So by banishing all "bad" comments to the forever-pending state, perhaps this won't encourage the "better" commenters to come out of the woodwork to correct him/her.
• KingJellybean 13y ago
  In the AskHN thread I made, only one person responded to it, but it was VERY USEFUL. Would Pending Comments have hidden that post from me? (I am assuming not many other people saw or cared about my thread) If so, then this policy seems like a big step towards focusing discussion to only what is on the front page.
• hindsightbias 13y ago
  Logic will never, ever, defeat Eternal September. This is absolutely the single greatest and subtly brilliant motivator for anyone interested in doing a startup to leap right now. All of your competition is going to be wasting hours of their day upvoting pending comments. Their time sink is your opportunity! Here's a free startup idea: autobot commenter to turk task the producers of the valley.
• waterlesscloud 13y ago
  I'm seeing no comments that remain as pending for very long. This is only going to affect the very bottom of the barrel as it stands now. So I think everyone can safely relax and let it work its course.
  • pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    Doesn't that mean this system performs [only] as well as the "flag" system for moderation but with many times more effort being applied?
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• cpeterso 13y ago
  If comment endorsing is going to scale, it needs to be very fast and easy. However, when I click an endorse link, the whole page reloads and I lose my scroll position! Clicking the up and down vote arrows does not reload the page, so the endorse links ought to be changed be changed to do the same. This frustrating behavior discourages me from endorsing comments.
  • pg 13y ago
    Hrm, yes, I should fix that.
• rkuykendall-com 13y ago
  I just realized that now only 10k+ users appear at the top of /newcomments, since they will be the only ones with approval at "0 minutes."
• pg 13y ago
  I'm turning off pending comments for now, because I'm going to bed and I don't like the idea of something this new running without me being able to watch it. One thing I noticed while it was turned on was that the comments were actually pretty good. It may be that bad comments tend to be concentrated on particular threads, and that the right way to implement pending comments is per-thread rather than site-wide. That was actually the original plan, but it was simpler to implement site-wide, and I usually try to do the simplest thing first, in case it works.
  • minimaxir 13y ago
    The comments are good because it's a Friday night and the only people now on Hacker News are the people who care about it too much. :P
    • Ecio78 13y ago
      it' Friday night in the US ...
      • sturmeh 13y ago
        Indeed, Saturday night here!
        • deleted 13y ago
          [deleted]
  • nodesocket 13y ago
    I like the idea, but I think there should be simple logic like: if post.created > 10 hours { comments.pending(false); } Threads that are older should be allowed to be commented on by anybody.
    • jw2013 13y ago
      >>It may be that bad comments tend to be concentrated on particular threads, and that the right way to implement pending comments is per-thread rather than site-wide. So what about this? Here comments is a vector of all the scores of comments inside one particular thread. ---- (defn filter? [comments threshold] (let [size (count comments)] (if (< threshold (/ (reduce + comments) size)) false true))) ;;user=> (filter? [1 2 3 4] 2) ;;false ;;user=> (filter? [1 2 3 4] 3) ;;true
• firebones 13y ago
  Given the power law distribution of participation in online forums (say, 1% produce comments or moderate, 3% vote, 96% only consume), I wouldn't be surprised to see the threshold have to drop quite a bit (especially based on time of day) in order to keep the wheels turning and to overcome the drop off after the honeymoon period is over and the novelty of dealing with pending comments wears off. Because of this power law distribution, it may not necessarily turn out to be that bad, since at any given time there may only be 3-4 comments pending for every eligible reviewer.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• xmonkee 13y ago
  I'll be honest, this just makes me feel terrible. I like to think of HN as the one online community where the comments are usually on point and there's no "power user" bullshit going on. Slashdot devolved into irrelevant memes by their moderation point system. Every Subreddit eventually becomes an echo chamber. Only on hacker news can you find very divergent opinions expressed side by side without banning, censoring, downvoting or trolling. I'm not saying that pending comments will destroy that, but I already while writing this comment I'm worried about being liked by the big guys. New people with valid opinions who might not know how to appeal to the site's group-think will have a bad time. People with poor language skills will have a bad time. And of course, jokes will have a bad time, and too much seriousness can just as surely dry up a forum as too much frivolity.
  • vl 13y ago
    >there's no "power user" bullshit going on Sometimes it's possible to notice that moderation is pretty heavy. For example, during recent "Satoshi identity discovered" debacle after brief period it was conspicuously absent from HN. I.e. I estimated that on any given day I would see one or two posts on the topic on the front page, but it wasn't the case. So my theory is that this topic was heavily moderated.
