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Pending Comments Update

152 points by pg 13y ago

Since some people were alarmed about pending comments, I thought I should explain what's going on with them. Sorry for the delay, but between implementing them and now I've had to help get the current batch of startups through Demo Day. To recap, pending comments are a feature we hope might mitigate or eliminate the nasty comment threads that sometimes occur on HN. It essentially turns HN into the sort of hard-moderated forum where comments have to be approved by moderators before being seen, except to make it more democratic (and less work for us), any user over some karma threshold can approve comments. Since the implementation touches many parts of the code, and I am at this stage still the one who understands the HN code best, I was encouraged to write it before I left. The plan from the beginning was to make it possible to turn pending comments on or off per thread. Since the simplest v1 was to have pending comments sitewide, I released it in that form first. That code didn't break, fortunately. The next day I finished making it work per thread. Or more precisely per item tree; a moderator can turn on pending comments for anything from the whole site to an individual comment. When I announced pending comments I said the threshold for endorsing comments would be 1000 karma. Some people have been alarmed by that. But 1000 was nothing more than a plausible initial value of a variable meant to be tuned by the moderator. In fact, the threshold never was 1000 even at first; I set it to 500 in the first release. Maybe it will end up being 50. The only way to figure out what works is empirically. Indeed, the only way to figure out if pending comments will work at all is empirically. The plan is for the moderator to experiment with turning pending comments on for individual threads. If that works, maybe after tuning the parameters he'll gradually expand to more and maybe eventually just turn on the feature sitewide. Or maybe that will never be necessary. Or maybe software will decide when to turn on pending comments. Nor does the threshold for endorsing comments have to be karma. That was the obvious choice for a v1, but it would be easy to incorporate or substitute other things like account age or average comment score, or even introduce randomness. It's impossible to predict exactly how pending comments will end up working, but one thing you can safely predict is that whatever happens with them won't ruin HN. The main moderator is extremely sensitive to the state of HN, and if something he did was making the site worse, he'd be quick to notice.

