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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

by 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?
        nanidin 13y ago
        It sounds like if your comment is stuck in pending for 24 hours, it will just be removed altogether.
- piyush_soni 13y ago
  Isn't it a subtle irony? While you might be indicating that this new system is good because his comment became 'live' within 4 minutes of posting, at the same time it directly means a lot of people endorsed his thoughts that this new pending comments system is not that good? SMH...
  - dfc 13y ago
    It means that people thought the comment was a useful addition to the discussion. (or at the very least did not detract from the discussion) It does not mean that they agree with or endorse the opinion expressed in the comment.
    - piyush_soni 13y ago
      That would be the ideal case, but the reality is a bit far off. As I said somewhere else, in the past the most upvotes I ever received were for sarcastic comments to a particular tech company (which I hate), but they arguably might not have contributed to the discussion. On the other hand, a few total negative votes were received on comments which I thought added to the discussion, but some people with high karma just didn't agree to it. Now the problem with this new system is this: for unpopular links or articles, they'll never come to the front page, and thus very few 1000 karma people will see those. And thus, those comments might never become 'live' and visible to others, not creating any discussion at all, even further causing it to never become popular, because only conversation attracts more conversation.
navinvarma 13y ago
+1. I never comment but have been lurking HN for 3 years now. This is my first comment.
- Varcht 13y ago
  So, one post every three years and you're worried it might not show up? Personally I'm on the fence. Occasionally I get a chuckle out of some of the flippant one liners and rarely see anything that really bothers me. I only read maybe 10% of the threads though.
  - navinvarma 13y ago
    I read HN every hour (almost) and stay updated on the comments of many posts that are very interesting. I read the comments more than the post itself. I chose not to comment since I didn't feel like I add value to the discussions. That may not be the same a year or 5 years or a decade down the line when I think HN will still be relevant and I will be more wiser to say something. Learning is forever and I would feel very sad if somehow my commenting in the future is buried because I did not have enough karma. Atleast, that's my take on it.
  - ddoolin 13y ago
    Yes? Why does it matter AT ALL how often you post? Censorship is not okay regardless.
colmmacc 13y ago
Our accounts are of a similar age (and probably like you, I read passively before ever even creating an account) and we've commented a similar number of times. Like others, I've also participated in mini-threads that add detail, but occur after the heated discussion has died down (here's a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295384). I almost never get to HN during peak hours, so it's my main form of interaction. But I don't feel disincentivized to comment - if anything I may try to find ways to contribute more valuable comments. I'd wager that the chances of a good comment being read will be higher, not lower. And either way, c'est la vie. HN is provided for free, and it's tremendous. It'll be a learning experience to observe the experiment.
farnsworth 13y ago
I'm in the same situation. Have an upvote. Maybe you'll hit it with this comment...
chc 13y ago
Do you actually believe high-value comments will commonly go unendorsed? That seems pretty unlikely to me. I'd only worry about comments that aren't all that compelling — and for obvious reasons, I'm not too worried about losing those. If anything, I expect it to be too easy to get your comments endorsed, just like it's too easy to get dumb comments upvoted right now.
- egeozcan 13y ago
  I think it's not about how easy it is to be endorsed. The idea of relying on other people to make your comment visible doesn't sound right. I can probably guess, against which type of comments this measure is for and I'm not sure if it's going to be enough. However, there is a Turkish saying which fits to this situation perfectly: "Damp wood, too, will burn alongside the dry", meaning, drastic measures to get rid of the wrong would damage the correct too.
- pizza234 13y ago
  The core problem is that conversations aren't one way highways made of high-value comments. Sometimes interesting things may come out of silly ones. Or maybe not. If we assume a conversation is also (not only) as a creative process, then mistakes and silliness are simply part of the process to get to something interesting. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating the "far west" attitude; I just think that the up/down voting works enough for the purpose. Introducing an extra layer is going to push people to behave in a certain way (that somebody define, in an extreme way, groupthinking), which may make things more interesting in a certain way, but far less interesting in another. There was a certain experiment on a certain site where they switched to Facebook comments, and they found that trolling comments were drastically reduced, but the posts started to look to nice and compliant. Also, very important, the new system replaces a democracy with (more or less) an aristocracy, and I some doubts about this.
deftnerd 13y ago
I'm actually scared to comment on here. If my comment is "too reddit" or if I am incorrect in what I write I could be shadow banned. I try to save my comments for when it's something really important. It feels like I'm the outsider at high school all over again and I'm scared the cool kids will notice me and tell me to get lost. It's odd because HN inspired me to make lots of passive income projects that now make enough money for our family of 4 to live off of. I even got Angel funding by winning a hackathon for another company I'm building now. I fit the criteria to be one of the HN crowd on paper, but I don't think I'll ever feel like I belong. A comment queue seems like it'll move HN even further into that judgmental direction.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  But what if that's the only thing keeping comments on HN any good? If you post something that isn't genuinely interesting or insightful the best case is that you get ignored and the worst case is that you get shadow banned. This means that everyone hovers over the submit button and second guesses whether what they're posting is any good. I know that I've probably aborted about 1/3rd of all my comments and I think that's a good thing.
  - hueving 13y ago
    >second guesses whether what they're posting is any good. A much more accurate portrayal is everyone second guessing whether or not their comment will please the HN group-think. People don't filter themselves when they think their idea is stupid, they filter themselves when they think their idea will be unpopular.
    - RyanZAG 13y ago
      Agreed - but the whole idea of upvotes is based on the idea that a popular comment = a good comment. The entire foundation of the system falls apart if you dispute that and the upvote system becomes the wrong choice. I think in practice that 'popular comment = good comment' works well enough that it seems to beat all competing systems for internet commenting so there must be some kind of truth in the statement. Maybe it has a low enough false positive rate to make a small false negative rate acceptable?
dfc 13y ago
Your incentive to post should be genuine interest in engaging in a mature and thoughtful discussion about HN topics. If you have something valuable to add the expectation is that it will not sit in the pending pile for too long and once the comment leaves the pending state it will not be drowned out by unhelpful/unwanted comments. If spending five or ten minutes to compose a comment is too much of an investment maybe HN is not the best place for the user.
- chinpokomon 13y ago
  Am I only supposed to send five or ten minutes to compose a comment? Regularly I've posted comments that take as much as an hour to write. This is because I take the time to find sources to back up and support my position, and then I write my comment. After that, I reread what I wrote and edit the comment so that it is grammatically correct and factually sound. Finally, I reread it once more and really consider if I'm contributing to the discussion. I've never really focused on karma. I've never tried to game the system. Because of this discussion I checked where I stand and I only have 132 points but with almost a 2 average. I think that supports my claim that I make thoughtful posts, but I don't know what the site average is. I hope that this system doesn't backfire for me and for other similar contributors.
  - dfc 13y ago
    What part of my comment gave you the impression that I think 5 to 10 minutes was the upper bounds?
    - chinpokomon 13y ago
      There wasn't, but I took it as the average, which still seems low. Since I discovered HN, I've been nothing but impressed with the audience. I think the nature of the site is one of the reasons the topics and comments are of higher quality than other news aggregation sites. Well over a decade ago, I was a regular reader of /. and I find that HN is reminiscent of those earlier days. After adding moderating and meta-moderating, the quality of /. suffered. I'm sure it wasn't moderation that actually brought about those problems and it had more to do with reaching a broader audience, but still it is unnerving to see my favorite forums gradually follow the same trajectories time and time again.