    • hayksaakian 13y ago
      Hard to say. HN still archives dead submissions, so maybe you can verify. I personally thought the satoshi identity thing was mainstream bullshit. My assumption was that people in power have a lot of incentive to find out who he is, and would have done so were it possible.
    • Houshalter 13y ago
      You may be correct, but I doubt it's due to moderators abusing their power. HN has an automated moderation system that is pretty arbitrary. It applies pretty heavy penalties to articles that have too many comments, or posts with certain keywords (like "nsa" and possibly "bitcoin".) Plus there is a regular spam filter that might be less than perfect, and I don't think the posts it filters are shown '[dead]'.
• Oculus 13y ago
  It just hit me the reason the page is blank is my karma is lower than 1000.
  • maxden 13y ago
    I think it's blank now because PG switched off pending status. I saw it before and could see comments in the queue, although my score was/is too low to do anything about them.
• downandout 13y ago
  Are spam and irrelevant comments really a huge issue here? I have been on here for over two years, and if it is a problem, it is one that I am blind to. I don't see myself or many of the others with 1000+ karma as the kind of people that would enjoy acting as HN police, and it seems like it will introduce internet politics to a community that has managed to avoid it. The net effect of this, IMO, will be that very few comments get endorsed and the quality and breadth of discussion will diminish. Finally, while we are talking about new ideas, I would love it if HN would track and display not only the net points a comment receives, but also the actual number of upvotes/downvotes. A controversial comment may have 1 net point, but may also have had 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes. Being able to see if a comment I posted was really interesting to people but opinion was divided, or that no one voted and thus the comment simply wasn't that interesting to others, would be be great.
  • Crito 13y ago
    Threads on.. particular.. topics tend to generate back-and-forth flamewars that I think this endorsement system may be effective at battling (if the endorsement thresholds are set high enough).
    • Gormo 13y ago
      A lot of discussions I've seen that seem superficially to be back-and-forth flamewars actually are instances of intense but substantive debate, and I'd really hate to see even rough-edged but worthwhile discourse suppressed just because someone who gave it only a cursory glance felt put off by its style.
      • gnaffle 13y ago
        What I'm really tired of is that off-topic, nitpicking discussion threads are often on top. I have to wade through a lot of comments to find the good ones. And I say that as someone who has myself fallen to the "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome. What I would like would be to have a tagging system on comment threads, so that I could filter out comment threads with rough edges if I didn't like them, or threads with endless back and forth nitpicking, or threads that have been covered endlessly before. Something like the old slashdot "Informative" or "Funny" system. Then the ones that wanted could troll and flame away to their hearts content, without disrupting the general discussion of a topic. The "no censorship" crows could turn off filtering alltogether and get HN exactly as it is today.
• JacksonGariety 13y ago
  test
• telvda 13y ago
  RIP in peace Hacker News
  • frik 13y ago
    Slashdot has the best and most advanced moderation system. Reddit/HN style moderation system is very simple but seem to work in most cases just fine too. But why change a working system? Maybe HN should add Sub-Topics (like reddit)?
• wildpeaks 13y ago
  Basically, that turns HN into politics ? Because 1000+ commenters get to choose between: - upvote and take the risk that other cliques will tag that as not worthy of an upvote, punishing both the commenter and yourself, possibly even pushing you back into the powerless silent majority. - don't upvote: don't take risks, only grind up hoping others will take risks for you. Sounds like it kills most discussions and only radical threads between cliques will remain :( So given that will probably be my last comment here if that change remain, what other sites would you guys suggest as HN alternatives?
  • clarry 13y ago
    lobste.rs
    • Pacabel 13y ago
      How is that an alternative that addresses the issues wildpeaks has raised, though? If anything, the invitation scheme over there just amplifies the sort of problems wildpeaks mentions.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
• RRRA 13y ago
  So now we should rate up everyone so they reach 1k karma?
• azth 13y ago
  I take it this won't affect submissions by those users?
• se85 13y ago
  What a terrible idea. Please reconsider.
• deftnerd 13y ago
  Doesn't this remove HN from being protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act if every comment is now screened by a human? There could be serious liability issues to think about.
  • dfc 13y ago
    Are we reading the same thing: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 And if you are referring to case law what decision?
