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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. O
by 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 agoThe 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
- nodesocket 13y agoI 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
- e12e 13y agoI think there's a lot of value to this idea. Think of it as basic network effect/peer pressure/culture thing. Just as you want "more of the right people", you (probably) want to start out on a topic with "more of the interesting/right" comments. That will generally steer the discussion -- as readers adapt to what is being discussed. This could/should probably be a/b tested (eg: on/off on odd/even numbered submissions or whatnot).
- hueving 13y agoThere is very rarely a time that good discourse has begun by filtering everyone out but 'the right people'. All you are doing is creating one of the world's most optimized circle-jerks.
- matt_heimer 13y agoWhen you say "the comments were actually pretty good" is that subjective or was the average karma per post higher?
- protomyth 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." Sage advise for every developer and the fervent wish of every system admin. Goodnight sir.
- vacri 13y agoAt my last job, the (rather dedicated) developers would often push code to production at 1am, give or take an hour. As support, I would ask them "Please don't do that. You don't watch to make sure it works okay" They would respond 'It's okay, because we'll be back online at 8am'. "Yes, but our primary customers are farmers, who check our SaaS at 6am to plan their day. It's the point of our software." 'It's okay, because we'll be back online at 8am' "I don't think you understand how this works..."
- noir_lord 13y agoIt's an interesting problem to optimise for. When is the best time to push new changes to production based on probability they will fall over, usage patterns and day of the week. I'm relatively lucky as the stuff I do is mostly for businesses so the (obvious to me) push point is 8am Saturday morning, that gives me two days to sort out any problems and there is always some low level usage.
- protomyth 13y agoI think vacri hit it with the knowing your audience and what times they are active. If you run a true 24-hour global service then you need to think hard, but a lot of systems have a very select audience that can be properly scheduled. I would imagine midwest farmers would accept updates done Sunday mornings during church hours maybe slipping later into the afternoon during sports.
- crusso 13y agoSounds like a support organization that should have had the developers' home phone numbers.
- obituary_latte 13y agoWhat's "it"? What is the problem that you all are trying to solve? I have showdead on, and maybe 2% of the comments I see are unreadable-grey. Pending what? Approval? By whom? Sounds scary. Perhaps I missed the tps report. If so, sorry. But as an outsider who spends a lot of time here (work; analogue; fortuitous), I can't wait to have the comments here that I've come to love be editorialized by some cabal of power users. Simple indeed.
- nick2021 13y agoThe developer sounds like a complete amateur. Site is slow as f* and they want to implement some pending comments feature in the worst way possible.
- edmccard 13y ago>maybe 2% of the comments I see are unreadable-grey. Maybe that's the problem? That is, maybe bad comments are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, like the weather; everyone talks about them but nobody bothers to downvote them to unreadable greyness. (either that, or there are voting rings that devote themselves to upvoting greyed-out comments).
- prawn 13y agoAny dodgy comment with reasonable age seems to be slammed by the time I get to it. Someone must be down voting them. And I can't recall seeing evidence of groups up voting junk comments, only stories. Everything seemed to be working OK to me. I find the quality of comments on HN to be very good and don't think this new feature is necessary.
- mercer 13y agoWhile I agree that generally the quality is high, I do feel that over the past two years (or so) that I've been active here, I've been seeing more and more reddit-like puns or empty comments. They're not overwhelming, and generally harmless enough, content-wise, but I do find them annoying. I welcome this attempt to fix the situation before it becomes too bad.
- sev 13y agoI think we need control, but not this much control. Moderation is key in everything. No pun intended. If this becomes reality, I see a future where we have no bad comments, a lot of decent/good comments from the same people and therefore turning into an elitist society (more-so than it already sort-of is). I feel this will push new users away, and therefore slow our knowledge diversification.
- yaur 13y ago"Punditocracy" is that a thing? If not it seems like a good term for it and something that is pretty antithetical of a site site that calls its self "hacker news".
- tripzilch 13y agoFor one beautiful moment, I imagined you meant we should get the comments with the best puns to rise to the top.
- vl 13y agoI'm convinced that "intelligent" auto-folding will improve quality of experience. It will naturally reduce depth of branches on the earliest (which are often top) comments and promote more top-level comments. In a sense my feeling is that there is no need to penalize people for unpopular opinions, the view should be such that unpopular comments are discoverable only by most dedicated readers. I'm afraid that current change will increase mono-culture.
- thatthatis 13y agoHave to agree with you. Reddit solved this problem elegantly with auto folding ages ago.
- Udo 13y agoBeing in a different time zone I missed out on the trial, bummer. I'm looking forward to actually trying it out. Going back to the original discussion it seems this is a measure designed to weed out comments that are nasty and low in content. The potential issue I see is that this feature adds a layer of complication and indirection to solve a cultural problem. There are two classes of low-grade comments: the "normal" ones which quickly sink to the bottom because they're downvoted into oblivion, and the "crafty" ones that get a lot of upvotes even though they're cheap, inflammatory, personal, repetitive, or just generally trollish (like for example the maneuver where someone posts a reply disagreeing with an imaginary point that was never made in the parent). The existing voting system is pretty good at filtering out the normal trash, but it fails to address the crafty pieces - so I assume the Pending Feature is designed to address those. I'm not sure it can though, because the crafty trolls seem to have a lot of fans and the same people who upvote these things today are just going to endorse them in the future. Sorry for spit-balling from the cheap seats, I'm actually excited to find out how the new system works in practice. It intuitively it feels like a layer of complexity with dubious benefits, but that said: addressing the underlying problem is a worthy cause.
- ajro 13y agoCould we please have the way to unlock someones abilty to post comment (delete comment, wait for timeout etc.) described in the FAQ?
- Alex3917 13y agoIf it's easy you could set it so that it's only turned on after the thread has 10 comments or whatever. That way there is a universal rule but it cuts down on unnecessary moderation work.
- mbrameld 13y agoThis has such potential for abuse and it's obvious it hasn't been very well thought-out. I hope that in order for an overseer to put the kibosh on a comment he or she will have to enter an explanation. Also, all comments that don't meet the group-think criteria should be viewable by everyone along with who censored it and why. I hate to see another website I love go down the drain.
- dangrossman 13y agoThere is no active censoring; you can only "put the kibosh" on a comment by having several thousand people all independently decide not to click its "endorse" link. Nobody can individually kill a comment.
- mcgwiz 13y agoThe word "endorse" mischaracterizes the aims of this program, and counter-productively provokes groupthink. Renaming the "endorse" link to "tolerable" (where it becomes a kind of flag) would go a long way to mitigating that risk. Details in my comment on "Coming Soon...": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449597