fletchowns 13y ago
I think this feature could have a very positive impact on HN. What happens if somebody replies to my comment, but I don't get around to responding to that person for a few days. Now there are hardly any eyeballs hitting that thread, so probably a low chance of my comment getting approved by somebody. Is it possible that my reply will never get to be seen?
- pg 13y ago
  The solution may be to have pending comments only enforced on recent threads. That would be about 30 characters of additional code.
morbius 13y ago
I sincerely apologize for saying this, but should all this have been made clear since Day 1? Not making public even a very basic whitepaper as to how to implement a site-wide change (and such a major one as well) just seems... off, given the high quality of this site otherwise. But thanks for the explanation. Duly noted.
- pg 13y ago
  I wrote most of the code the day it launched, and I had to get it done that day because I had to help the startups prepare their Demo Day pitches. Thanks for saying the site is high quality, but if so it's despite (or possibly because of) the fact that much of the development happens in the repl of the live site. There are not a lot of whitepapers around here. We tend to think by writing code.
  - elwell 13y ago
    > much of the development happens in the repl of the live site Wow, I guess that gives me an excuse when I'm too lazy to test on a dev server. "Well, PG live edits HN"
    - batoure 13y ago
      >"Well, PG live edits HN" But HN has a persistent bug where the next button on the first page expires and doesn't work. That's the difference between doing something for work and doing something for fun. The willingnes to tolerate malfunction is higher
      - bdcravens 13y ago
        > HN has a persistent bug where the next button on the first page expires and doesn't work. I don't think that's a bug, but a feature - a type of cache invalidation that forces you to refresh to ensure paging is accurate
        deleted 13y ago
eliteraspberrie 13y ago
You can set the value of the karma threshold automatically, to some multiple of the standard deviation of karma for all of HN. So you won't have to constantly revise it. I assume the distribution of karma here is exponential, so take the distribution's parameter lambda to be the highest value of karma, and set the threshold to half of the inverse of lambda. This page explains it better: http://www.phy.ornl.gov/csep/mc/node18.html http://www.phy.ornl.gov/csep/mc/node18.html
- madsushi 13y ago
  I like the idea of a hidden karma threshold, because it prevents any obvious attacks like "get to 50 karma and then approve bad comments".
zck 13y ago
I haven't actually been on HN when pending was turned on, but there's one question I have: How do I tell when pending is on? As far as I know, it will be in the top bar -- if you qualify to approve comments. Does it appear if I can't approve comments? How else could I tell whether pending is on, or if I am able to approve comments?
- pg 13y ago
  You can tell when a comment of your own is pending because the text is preceded by [pending]. You can tell when you can endorse a comment because there is link to do so. The link is currently small and gray, so it should probably be made a brighter color or replaced by a button or something.
  - pigDisgusting 13y ago
    First Question: Does an endorsement also provide one karma point in favor of the user that posted the comment? If yes, why not just bind endorsements to the upvote link? So that it becomes a natural behavior, in keeping with existing norms on this site. (perhaps emphasize the upvote button with color-coding, to indicate that the upvote also endorses the comment) If not, why not? Why shouldn't an endorsement count as an upvote that provides karma? Second Question: Do pending comments also apply to users with endorsement powers, or are their comments always visible by default, due to their endorsement privileges? I'm assuming not. What if a privileged user were also required to be endorsed by a fellow karma-enabled user who was not the author of the comment under review, as a form of peer review? In other words, just because you have enough karma to review someone else's comments, still does not guarantee that your own judgement of your personal statements might hold universal, objective merit.
    - chunky1994 13y ago
      I think the suggestion of tying the upvote to an endorsement may be a bad idea. It would be conflating the fact that you want the comment to be seen with the possibility that you might agree with it. The comment could be tangential/adversarial to your opinion, and so you might not upvote it, however it could still add to the discussion, and hence you would endorse it. To answer your second question I believe pg has stated that only users with over 10000 karma have their comments automatically endorsed.
mcgwiz 13y ago
I feel my previous comment [1] on the design of this feature is still valid. The word "endorse" carries the wrong connotations and increases the risk of subjectivity and groupthink. A better link label might be "tolerable". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449597
- pg 13y ago
  IIRC that name was chosen by the moderator, but it will be easy enough for him to change if he wants.
  - yajoe 13y ago
    $0.02 regarding the name of the feature, which I think anchors too much in the "censorship/free speech" principle discussion when it seems you have much more tactical goals (moderator workload, foster specific topics, etc.). Consider renaming the feature from "pending comments" to "civility filter." In prose one would say Moderators now can require civility via special-purpose moderation on specific threads. Similarly, consider changing the "[pending]" text to "[Pending civility check]" and changing the "endorse" link to "Affirm civility" (or just "Civil" to keep with one-word nav elements). Why? "All speech must be endorsed" --> "Bad Thing" "All speech must be civil" --> "Good Thing"
- chacham15 13y ago
  could it just be that if the 'privileged user' upvoted or downvoted it, it would be considered an endorsement whereas not touching it would leave it pending?
  - derefr 13y ago
    Indeed, that seems a much more sensible interaction-model to me. Take the absolute number of upvotes as the "endorsement value" of a post. Make all posts start at zero "endorsement", and require them to reach some N before they appear.
  - vacri 13y ago
newhouseb 13y ago
> Nor does the threshold for endorsing comments have to be karma. That was the obvious choice for a v1, but it would be easy to incorporate or substitute other things like account age or average comment score, or even introduce randomness. I don't have a sense anymore for the quality of comments on Slashdot but Slashdot has had a form of random moderation for long time. I do wonder how the goals and ideals are (were?) different between HN and Slashdot and how these differences manifest themselves in moderation policy. A good overview of Slashdot's history and though process on moderation can be found here: http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
- lnanek2 13y ago
  Slashdot is a lot better, however, because it is user customizable. Comments are rated on various attributes like if they are funny or insightful, then users can adjust the scoring of posts based on their preferences. It is also social - you can adjust posts of people you mark friends or foes. It is also policed - meta moderation moderated the moderators. As someone who has run internet forums and picture sharing sites before, I know the problem isn't finding moderators, the problem is finding moderators who don't get ban happy and enforce rules just for the fun of enforcing.
elwell 13y ago
Would a moderator care to turn on pending comments for this thread, so we can get an idea of how it works?
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  Are there several moderators or just one "main moderator"? I can't work that out from the text.
  - pg 13y ago
    There is one main moderator (who is not me) as well as several other people who could do something like that but wouldn't.
sillysaurus3 13y ago
Why not turn on pending comments site-wide for 24 hours and see how it works out? The initial test worked fine, and it'd be a nice experiment.
- pg 13y ago
  The main reason not to is that comments sitewide come too fast for a human to watch what's happening in real time.
gargarplex 13y ago
I know we're not allowed to complain that HN is becoming Reddit. But with this feature.. HN is becoming Slashdot.
Zenst 13y ago
As for a karma rating to pend, then perhaps some scaling, if backlog of pending comments then the limit lowered and if low then raised, Base on say 5-15 minute average, or even hoursly or daily... Also thing the initial poster should automaticly get some level of control upon the posted comments. Random is what /. did for a last time I used it and that is pretty random in results, garbage in, garbage out as they say.
baddox 13y ago
How do you even determine results empirically? Is there some objective measure of utility, or is it just up to whether HN mods/admins think that things seem better with the new feature? If it's something like the latter, I wouldn't call that an empirical approach.
cwaniak 13y ago
Great! So it will be even more left-wing, white knights oriented, immature behind big books kind of an affair. Write me off today Paul! Have a nice day!
yarou 13y ago
This may or may not be a bad change to HN, it's too early to tell. Instead of having karma as the sole criterion of whether or not to endorse comments, why not have additional criteria such as age of the account, or number of threads started that netted x amount of karma?
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  You may have never worked in a content industry before, but there are certainly empirical methods you can use to find out if something is more appealing to people along some axes.
britta 13y ago