    • stefan_kendall3 13y ago
      Maybe he's confusing DMCA with Section 230.
      • deftnerd 13y ago
        I was confusing the two, my apologies.
  • corin_ 13y ago
    Why would a comment being approved by a community member be different to a comment submitted by a community member?
• hrjet 13y ago
  What I think would be ideal: Comments ranked by the network of users I have upvoted / downvoted in the past, by computing a centrality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvector_centrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvector_centrality (I don't understand the mathematics of this entirely, just have an intuitive understanding of it)
• maximgsaini 13y ago
  When the elites are allowed censor "bad" voices, it ends up hurting progress. The elites of the middle ages did the same to the "bad" voices defying the clergy. The elites in Afghanistan do the same to the "bad" and "immoral" voices demanding freedom for women. The brain plays tricks on you and makes you believe that your perception/ideas are "good", while those opposing you are 'bad'. Letting humanity play into the hands of this cognitive bias of the elites or the majority. Nothing worse for progress. We could've come much further had it not been for this. If no one in the 'elite' club thinks that my ideas are 'good', does that mean my ideas are wrong? It has been and will be bad science to suppress "bad"/"crazy"/"stupid" ideas. "Bad" of today might be the status quo tomorrow. Interfering with this evolution is "bad". No matter how smart you think you are.
• enscr 13y ago
  It is probably a good thought but the implementation sounds too strict. The power users have ruined stackoverflow to an extent. I'd suggest relaxing the endorsement policy to a lower karma score. And perhaps a way of penalizing those who aren't doing a good job of letting positive comments in. So if you want power, it comes at a cost. Lastly, you should also consider the intelligent but quiet guys in the classroom. Those who are uber conscious about speaking up despite having good suggestions. The fear of not being able to speak, if they don't say anything good enough will silence them.
• whyme 13y ago
  Have you considered using some avg. rank threshold instead of karma for both this and down voting? or rather some blend of profile age, minimum karma, and avg. rank? I look at 1000 karma and wonder why you would empower people who could simply be post happy.
  • whyme 13y ago
    LOL. It just dawned on me that post happy people are probably the most active people, thus best suited to do a job requiring quite a lot of work. I never seem to give pg enough credit.
• ChrisGaudreau 13y ago
  I've been on HN for a long time, but I am using a different account now. I think it's pretty bad that I have to prefix my argument with that. The outcome of this change will be to alienate new users or get them to suck up to older users long enough to boost their karma beyond noob-level. HN will become much more of an echo chamber. Beyond that, are HN comments really that bad? There may be a few people who just know that HN is turning into Reddit. If you believe that, go read a few comments on Reddit and then read a few comments on HN.
• sturmeh 13y ago
  I don't see the real need to have every single comment a user makes moderated. Surely just adding a button that says "report" to comments that sends the message to a pending queue and sees how 1000's respond to it? I also assume that >1000ers go unmoderated?
• dmunoz 13y ago
  I missed the large discussion thread earlier, and I imagine someone there brought up something similar already, but I doubt it precisely what I am about to post. I'll make my more nuanced comment first. What about older threads? Sometimes I don't visit HN actively throughout the day, but partake in the discussion at night or the next morning if I have spare time. Many times my comments are slight clarifications of a point being made, or providing some citations or links to resources that I happen to know about on the subject. They almost always go unnoticed with 1 karma, but I continue to do so because they provide helpful resources for someone who comes along later, perhaps by search, or through the discussion view on their user page. If no users with the ability to approve the comment browse the old threads, and my comment is quickly pushed off the earlier pages of the pending comments section, they'll be lost. More generally, I get why this is being done, and it's even a touch exciting. I would love to see general comment quality improve if for the only reason that the general quality forms expectations in the community, and this can help raise the bar a little. However, it's also pretty concerning. It's a big surprise to see human activity be what is reached for. Edit: Woah, so it turns out my main concern was discussed in the thread by cperciva [0], and it was an oversight by pg which resulted in the page of pending comments being added. This certainly has the potential to raise comment quality dramatically, but is fraught with danger. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445916 Edit 2: I don't want to flood this comment thread with another post, so I'll make it here. Close to 40 minutes after making the above, I find even my lingering doubt has close to disappeared and been replaced by excitement. My initial horror disappeared surprisingly quickly, even before I made the above comment, as I realized quickly how much this could improve comment quality. Yet, after some reading in the announcement thread, I find myself feeling like a slightly modified system would require much less activity from users, but be nearly as effective. Why not have, after a certain threshold of endorsed comments, comments by the user be automatically endorsed. Then, instead of requiring active endorsement for every comment, give high karma users the ability to require further comments by a bad commenter to require endorsement before appearing. This ensures that they can only make a handful of low quality comments before being pushed to active moderation, and presumably the event would happen rarely so that abuse of the ability can be more accurately monitored. I imagine that the opposite idea, having bad comments being endorsed by a user resulting in the removal their ability to endorse, would be more work. Another 20 minutes later, and one last edit just for posterity: I still remain fairly bullish about the potential, but reading the discussion threads leaves me bouncing back and forth between excitement and concern. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, in either case.