by nanidin 13y ago

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?
      - nanidin 13y ago
        It sounds like if your comment is stuck in pending for 24 hours, it will just be removed altogether.
piyush_soni 13y ago
Isn't it a subtle irony? While you might be indicating that this new system is good because his comment became 'live' within 4 minutes of posting, at the same time it directly means a lot of people endorsed his thoughts that this new pending comments system is not that good? SMH...
- dfc 13y ago
  It means that people thought the comment was a useful addition to the discussion. (or at the very least did not detract from the discussion) It does not mean that they agree with or endorse the opinion expressed in the comment.
  - piyush_soni 13y ago
    That would be the ideal case, but the reality is a bit far off. As I said somewhere else, in the past the most upvotes I ever received were for sarcastic comments to a particular tech company (which I hate), but they arguably might not have contributed to the discussion. On the other hand, a few total negative votes were received on comments which I thought added to the discussion, but some people with high karma just didn't agree to it. Now the problem with this new system is this: for unpopular links or articles, they'll never come to the front page, and thus very few 1000 karma people will see those. And thus, those comments might never become 'live' and visible to others, not creating any discussion at all, even further causing it to never become popular, because only conversation attracts more conversation.

navinvarma 13y ago

+1. I never comment but have been lurking HN for 3 years now. This is my first comment.

Varcht 13y ago
So, one post every three years and you're worried it might not show up? Personally I'm on the fence. Occasionally I get a chuckle out of some of the flippant one liners and rarely see anything that really bothers me. I only read maybe 10% of the threads though.
- navinvarma 13y ago
  I read HN every hour (almost) and stay updated on the comments of many posts that are very interesting. I read the comments more than the post itself. I chose not to comment since I didn't feel like I add value to the discussions. That may not be the same a year or 5 years or a decade down the line when I think HN will still be relevant and I will be more wiser to say something. Learning is forever and I would feel very sad if somehow my commenting in the future is buried because I did not have enough karma. Atleast, that's my take on it.
- ddoolin 13y ago
  Yes? Why does it matter AT ALL how often you post? Censorship is not okay regardless.

colmmacc 13y ago

Our accounts are of a similar age (and probably like you, I read passively before ever even creating an account) and we've commented a similar number of times. Like others, I've also participated in mini-threads that add detail, but occur after the heated discussion has died down (here's a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295384). I almost never get to HN during peak hours, so it's my main form of interaction. But I don't feel disincentivized to comment - if anything I may try to find ways to contribute more valuable comments. I'd wager that the chances of a good comment being read will be higher, not lower. And either way, c'est la vie. HN is provided for free, and it's tremendous. It'll be a learning experience to observe the experiment.