I'm concerned that giving comment-approval power to people with x amount of karma will reinforce many of the existing problematic aspects of HN instead of opening it up to better discussion. It means that people with currently-underrepresented voices will have to "play nice" with the current mainstream of HN in order to be represented on the site. For example, discussions here already have a pattern of being mostly men, and most people with significant amounts of karma are men - I don't know the data here, but I don't think that's a controversial observation. If you're a woman who is new to HN and trying to explain your work experience as a woman in a relevant thread, right now you can give commenting an honest effort and know that everyone can at least read your words and consider them. But under pending comments, instead women will have to write comments that men approve before those women's comments are even visible. The pending comments system seems worryingly likely to reinforce HN's existing systemic biases in silent/hidden ways that will be hard to analyze and improve after implementation. Edit to suggest an improvement instead of just criticism: I've been moderating forums and IRC professionally for six years (for del.icio.us and now for Cydia), and to change the culture here, I'd first try expanding the community guidelines with much more detail and several specific examples of unacceptable comments. It clearly has not been enough to only say "be civil", no name calling, and "no classic flamewar topics" - it's a good start, but vague and incomplete. Expanded guidelines would go along with clearly-indicated removals of unacceptable comments to show that the new guidelines are serious and not just suggestions. I would also try implementing a Metafilter-style flagging system: make the "flag" button consistently visible, with a "pick a reason to flag" menu that has one option per rule category (http://i.imgur.com/Aw03Tl2.png http://i.imgur.com/Aw03Tl2.png). This serves as an integrated (and "just in time") reminder of the rules, with the bonus of flag counts helping moderators find problem spots.
- sillysaurus3 13y ago
  I don't think it will be a problem in practice, both because women will be able to endorse comments and because during the test period people endorsed most comments. The only comments that weren't endorsed were troll comments. The most recent test period was brief (just a couple hours) so it isn't representative of how it will work out in practice, but that's why I think we should turn it on for 24 hours and see what happens. EDIT: On reflection, I apologize for how dismissive my comment must've sounded. It wasn't my intention.
radley 13y ago
What about connecting pending comments (or posts) to an initial upvote? - Anything posted by K- users is only visible to K+ users and the K- guy who posted it. - Nobody can comment on a K- post/comment until it gets the first upvote by a K+ user. - Once a K+ user upvotes the K- post, it clears for everyone to read and respond, even if it drops under 0 later. I imagine this could easily reduce the most obvious friction.
elwell 13y ago
> I am at this stage still the one who understands the HN code best Hopefully not sounding offensive, but objectively: this is probably because the HN codebase is a complex ball of mud written in an obscure, original language, further obfuscated by a rabbit-hole filled journey of macros/DSLs. Ok, maybe that was a little offensive. And, I'm not one to talk about language choice (much less language design), as I use PHP heavily every day. But if PG is going to back off from the code ("I was encouraged to write it before I left"), then maybe it's time for a rewrite in a more familiar language, and maybe it's time to open source it properly and actively. While I think the current Arc situation epitomizes the hacker culture, I disagree that an open source rewrite in a more popular language could not also function in the same manner (if not more so). Edit: "ball of mud" isn't necessarily all negative. I'm borrowing from a supposed Joel Moses quote: "APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp."
- sillysaurus3 13y ago
  It's not nearly as bad as you make it sound. Most people just don't give it a chance by forcing themselves to work exclusively in it for a week while trying to implement features, etc. The ice skating analogy is pretty apt. You'll fall and hurt yourself a few times, but once you get the hang of it you get around much faster.
  - couchand 13y ago
    That still doesn't address the apparent issue of PG being the only person capable of implementing this feature.
simonsarris 13y ago
Some concepts are controversial, but the resulting discussion hashed out from them can often be more insightful and meaningful than the original article. Some concepts are odd on the first take, and it might take a child comment to flesh out what may be a very good but difficult to understand idea. And if most people do not understand the point right away, they may not endorse it. Some people are creative with their use of language, or are non-native English speakers, and may not be able to effectively articulate what may well be a very interesting idea or important concept that adds to the conversation. Alone such a comment may not be useful, but child comments exploring it further may yield some excellent discussion. Some comments may seem flippant, but solicitations for back-story reveal what the original commenter was really getting at. One of the best things about HN is the comments, and it follows that one of the best things about any particular comment is a another comment reply. ~~~ There's a problem you can peek at in academia, it doesn't have a name, but it's the reason that 125 Harvard students were caught cheating a few years ago. The problem isn't that the students were cheating - Harvard students are not dumb and I doubt they're particularly lazy. The problem was that grading had become such a low priority for a professor that the take-home final answers, that only a gradable subset of possible answers were really accepted for any question, so that grading could be done more on the number of citations than how effectively you communicated an answer. Implicitly and usually explicitly it's understood that you cannot just give an original answer, you must give an answer relating to something that was taught in the course. This does not optimize for interesting or insightful answers, it optimizes for regurgitation. Originality becomes dangerous, since it demand deviation. I fear we will run into a similar issue here. People will tailor their comments to please the endorsers that be. We will be turning inward mentally, and we will never know how much. And for what? It's true that sometimes there's a controversial comment and it ends in a 60-comment emotive goose-chase. Is that such a bad price to pay? > Indeed, the only way to figure out if pending comments will work at all is empirically. We cannot know what interesting conversations and discussions might be lost. No comment is an island, and I think this concept ignores that. ~~~ I do hope that if you turn it on it is as laser-focused as possible. The smaller the unit you damage though, the more you put the the ability to shut down/delay conversation in what might be an otherwise interesting thread into the hands of one/a few people. ~~~ [1] There are probably other problems at play, such as Harvard students being pressed for time and giving low priority to an intro to government class. That Harvard has an intro to government class is also probably a (separate) issue.
jcampbell1 13y ago
My instinct is the hidden scores are the bigger problem. There are so many posts where the top comment seems relevant and interesting, and I up-vote it blindly, even though it already has like 50 up-votes, and the more interesting discussion is buried. As a 1000+ karma user, I'll make the same mistake, under the new system. Hiding the scores was a popular change because comments that would normally generate +5, all the sudden were getting +60. It made everyone feel better. None complained, but the site got worse. I really miss the old days, when I could check the comments page, and the top comment would be a new, interesting, nuanced, balanced, comprehensive, perspective on the issue. Now the top comment is the first popular opinion followed by a bunch of trolling. Can we bring back showing scores for a week? Maybe as a april fools joke.
- dfc 13y ago
  Why not put a new mental rule in place: Do not upvote top level comments unless they are extremely new <10 minutes ago. Then you get the benefits of hidden scores and you do not contribute to burying the interesting discussions. It is also worth rethinking blindly up-voting. How reasonable is it to expect a comment scoring system to succeed when users blindly upvote things?
  - jcampbell1 13y ago
    That is a good suggestion for me, but it doesn't fix anything. I want to read interesting, comprehensive, and nuanced comments. My voting won't change that. The reason HN moved to blind voting was because there was ugly complaining about high karma users. HN should have hidden the usernames rather than the votes. The Economist works this way. My new theory is that HN should exploit the Hawthorne effect. Basically change the rules constantly to get the best results.
- ajanuary 13y ago
  An alternative could be that the impact of an upvote is inversly proportional to its position on the page. You'd probably have to combine it with other metrics like age.
webwright 13y ago
It seems like many/most sites with content issues use a "flag bad stuff" option rather than an "endorse good stuff" option-- which makes sense if most stuff is good. Why not give people with karma level of X (5000?) the ability to insta-kill anything that is rude? And perhaps people with lesser karma the ability to flag, where X flag points = comment death?
exodust 13y ago
For what it's worth, I disagree with pre-moderation. I'm not frequent enough to ever have hundreds of karma points, and it's very rare for me to see a "nasty comment". What's wrong with reactive moderation? Or the existing system where unpopular comments fade away literally? Pre-moderation kills the flow of conversation. It's a massive bottleneck, is more work for moderators, and for what benefit? Sanitation? There's nothing wrong with a bit of grit. We're not all sensitive flowers, reduced to tears at the sight of a nasty spray by Mr X. I hardly see that anyway, I'm really suprised to see pending comments even being contemplated here.
mrcwinn 13y ago
I fully support making discourse more productive and agree the problem exists, but the idea of giving a small subgroup the power to determine whose voices can be heard is hardly "more democratic." I do agree it is less work for you.
molecule 13y ago
> Indeed, the only way to figure out if pending comments will work at all is empirically. The plan is for the moderator to experiment with turning pending comments on for individual threads. If that works... If this is going to be empirical, then what is the measurement for 'it works' and how quickly do you expect to determine efficacy of the endorsement system?
- matt_heimer 13y ago
  Since all threads are different it would be really cool if there could be some A/B tests. Every thread or day you round-robin which users have to go through the pending system. The pending and non-pending groups see completely different sets of comments. Then we could see what type of effect it had on comments. Does it raise the average karma per comment? How does it impact the number of comments? etc... Probably too much work to implement but it'd be really cool to see.
matt_heimer 13y ago
I'm not sure I'm a fan yet but the main benefit of pending comments will be that it should make people think more before commenting. If pending comments can be enabled per-thread, will there be a visual warning when commenting? I know mods will still have to approve the comment but that seems the lesser of the two benefits to me. If not then pending comments need to be enabled for the majority of threads to make everybody operation under the assumption that they are enabled.