• NamTaf 13y ago
  What thought process has been put in to how the throttling of 'discussion'-style comments affect the pagerank of a particular post? If a bunch of moderate-quality comments have the effect of bolstering the pagerank of a post until a highly insightful comment comes along that'll be upvoted to the stratosphere, then will we risk losing those interesting discussions simply because there isn't 'that one right person' there to seed the bigger conversation with insight?
• virtualwhys 13y ago
  Certainly runs of the risk of removing dissenting opinion from the mix, which is unfortunate. For example, if language X has had a new release with a bunch of features and someone posts the announcement to HN, language X users will typically form the majority of the comment pool. Now, when someone comes along that feels differently about language X and the direction it's going in, foundation, etc., naturally the dissenting opinion will be suppressed as pro language X users will be incentivized to not promote the comment, no matter how constructive the comment is, and the dissenter will therefore need to rely on members of the minority (dissenters) to come to the rescue, so to speak, in order for the comment to go live. I prefer to see the _whole_ picture, if something comes up on HN it's important to see the pros and cons, not just the pros of the pro-X-posting crowd (i.e. clique affect). Gut reaction is thumbs down, comment quality on HN is generally quite good, but PG must have seen a need (or had an itch) to implement pending comments. We'll see how it plays out p.s. seems a little heavy handed for the under 1000 karma crowd, which must quite large...
• xedarius 13y ago
  It's interesting that this seems to be a move away from the world of realtime. Some of the articles on HN only appear in the top 30 for a few hours. This seems to grate against the idea of pending comments. Also it exposes HN to something that irritates about Stack Overflow, this idea that there are a bunch of people who somehow know what I want to read. The amount of questions on SO that are 'closed as deemed none relevant' is ridiculous. Also remember, the bad comments are the exact benchmark on which you judge a good comment. Without bitter there is no sweet.
• pearjuice 13y ago
  Well, here comes the common denominator. The upvoting circles and shilling was pretty bad already but this makes it worse. You enable mutual backpatting and group thinking. Sliding out all people who have "odd" or uncommon opinion. It is like rogue censorship.
  • quomopete 13y ago
    Also not terribly excited about this. But i should also probably just move on from posting here. Not a big contributor and have found that overall there's a huge echo chamber dynamic to this community that's generally hard to break through. Really hard to have a dissenting opinion unless you're just doing it for academic reasons or devil's advocacy. I imagine with this, myself and many other new or not high participating members that don't go full heartedly with the general belief system here will find themselves wedged out of the conversation. Oh well.
• lukehorvat 13y ago
  Orwellian.
• edtechdev 13y ago
  I'm a fan of post-publication review. Let people post, and then if it really is something bad, unhelpful, or spam, just let it be down voted and hidden after it receives a certain number of down votes (such as 5, like on reddit). And I like that people can still click on a down voted comment to see it, since sometimes comments are down voted because they are saying something unpopular, not necessarily "bad."
• 3rd3 13y ago
  My only complaint is that the verb 'to endorse' might be a little bit too strong. A button that says 'appropriate' might be better, because it's more clear then what exactly the intended criteria for an endorsement are and the user does not need to identify with clicking the button as much.
• oskarth 13y ago
  There's an interesting meta pattern here. pg has obviously thought a lot about this change, he's the creator of HN and he's the one who knows the site the best. All pg is saying is this: let's try it out and see if it works as intended. That is, it is an experiment, and reality is the ultimate judge. If you look in this thread, the original thread, or the latest poll you see a different attitude. It's not viewed as an experiment where reality will be the judge at all. Instead the comments basically boils down to "This is good." or "This is bad.", plus a few technical questions. How come so few people think of it in terms of an experiment? Isn't this the supposed standard m.o. for startups as well as for coding? Is it just that people who have the wait-and-see attitude don't comment, so all we hear about is from the vocal crowd? (This was the case for me before writing this post.) Is it some form of domain dependence going on here? I find this to be a very curious pattern.