farnsworth 13y ago

I'm in the same situation. Have an upvote. Maybe you'll hit it with this comment...

chc 13y ago

Do you actually believe high-value comments will commonly go unendorsed? That seems pretty unlikely to me. I'd only worry about comments that aren't all that compelling — and for obvious reasons, I'm not too worried about losing those. If anything, I expect it to be too easy to get your comments endorsed, just like it's too easy to get dumb comments upvoted right now.

egeozcan 13y ago
I think it's not about how easy it is to be endorsed. The idea of relying on other people to make your comment visible doesn't sound right. I can probably guess, against which type of comments this measure is for and I'm not sure if it's going to be enough. However, there is a Turkish saying which fits to this situation perfectly: "Damp wood, too, will burn alongside the dry", meaning, drastic measures to get rid of the wrong would damage the correct too.
pizza234 13y ago
The core problem is that conversations aren't one way highways made of high-value comments. Sometimes interesting things may come out of silly ones. Or maybe not. If we assume a conversation is also (not only) as a creative process, then mistakes and silliness are simply part of the process to get to something interesting. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating the "far west" attitude; I just think that the up/down voting works enough for the purpose. Introducing an extra layer is going to push people to behave in a certain way (that somebody define, in an extreme way, groupthinking), which may make things more interesting in a certain way, but far less interesting in another. There was a certain experiment on a certain site where they switched to Facebook comments, and they found that trolling comments were drastically reduced, but the posts started to look to nice and compliant. Also, very important, the new system replaces a democracy with (more or less) an aristocracy, and I some doubts about this.

deftnerd 13y ago

I'm actually scared to comment on here. If my comment is "too reddit" or if I am incorrect in what I write I could be shadow banned. I try to save my comments for when it's something really important. It feels like I'm the outsider at high school all over again and I'm scared the cool kids will notice me and tell me to get lost. It's odd because HN inspired me to make lots of passive income projects that now make enough money for our family of 4 to live off of. I even got Angel funding by winning a hackathon for another company I'm building now. I fit the criteria to be one of the HN crowd on paper, but I don't think I'll ever feel like I belong. A comment queue seems like it'll move HN even further into that judgmental direction.

RyanZAG 13y ago
But what if that's the only thing keeping comments on HN any good? If you post something that isn't genuinely interesting or insightful the best case is that you get ignored and the worst case is that you get shadow banned. This means that everyone hovers over the submit button and second guesses whether what they're posting is any good. I know that I've probably aborted about 1/3rd of all my comments and I think that's a good thing.
- hueving 13y ago
  >second guesses whether what they're posting is any good. A much more accurate portrayal is everyone second guessing whether or not their comment will please the HN group-think. People don't filter themselves when they think their idea is stupid, they filter themselves when they think their idea will be unpopular.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    Agreed - but the whole idea of upvotes is based on the idea that a popular comment = a good comment. The entire foundation of the system falls apart if you dispute that and the upvote system becomes the wrong choice. I think in practice that 'popular comment = good comment' works well enough that it seems to beat all competing systems for internet commenting so there must be some kind of truth in the statement. Maybe it has a low enough false positive rate to make a small false negative rate acceptable?

dfc 13y ago

Your incentive to post should be genuine interest in engaging in a mature and thoughtful discussion about HN topics. If you have something valuable to add the expectation is that it will not sit in the pending pile for too long and once the comment leaves the pending state it will not be drowned out by unhelpful/unwanted comments. If spending five or ten minutes to compose a comment is too much of an investment maybe HN is not the best place for the user.

chinpokomon 13y ago
Am I only supposed to send five or ten minutes to compose a comment? Regularly I've posted comments that take as much as an hour to write. This is because I take the time to find sources to back up and support my position, and then I write my comment. After that, I reread what I wrote and edit the comment so that it is grammatically correct and factually sound. Finally, I reread it once more and really consider if I'm contributing to the discussion. I've never really focused on karma. I've never tried to game the system. Because of this discussion I checked where I stand and I only have 132 points but with almost a 2 average. I think that supports my claim that I make thoughtful posts, but I don't know what the site average is. I hope that this system doesn't backfire for me and for other similar contributors.
- dfc 13y ago
  What part of my comment gave you the impression that I think 5 to 10 minutes was the upper bounds?
  - chinpokomon 13y ago
    There wasn't, but I took it as the average, which still seems low. Since I discovered HN, I've been nothing but impressed with the audience. I think the nature of the site is one of the reasons the topics and comments are of higher quality than other news aggregation sites. Well over a decade ago, I was a regular reader of /. and I find that HN is reminiscent of those earlier days. After adding moderating and meta-moderating, the quality of /. suffered. I'm sure it wasn't moderation that actually brought about those problems and it had more to do with reaching a broader audience, but still it is unnerving to see my favorite forums gradually follow the same trajectories time and time again.