sedev 13y ago
Prior restraint solutions sit very badly with me: there's a reason that "prior restraint on speech" is near or at the top of the list of First Amendment no-nos (yes, the First Amendment applies to US government entities rather than private entities; the lesson is still valuable). It's a gratuitously bad idea to enable the prior restraint feature sitewide and by default. Besides the principle of prior restraint, that has all the hallmarks of being a feature that scales very poorly because it requires human involvement. Requiring human involvement and discretion is the point, so I'm not sure how one could eliminate that. Further, the part of it that say "if a user has a comment in the pending-approval status, they may not post new comments at all," seems very, very likely to have adverse consequences of large scope. People participate in multiple discussions over time and change their minds about them and behave differently in different contexts in response to different prompts. Holding all of their participation hostage to something they've said in the most contentious available context, seems like a great way to exert a chilling effect on participation as a whole. I strongly, strongly object to and oppose turning on the prior-restraint feature sitewide by default, and especially to the "if a user has a comment in the pending-approval status, they may not post new comments at all" part of the feature. That said, the history of moderating large discussions, especially in digital media, demonstrates that giving moderators programmatic tools to enforce their judgment is a Good Thing. So if you consider the proposed feature as "Allow moderators to say that any reply to a comment in the tree rooted at Comment Foo, must be human-approved before going live," sounds like a great tool for a moderator to have at their disposal. It is limited in scope and its effects can be judged and known. I think that's a reasonable thing to add, with the caveat that that shouldn't include the "users who have pending comments can't create other comments" part.
- pg 13y ago
  If we didn't have prior restraints on people speaking about places where you could buy cheap Ugg boots, HN would be so overrun with spam that it would be unusable.
  - couchand 13y ago
    That's a good observation, but doesn't really get at the point the parent was making. If I may continue the example of First Amendment rights, consider the well-founded prohibition on yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater, which seems more or less in line with an ad for boots on the Internet. Could you address the issue of only allowing a user to post one comment at a time? I think the parent made a good point on the potential chilling effect that may have on parallel comment threads.
CoolGuySteve 13y ago
Why does the site reward high karma rather than high average karma? I don't have any experiences miderating a forum, but intuitively it seems to me that those who spend a lot of time contributing low quality posts gain more moderation privileges than those who are either too busy to do so or who spend time writing a few quality posts.
- derefr 13y ago
  Mostly because high-quality posts hidden in low-traffic subthreads "look like" low-quality posts under such a system. People who go out of their way to help some individual without the expectation of a status-gain would be punished, while sycophants would be rewarded. This is the opposite of the incentives you'd want.
dfc 13y ago
I am confused about the "main moderator." When pg says "main moderator" is he referring to a specifc person other than himself, himself in the third person or a functional role (possibly rotating like "pager duty")? Elsewhere in this discussion he says "IIRC that name was chosen by the moderator, but it will be easy enough for him to change if he wants." The first mention of endorsing comments I can find is in pg's initial announcement of the pending comments change.
cs702 13y ago
I really like the idea of introducing some form of randomness to prevent gaming, social stratification, and other unintended consequences. My immediate thought is to suggest some type of majority voting and maybe even random bagging -- e.g., show the "endorse" link to a few random users (or groups of users) and endorse any comment that gets majority vote.
codezero 13y ago
I worked on the moderation team at Quora, and though you and your moderators know HN better, I'd be happy to share some of what I learned there with respect to hairy comment threads. One of the main focuses of my work was pragmatic solutions that reduce the necessity of human (moderator) intervention without eliminating it entirely.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Houshalter 13y ago
Why not just bury new comments at the bottom of the thread until they get an upvote (essentially equivalent to "endorsement".) It's a terrible idea (new comments never get seen), but it's functionally the same and only a small modification rather than a whole new system. You can also have an option to "hide" comments below a certain threshold (i.e. ones that haven't been "endorsed" yet) if that is the desired system. Or an option like showdead for low karma comments (perhaps count only total upvotes or "endorsements" rather than upvotes-downvotes.)
ryandrake 13y ago
Did you give any thought to the "showpending" idea posted in the previous discussion? Account config for those of us who don't mind reading the full, uncensored firehose.
tbirdz 13y ago
To further the endorsing aspect, how about we link the endorser to the endorsee? If the user endorses a comment which gets downvoted or flagged, there should be some negative reinforcement for the endorser. Similarly, if the user endorses a post that then goes on to get lots of upvotes, the endorser should also receive some positive reinforcement.
- Semiapies 13y ago
  In that case, then nobody would dare endorse even the most remotely controversial statements. Result: Total echo chamber.
walexander 13y ago
It seems like a lot of flame wars could be prevented without a pending comment feature, or at least a watered down one. If a comment is particularly offensive/offtopic, it is already downvoted, eventually greyingout. To prevent flame wars, the reply button could simply be disabled on those comments, or in comment threads with high vote volatility (high numbers of up and down votes on parent comment). Vote volatility could indicate a flamebait worthy topic, and the reply depth could be limited based on the volatility. Similarly the reply button could be pulled when two users are chaining long reply threads alone. Perhaps with higher levels of karma, the reply thread depth is relaxed for those particular users. Modifying reply access should prevent flame wars, but if there is still a desire to police the content more, then I think a "flag" button is more effective. If enough people flag your post (regardless of your karma), it could be placed in a type of quarantine area and then be pending until someone with the karma privileges decides to moderate it back in or not. I believe this is what reddit does, though the comments must be approved by mods rather than users.
eps 13y ago
pg, how many moderators are there?
InclinedPlane 13y ago
I've been thinking about pending comments and some of the issues I foresee from it. I have a major suggestion on how to change pending comments functionality to make it more useful and keep comments productive: The basic idea is to move away from the model of censorship/moderation and toward a model around rate limiting, as well as to integrate more seamlessly into the existing workflow of HN rather than to bolt on new things for people to do that cause the site to break down if they're not done. So, instead of hiding pending comments and making them visible only on the pending comments page until they've been upvoted enough to graduate to real comments you show them inline, but not 100% of the time. There are lots of algorithmic options on this part but one simple idea would be to display them to X% of users with over 500 karma who have been active within the last few days. The posts would simply appear as normal, and have normal up/down vote buttons on them. If the post gathers enough upvotes then it gets promoted to universally visible. If not then it continues to be only partially visible until some timeout where it becomes visible. Additionally, the amount of upvotes/downvotes could change the rate limit timeouts on the post. If a post receives a few upvotes then it could be automatically promoted out of pending status faster than one with no upvotes. If a post receives a few downvotes then it could be promoted slower than normal. If a post receives enough downvotes then perhaps it disappears, or simply takes a very long time to show up (days? a week?) The advantages of doing it this way are many fold. It blends into the normal functioning of the site. People won't even know they're voting on pending comments, they'll just use the site as usual. More importantly, it gets rid of a lot of the clunkier problems of pending comments, such as the potential for comments to languish in the pending state. In that case this model simply falls back to the rate limiting model. The site would still continue to function just fine even if nobody voted on pending comments, but the pace of discussion would be slower. And it avoids the censorship problem. Moderation is a fundamentally hard problem even with humans in the loop, by defaulting to allowing all comments to surface eventually you solve the problem of denying people a voice while also putting the brakes on overheated emotionally fueled flame wars and so forth. Also, I'd propose a few tweaks. First, make it so that high karma users' comments usually skip the pending step. To me this just seems logical and a good way to avoid excessive friction. If necessary you can add a toggle which forces pending comments behavior on a per thread basis. Also, you can add functionality which pushes a comment into pending status if it's downvoted. Second, consider making direct replies always visible to the parent poster, perhaps gated based on karma of the parent/child or both. Third, perhaps make it impossible to reply to a pending comment unless it has at least one upvote. That would preserve constructive back and forth comment threads while discouraging flame wars and vitriol. I don't want to see commentary, even controversial commentary, squashed in a misguided effort to turn HN into the digital equivalent of "Pleasantville". Sometimes controversy leads to extremely valuable discussion. But I think discouraging and quieting non-constructive commentary is well within the realm of possibility.
NicoJuicy 13y ago
PS. Release the HN Code. Need changes to the code, ask for the HN community :)