  • ElDiablo666 13y ago
    It just doesn't make sense to test every bad idea and lament that fact as some kind of opposition to scientific curiosity and inquiry.
  • npizzolato 13y ago
    This was not phrased as an experiment by pg. Go back and read the "Coming soon" post. It was phrased entirely as "this is the way things are going to be now" with the caveat that he could roll back the change if necessary. But just because you can undo something doesn't make it an experiment. I feel like you're unfairly giving pg the benefit of the doubt and placing the blame on the people against this idea. When you tell people this is the way things are going to be, it's reasonable for them to get upset by that.
  • smackfu 13y ago
    People who don't see anything broken are going to be opposed to random experiments. It's like pivoting a successful business - no one does that.
  • Avshalom 13y ago
    >pg has obviously thought a lot about this change Seeing as 19 hours ago* he apparently hadn't thought of the blindingly obvious problem that an un-endorsed comment was equivalent to a ban maybe he hadn't actually thought a lot about it. The reason not to move fast and break things is that reality does not come with source control; destroyed communities do not tend to recover. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445916
• noir_lord 13y ago
  If it becomes more difficult to participate in conversations because I have to wait for moderation on a previous comment then I lose engagement. The end result is I'll probably just stop visiting hacker news so frequently (if at all). As without the ability to have conversations with people better than me at interesting stuff what does this place offer that reddit doesn't.
  • DanBC 13y ago
    > As without the ability to have conversations with people better than me at interesting stuff what does this place offer that reddit doesn't. It offers the opportunity to read insightful thoughfulncomments from people who know what they're talking about, without also having to tolerate vicious and stupid comments.
    • noir_lord 13y ago
      > It offers the opportunity to read insightful thoughfulncomments from people who know what they're talking about So do many other sites, for me the main draw is the ability to take part in the conversation. > It offers the opportunity to read insightful thoughfulncomments from people who know what they're talking about, without also having to tolerate vicious and stupid comments. I'll take having to read the odd vicious/stupid comment (and on here they are the oddity) if it allows me to take part in the conversation. I'll resist the urge for a knee-jerk reaction but as it currently stands I'll probably just stop using Hacker News if I can't comment, I don't see much of anything on here I wouldn't find by subscribing to the right sub-reddits, it really is the conversation that sets this place apart. I guess we will see what happens.
  • FedRegister 13y ago
    I predict a cottage industry of sites that provide unmoderated discussion around the HN frontpage articles in the wake of this decision. It might be interesting to provide a site to do incline, anonymous annotation of/replies to existing, approved comments. Sort of a meta-HN meets Statler and Waldorf.
    • 13y ago
• renang 13y ago
  Does a person get karma when his comment is endorsed? That would be a good way to promote good commentators to the "next level", whatever it brings with karma.
• teawithcarl 13y ago
  For a different perspective on "single truths" - please read Ward Cunningham's research on Federated Wiki's. Ward invented the wiki itself, and years later invented the Federated Wiki to allow unlimited truth forks, so that Wikipedia would not require expunging any viewpoint. In other words, all "truth tree" branches remain valid. Branchs may be sorted by up/down voting, but they may not be struck by editors. To me a better HN would allow a multitude of HN's (think colors) ... where anyone applying time/effort could edit an HN truth fork. Thereby, people might say, which color of HN do you read? "My favorite is green", might be a typical reply. My sense is that PG thinks of HN as top down authority driven, and therefore refuses to open HN to public editorship, even though there's a way to do it and truly improve comment quality, rather than just adding this new layer of winner take all. More deeply, I believe PG has tired of building HN, and is looking for an honest way out. To me, that means abandoning the 4th-5th most important startup in YC history (up there with Airbnb in importance), and the all too familiar slow degradation of startup quality as they get bigger. I have always felt that YC is a dictatorship, and that "peak HN" and "peak YC" have already occurred. Accordingly, an open approach to HN, where public editors might flourish was never likely. Two links on Ward Cunningham's ideas - TED Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdwLczSgvcc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdwLczSgvcc Wired article: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/wiki-inventor/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/wiki-inventor/
• akerl_ 13y ago
  I do like that we're tweaking the system as we go in response to feedback / observation, but blocking comments based on endorsements from existing users seems like it's just going to increase the echo-chamber-ness of the site.
  • jedicoffee 13y ago
    In before endorsement sales and Hacker News "gold".
• lukaseder 13y ago
  That sounds like the inbox in reddit...
• jedicoffee 13y ago
  Sweet, I can make comments that people can't see unless they're users who have X karma and agree with X opinion. So now I should just agree with everyone so I get X karma so I can make honest comments. Great idea!
• bmurphy1976 13y ago
  This is going to be an interesting experiment. I hope it addresses something I've noticed lately, something I refer to as "Poisoning the Well". What I've seen again and again and again is that the first (highest rated?) comment on the thread is either negative or off topic. Discussion ensues. Lots of discussion. Screens of discussion. Most of which is entirely irrelevant to the primary topic. By the time I wade through that mess to get to the real discussion, I'm burnt. I can't imagine I'm the only one, it seems like the comments further below, while typically of much higher quality are fewer and farther between. I wonder how often we collectively read the first thread, get frustrated, and move on. For me, it happens all too often.
• RogerL 13y ago
  I am currently spending my life working on signal processing - constructing a story of what is happening in the world from sensor data. And you know what - noise is good. You would perhaps think that the thing to do is to turn on the filters, crank 'em up, and don't ever let a noisy bit of data through. But, of course, that does not work. Noise is helpful. It's still signal. I can construct more information from a noisy signal than an overly filtered one. Back to forums, I was a participant in several for a different niche area. One was obsessed with post 'quality' - a horde of moderators swarming around, then after awhile they'd comb through every thread, deleting every comment they found not worthy so they would have some kind of pristine archive, and so on. They utterly failed. Oh, they are still trundling along. But the sites with the industry leaders posting? Those are the ones with far less concern with 'quality'. Why would an expert spend time crafting an answer to somebody when it is likely or possible that it will either not get approved to show up, or later deleted? It made no sense to them, they vocally complained, were again and again told this was for the greater good, and so they all left. Now, if you want to talk to an expert, you go to one of the other forums; if you want to talk to a complete amateur, but with never a post off topic, well, you go to the controlled one. You'll get terrible advice, or no advice at all, but hey, it's civil and on topic. I've concluded nothing about HN yet, but I don't forsee myself clicking away, endorsing post after post. This is mostly a 'consume' site for me, and occasionally, post. I don't want to spend my time endorsing and clicking away. I'll upvote once in a while, and almost never downvote. I can't see that changing much. I can't see posting anymore; I am giving you value (or trying to), and you hold it hostage. Ya, okay, if that is how you feel, I'll go elsewhere. I recognize that sounds petulant, but back to the site in the first paragraph - a lot of people stopped posting because so much did not survive the great purges that went on. Why go to this effort if others will silence you? Noise is not the enemy of quality. It is not the enemy of value. It's a wonderful side effect of free thinking, innovative thinking, of creation, of invention. It's messy, it's beautiful. I love noise for what it represents. Long live noise.
  • sourceless 13y ago
    I think it's for a similar reason sites such as reddit and 4chan (though their topics are often rather lewd) have seen so much success. They're like big melting pots, and all the good stuff floats to the top. Sometimes even the most average of topics can be made interesting by a relative unknown providing some insight. TL;DR you really reduce your chance of finding diamonds if you don't let some dirt through too.
• EGreg 13y ago
  I will post another comment. This is the problem with centralization. A service that is centralized in the hands of the person or organization hosting it leaves all the power in their hands to change the rules on a whim. We are lucky that pg is reasonable and cares about feedback. Remember what happened with the facebok newsfeed? Also, democracies don't mitigate all the problems of centralization. Facebook even attempted to have a vote on the new privacy features, heavily promoted it, but had a ridiculously low turnout. Most people don't spend their time on sites trying to govern them, but simply use the tool. Compare this to decentralized systems like git or the web. Any particular publisher's decision is mitigated by the fact that the audience is small. Even if this while site disappeared tomorrow, the web would continue to exist. Can such a principle be implemented for communities in general? Yes. But it requires open source software to be installed and published by many people, and clients could interact with publicly signed versions of servers (or their plugins). The key question here is who is trying to protect whom and why. When a small group forms (such as the discussion thread) the participants are the most interested party, and if the host changes something from what they expected they should be able to fork the discussion and easily continue it somewhere else. On the other hand, a publisher who is interested in trying out a new (version of a) plugin can install it and see people's reactions. If they like it, they may start more discussions hosted by this publisher. But the key to a "free market" in improvements is the switching cost. People should be able to easily move the entire discussion somewhere else in case the particular installation has been sabotaged. Ideally such distributed software could be a bitcoin agent.