152 points by pg 13y ago

fletchowns 13y ago

I think this feature could have a very positive impact on HN. What happens if somebody replies to my comment, but I don't get around to responding to that person for a few days. Now there are hardly any eyeballs hitting that thread, so probably a low chance of my comment getting approved by somebody. Is it possible that my reply will never get to be seen?

pg 13y ago
The solution may be to have pending comments only enforced on recent threads. That would be about 30 characters of additional code.

morbius 13y ago

I sincerely apologize for saying this, but should all this have been made clear since Day 1? Not making public even a very basic whitepaper as to how to implement a site-wide change (and such a major one as well) just seems... off, given the high quality of this site otherwise. But thanks for the explanation. Duly noted.

pg 13y ago
I wrote most of the code the day it launched, and I had to get it done that day because I had to help the startups prepare their Demo Day pitches. Thanks for saying the site is high quality, but if so it's despite (or possibly because of) the fact that much of the development happens in the repl of the live site. There are not a lot of whitepapers around here. We tend to think by writing code.
- elwell 13y ago
  > much of the development happens in the repl of the live site Wow, I guess that gives me an excuse when I'm too lazy to test on a dev server. "Well, PG live edits HN"
  - batoure 13y ago
    >"Well, PG live edits HN" But HN has a persistent bug where the next button on the first page expires and doesn't work. That's the difference between doing something for work and doing something for fun. The willingnes to tolerate malfunction is higher
    - bdcravens 13y ago
      > HN has a persistent bug where the next button on the first page expires and doesn't work. I don't think that's a bug, but a feature - a type of cache invalidation that forces you to refresh to ensure paging is accurate
      - deleted 13y ago

eliteraspberrie 13y ago

You can set the value of the karma threshold automatically, to some multiple of the standard deviation of karma for all of HN. So you won't have to constantly revise it. I assume the distribution of karma here is exponential, so take the distribution's parameter lambda to be the highest value of karma, and set the threshold to half of the inverse of lambda. This page explains it better: http://www.phy.ornl.gov/csep/mc/node18.html http://www.phy.ornl.gov/csep/mc/node18.html

madsushi 13y ago
I like the idea of a hidden karma threshold, because it prevents any obvious attacks like "get to 50 karma and then approve bad comments".

zck 13y ago

I haven't actually been on HN when pending was turned on, but there's one question I have: How do I tell when pending is on? As far as I know, it will be in the top bar -- if you qualify to approve comments. Does it appear if I can't approve comments? How else could I tell whether pending is on, or if I am able to approve comments?

pg 13y ago
You can tell when a comment of your own is pending because the text is preceded by [pending]. You can tell when you can endorse a comment because there is link to do so. The link is currently small and gray, so it should probably be made a brighter color or replaced by a button or something.
- pigDisgusting 13y ago
  First Question: Does an endorsement also provide one karma point in favor of the user that posted the comment? If yes, why not just bind endorsements to the upvote link? So that it becomes a natural behavior, in keeping with existing norms on this site. (perhaps emphasize the upvote button with color-coding, to indicate that the upvote also endorses the comment) If not, why not? Why shouldn't an endorsement count as an upvote that provides karma? Second Question: Do pending comments also apply to users with endorsement powers, or are their comments always visible by default, due to their endorsement privileges? I'm assuming not. What if a privileged user were also required to be endorsed by a fellow karma-enabled user who was not the author of the comment under review, as a form of peer review? In other words, just because you have enough karma to review someone else's comments, still does not guarantee that your own judgement of your personal statements might hold universal, objective merit.
  - chunky1994 13y ago
    I think the suggestion of tying the upvote to an endorsement may be a bad idea. It would be conflating the fact that you want the comment to be seen with the possibility that you might agree with it. The comment could be tangential/adversarial to your opinion, and so you might not upvote it, however it could still add to the discussion, and hence you would endorse it. To answer your second question I believe pg has stated that only users with over 10000 karma have their comments automatically endorsed.

mcgwiz 13y ago

I feel my previous comment [1] on the design of this feature is still valid. The word "endorse" carries the wrong connotations and increases the risk of subjectivity and groupthink. A better link label might be "tolerable". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449597

pg 13y ago
IIRC that name was chosen by the moderator, but it will be easy enough for him to change if he wants.
- yajoe 13y ago
  $0.02 regarding the name of the feature, which I think anchors too much in the "censorship/free speech" principle discussion when it seems you have much more tactical goals (moderator workload, foster specific topics, etc.). Consider renaming the feature from "pending comments" to "civility filter." In prose one would say Moderators now can require civility via special-purpose moderation on specific threads. Similarly, consider changing the "[pending]" text to "[Pending civility check]" and changing the "endorse" link to "Affirm civility" (or just "Civil" to keep with one-word nav elements). Why? "All speech must be endorsed" --> "Bad Thing" "All speech must be civil" --> "Good Thing"
chacham15 13y ago
could it just be that if the 'privileged user' upvoted or downvoted it, it would be considered an endorsement whereas not touching it would leave it pending?
- derefr 13y ago
  Indeed, that seems a much more sensible interaction-model to me. Take the absolute number of upvotes as the "endorsement value" of a post. Make all posts start at zero "endorsement", and require them to reach some N before they appear.
- vacri 13y ago

newhouseb 13y ago

> Nor does the threshold for endorsing comments have to be karma. That was the obvious choice for a v1, but it would be easy to incorporate or substitute other things like account age or average comment score, or even introduce randomness. I don't have a sense anymore for the quality of comments on Slashdot but Slashdot has had a form of random moderation for long time. I do wonder how the goals and ideals are (were?) different between HN and Slashdot and how these differences manifest themselves in moderation policy. A good overview of Slashdot's history and though process on moderation can be found here: http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml

lnanek2 13y ago
Slashdot is a lot better, however, because it is user customizable. Comments are rated on various attributes like if they are funny or insightful, then users can adjust the scoring of posts based on their preferences. It is also social - you can adjust posts of people you mark friends or foes. It is also policed - meta moderation moderated the moderators. As someone who has run internet forums and picture sharing sites before, I know the problem isn't finding moderators, the problem is finding moderators who don't get ban happy and enforce rules just for the fun of enforcing.

elwell 13y ago

Would a moderator care to turn on pending comments for this thread, so we can get an idea of how it works?

oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
Are there several moderators or just one "main moderator"? I can't work that out from the text.
- pg 13y ago
  There is one main moderator (who is not me) as well as several other people who could do something like that but wouldn't.

sillysaurus3 13y ago

Why not turn on pending comments site-wide for 24 hours and see how it works out? The initial test worked fine, and it'd be a nice experiment.

pg 13y ago
The main reason not to is that comments sitewide come too fast for a human to watch what's happening in real time.

gargarplex 13y ago

I know we're not allowed to complain that HN is becoming Reddit. But with this feature.. HN is becoming Slashdot.

Zenst 13y ago

As for a karma rating to pend, then perhaps some scaling, if backlog of pending comments then the limit lowered and if low then raised, Base on say 5-15 minute average, or even hoursly or daily... Also thing the initial poster should automaticly get some level of control upon the posted comments. Random is what /. did for a last time I used it and that is pretty random in results, garbage in, garbage out as they say.

baddox 13y ago

How do you even determine results empirically? Is there some objective measure of utility, or is it just up to whether HN mods/admins think that things seem better with the new feature? If it's something like the latter, I wouldn't call that an empirical approach.

cwaniak 13y ago

Great! So it will be even more left-wing, white knights oriented, immature behind big books kind of an affair. Write me off today Paul! Have a nice day!

yarou 13y ago

This may or may not be a bad change to HN, it's too early to tell. Instead of having karma as the sole criterion of whether or not to endorse comments, why not have additional criteria such as age of the account, or number of threads started that netted x amount of karma?

jamesaguilar 13y ago
You may have never worked in a content industry before, but there are certainly empirical methods you can use to find out if something is more appealing to people along some axes.

britta 13y ago

I'm concerned that giving comment-approval power to people with x amount of karma will reinforce many of the existing problematic aspects of HN instead of opening it up to better discussion. It means that people with currently-underrepresented voices will have to "play nice" with the current mainstream of HN in order to be represented on the site. For example, discussions here already have a pattern of being mostly men, and most people with significant amounts of karma are men - I don't know the data here, but I don't think that's a controversial observation. If you're a woman who is new to HN and trying to explain your work experience as a woman in a relevant thread, right now you can give commenting an honest effort and know that everyone can at least read your words and consider them. But under pending comments, instead women will have to write comments that men approve before those women's comments are even visible. The pending comments system seems worryingly likely to reinforce HN's existing systemic biases in silent/hidden ways that will be hard to analyze and improve after implementation. Edit to suggest an improvement instead of just criticism: I've been moderating forums and IRC professionally for six years (for del.icio.us and now for Cydia), and to change the culture here, I'd first try expanding the community guidelines with much more detail and several specific examples of unacceptable comments. It clearly has not been enough to only say "be civil", no name calling, and "no classic flamewar topics" - it's a good start, but vague and incomplete. Expanded guidelines would go along with clearly-indicated removals of unacceptable comments to show that the new guidelines are serious and not just suggestions. I would also try implementing a Metafilter-style flagging system: make the "flag" button consistently visible, with a "pick a reason to flag" menu that has one option per rule category (http://i.imgur.com/Aw03Tl2.png http://i.imgur.com/Aw03Tl2.png). This serves as an integrated (and "just in time") reminder of the rules, with the bonus of flag counts helping moderators find problem spots.