• pg 13y ago
  Pending comments are now per thread, or more precisely per item tree, rather than sitewide. That was the original plan, and it turned out to be only a little more code. The moderator (who is not me) will turn pending comments on as needed when conversations turn nasty. That doesn't happen on most threads, but it does happen on some, and pending comments may help fix the problem. I'm not sure it will. The moderator will have to experiment to see what works. But since the code was slightly complicated I wanted at least to get the initial version done before I left.
  • chunky1994 13y ago
    > The moderator (who is not me) will turn pending comments on as needed when conversations turn nasty Does this mean that they are not enabled by default?
    • pg 13y ago
      Yes.
      • late2part 13y ago
        Thank you :)
      • guiambros 13y ago
        This is great. I was concerned with the idea of site-wide pending comments, as it could have a chilling effect on controversial ideas, and water down discussions. Or, worse, eliminate comments past the front page, as no one would want to risk being blocked from further commenting. You could alleviate the problem by allowing people to delete pending comments, but it's like asking people to sacrifice their own creations. It would make me think twice before spending time to comment next time. Having this disabled by default, and enabling only on particularly controversial threads (that tend to bring the majority of low-quality comments) solves most of these problems. I think this is the best approach. A good balance between negative flagging, and positive endorsement.
      • RogerL 13y ago
• robk 13y ago
  Weird I'm over 1000 karma and pending is blank
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• rlu 13y ago
  I'm not sure how I feel about this. Particularly this part: "Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another". Am I seriously expected to keep a "queue" of posts I want to make in Notepad or something? Seems pretty stupid to me. The way I use HN is to spend 30ish minutes on it by opening a bunch of tabs...reading the articles...and then either posting a root comment or responding to something interesting. I do this for every tab. Sounds like this breaks my work flow, and I don't understand what the purpose of this part is.
• projectileboy 13y ago
  Pending comments may not be the ultimate solution, but it's a good idea and worth a try. The comment threads used to be the best part of the site; maybe they will be again.
• NextUserName 13y ago
  Silence those with opinions that are not popular. Even if their points are valid, censor them. how many innocuous comments (ones that may not be quite worth an up-vote, yet add a sprinkle of thought) will be lost forever? In this scenario, all those comments who were left at 1 point now are never heard. Casual users (which must make up quite a large percentage of HN) will not be readily heard. Those comments with even an air of controversy will not be approved because if it ends up with down-votes, that will go toward the approving member's record and may end up getting them banned eventually. Controversial points and less popular opinions and facts will never be seen to counter. PG, you are building a Censorship wall so that controversial or unpopular comments now don't even exist to refute/debate. There is a reason that anytime you take away people's free speech or expression, they eventually revolt. Why do comments that are not mainstream have to go away (as in never be seen). Why not engage in debate about them. I never understood this. Sure I can see censoring comments containing personal threats or vulgar content, but this is ridiculous. Keeping information from someone's eyes just because one group does not agree with it is censorship. Honestly, the way that disagreeable comments are handled now are quite refreshing and are one of the reasons that HN is so popular. Anyone can post their opinion. If people don't agree with it, they can engage in civil opposition. If it is inappropriate, they can down-vote. Perhaps the biggest reason for not pending comments is that you are going to dramatically change what shows up here. You have members of one group (or classification if you will) who are very active and will all have 1000 points, this group now is the voice of HN. Those who post more occasionally, post late, or don't pad their numbers by replying to the hot thread (rather they create their own which drops 3/4 down the page) now have a limited voice. Other groups likely have many differing opinions than the over 1000 class, they now have no voice. You see, your over 1000 (certainly the minority of your members) mostly all have common opinions, ideologies and viewpoints about things. This group now has the power to silence those others (though perhaps even larger in numbers) groups. I would have liked it if you ran a poll before coding something like this. A last minute pseudo-courtesy notification shows just how much HN is really all about you and does not really belong to the people who actually own it (the public). Without us, you've got and idle server. No stories posted, no comments, nothing. Your totalitarianism attitude put a bad taste in my mouth.