sillysaurus3 13y ago
I don't think it will be a problem in practice, both because women will be able to endorse comments and because during the test period people endorsed most comments. The only comments that weren't endorsed were troll comments. The most recent test period was brief (just a couple hours) so it isn't representative of how it will work out in practice, but that's why I think we should turn it on for 24 hours and see what happens. EDIT: On reflection, I apologize for how dismissive my comment must've sounded. It wasn't my intention.

radley 13y ago

What about connecting pending comments (or posts) to an initial upvote? - Anything posted by K- users is only visible to K+ users and the K- guy who posted it. - Nobody can comment on a K- post/comment until it gets the first upvote by a K+ user. - Once a K+ user upvotes the K- post, it clears for everyone to read and respond, even if it drops under 0 later. I imagine this could easily reduce the most obvious friction.

elwell 13y ago

> I am at this stage still the one who understands the HN code best Hopefully not sounding offensive, but objectively: this is probably because the HN codebase is a complex ball of mud written in an obscure, original language, further obfuscated by a rabbit-hole filled journey of macros/DSLs. Ok, maybe that was a little offensive. And, I'm not one to talk about language choice (much less language design), as I use PHP heavily every day. But if PG is going to back off from the code ("I was encouraged to write it before I left"), then maybe it's time for a rewrite in a more familiar language, and maybe it's time to open source it properly and actively. While I think the current Arc situation epitomizes the hacker culture, I disagree that an open source rewrite in a more popular language could not also function in the same manner (if not more so). Edit: "ball of mud" isn't necessarily all negative. I'm borrowing from a supposed Joel Moses quote: "APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp."

sillysaurus3 13y ago
It's not nearly as bad as you make it sound. Most people just don't give it a chance by forcing themselves to work exclusively in it for a week while trying to implement features, etc. The ice skating analogy is pretty apt. You'll fall and hurt yourself a few times, but once you get the hang of it you get around much faster.
- couchand 13y ago
  That still doesn't address the apparent issue of PG being the only person capable of implementing this feature.

simonsarris 13y ago

Some concepts are controversial, but the resulting discussion hashed out from them can often be more insightful and meaningful than the original article. Some concepts are odd on the first take, and it might take a child comment to flesh out what may be a very good but difficult to understand idea. And if most people do not understand the point right away, they may not endorse it. Some people are creative with their use of language, or are non-native English speakers, and may not be able to effectively articulate what may well be a very interesting idea or important concept that adds to the conversation. Alone such a comment may not be useful, but child comments exploring it further may yield some excellent discussion. Some comments may seem flippant, but solicitations for back-story reveal what the original commenter was really getting at. One of the best things about HN is the comments, and it follows that one of the best things about any particular comment is a another comment reply. ~~~ There's a problem you can peek at in academia, it doesn't have a name, but it's the reason that 125 Harvard students were caught cheating a few years ago. The problem isn't that the students were cheating - Harvard students are not dumb and I doubt they're particularly lazy. The problem was that grading had become such a low priority for a professor that the take-home final answers, that only a gradable subset of possible answers were really accepted for any question, so that grading could be done more on the number of citations than how effectively you communicated an answer. Implicitly and usually explicitly it's understood that you cannot just give an original answer, you must give an answer relating to something that was taught in the course. This does not optimize for interesting or insightful answers, it optimizes for regurgitation. Originality becomes dangerous, since it demand deviation. I fear we will run into a similar issue here. People will tailor their comments to please the endorsers that be. We will be turning inward mentally, and we will never know how much. And for what? It's true that sometimes there's a controversial comment and it ends in a 60-comment emotive goose-chase. Is that such a bad price to pay? > Indeed, the only way to figure out if pending comments will work at all is empirically. We cannot know what interesting conversations and discussions might be lost. No comment is an island, and I think this concept ignores that. ~~~ I do hope that if you turn it on it is as laser-focused as possible. The smaller the unit you damage though, the more you put the the ability to shut down/delay conversation in what might be an otherwise interesting thread into the hands of one/a few people. ~~~ [1] There are probably other problems at play, such as Harvard students being pressed for time and giving low priority to an intro to government class. That Harvard has an intro to government class is also probably a (separate) issue.

jcampbell1 13y ago

My instinct is the hidden scores are the bigger problem. There are so many posts where the top comment seems relevant and interesting, and I up-vote it blindly, even though it already has like 50 up-votes, and the more interesting discussion is buried. As a 1000+ karma user, I'll make the same mistake, under the new system. Hiding the scores was a popular change because comments that would normally generate +5, all the sudden were getting +60. It made everyone feel better. None complained, but the site got worse. I really miss the old days, when I could check the comments page, and the top comment would be a new, interesting, nuanced, balanced, comprehensive, perspective on the issue. Now the top comment is the first popular opinion followed by a bunch of trolling. Can we bring back showing scores for a week? Maybe as a april fools joke.

dfc 13y ago
Why not put a new mental rule in place: Do not upvote top level comments unless they are extremely new <10 minutes ago. Then you get the benefits of hidden scores and you do not contribute to burying the interesting discussions. It is also worth rethinking blindly up-voting. How reasonable is it to expect a comment scoring system to succeed when users blindly upvote things?
- jcampbell1 13y ago
  That is a good suggestion for me, but it doesn't fix anything. I want to read interesting, comprehensive, and nuanced comments. My voting won't change that. The reason HN moved to blind voting was because there was ugly complaining about high karma users. HN should have hidden the usernames rather than the votes. The Economist works this way. My new theory is that HN should exploit the Hawthorne effect. Basically change the rules constantly to get the best results.
ajanuary 13y ago
An alternative could be that the impact of an upvote is inversly proportional to its position on the page. You'd probably have to combine it with other metrics like age.

webwright 13y ago

It seems like many/most sites with content issues use a "flag bad stuff" option rather than an "endorse good stuff" option-- which makes sense if most stuff is good. Why not give people with karma level of X (5000?) the ability to insta-kill anything that is rude? And perhaps people with lesser karma the ability to flag, where X flag points = comment death?

exodust 13y ago

For what it's worth, I disagree with pre-moderation. I'm not frequent enough to ever have hundreds of karma points, and it's very rare for me to see a "nasty comment". What's wrong with reactive moderation? Or the existing system where unpopular comments fade away literally? Pre-moderation kills the flow of conversation. It's a massive bottleneck, is more work for moderators, and for what benefit? Sanitation? There's nothing wrong with a bit of grit. We're not all sensitive flowers, reduced to tears at the sight of a nasty spray by Mr X. I hardly see that anyway, I'm really suprised to see pending comments even being contemplated here.

mrcwinn 13y ago

I fully support making discourse more productive and agree the problem exists, but the idea of giving a small subgroup the power to determine whose voices can be heard is hardly "more democratic." I do agree it is less work for you.

molecule 13y ago

> Indeed, the only way to figure out if pending comments will work at all is empirically. The plan is for the moderator to experiment with turning pending comments on for individual threads. If that works... If this is going to be empirical, then what is the measurement for 'it works' and how quickly do you expect to determine efficacy of the endorsement system?

matt_heimer 13y ago
Since all threads are different it would be really cool if there could be some A/B tests. Every thread or day you round-robin which users have to go through the pending system. The pending and non-pending groups see completely different sets of comments. Then we could see what type of effect it had on comments. Does it raise the average karma per comment? How does it impact the number of comments? etc... Probably too much work to implement but it'd be really cool to see.

matt_heimer 13y ago

I'm not sure I'm a fan yet but the main benefit of pending comments will be that it should make people think more before commenting. If pending comments can be enabled per-thread, will there be a visual warning when commenting? I know mods will still have to approve the comment but that seems the lesser of the two benefits to me. If not then pending comments need to be enabled for the majority of threads to make everybody operation under the assumption that they are enabled.

sedev 13y ago

Prior restraint solutions sit very badly with me: there's a reason that "prior restraint on speech" is near or at the top of the list of First Amendment no-nos (yes, the First Amendment applies to US government entities rather than private entities; the lesson is still valuable). It's a gratuitously bad idea to enable the prior restraint feature sitewide and by default. Besides the principle of prior restraint, that has all the hallmarks of being a feature that scales very poorly because it requires human involvement. Requiring human involvement and discretion is the point, so I'm not sure how one could eliminate that. Further, the part of it that say "if a user has a comment in the pending-approval status, they may not post new comments at all," seems very, very likely to have adverse consequences of large scope. People participate in multiple discussions over time and change their minds about them and behave differently in different contexts in response to different prompts. Holding all of their participation hostage to something they've said in the most contentious available context, seems like a great way to exert a chilling effect on participation as a whole. I strongly, strongly object to and oppose turning on the prior-restraint feature sitewide by default, and especially to the "if a user has a comment in the pending-approval status, they may not post new comments at all" part of the feature. That said, the history of moderating large discussions, especially in digital media, demonstrates that giving moderators programmatic tools to enforce their judgment is a Good Thing. So if you consider the proposed feature as "Allow moderators to say that any reply to a comment in the tree rooted at Comment Foo, must be human-approved before going live," sounds like a great tool for a moderator to have at their disposal. It is limited in scope and its effects can be judged and known. I think that's a reasonable thing to add, with the caveat that that shouldn't include the "users who have pending comments can't create other comments" part.

pg 13y ago
If we didn't have prior restraints on people speaking about places where you could buy cheap Ugg boots, HN would be so overrun with spam that it would be unusable.
- couchand 13y ago
  That's a good observation, but doesn't really get at the point the parent was making. If I may continue the example of First Amendment rights, consider the well-founded prohibition on yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater, which seems more or less in line with an ad for boots on the Internet. Could you address the issue of only allowing a user to post one comment at a time? I think the parent made a good point on the potential chilling effect that may have on parallel comment threads.

CoolGuySteve 13y ago

Why does the site reward high karma rather than high average karma? I don't have any experiences miderating a forum, but intuitively it seems to me that those who spend a lot of time contributing low quality posts gain more moderation privileges than those who are either too busy to do so or who spend time writing a few quality posts.

derefr 13y ago
Mostly because high-quality posts hidden in low-traffic subthreads "look like" low-quality posts under such a system. People who go out of their way to help some individual without the expectation of a status-gain would be punished, while sycophants would be rewarded. This is the opposite of the incentives you'd want.

dfc 13y ago

I am confused about the "main moderator." When pg says "main moderator" is he referring to a specifc person other than himself, himself in the third person or a functional role (possibly rotating like "pager duty")? Elsewhere in this discussion he says "IIRC that name was chosen by the moderator, but it will be easy enough for him to change if he wants." The first mention of endorsing comments I can find is in pg's initial announcement of the pending comments change.

cs702 13y ago

I really like the idea of introducing some form of randomness to prevent gaming, social stratification, and other unintended consequences. My immediate thought is to suggest some type of majority voting and maybe even random bagging -- e.g., show the "endorse" link to a few random users (or groups of users) and endorse any comment that gets majority vote.

codezero 13y ago

I worked on the moderation team at Quora, and though you and your moderators know HN better, I'd be happy to share some of what I learned there with respect to hairy comment threads. One of the main focuses of my work was pragmatic solutions that reduce the necessity of human (moderator) intervention without eliminating it entirely.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Houshalter 13y ago

Why not just bury new comments at the bottom of the thread until they get an upvote (essentially equivalent to "endorsement".) It's a terrible idea (new comments never get seen), but it's functionally the same and only a small modification rather than a whole new system. You can also have an option to "hide" comments below a certain threshold (i.e. ones that haven't been "endorsed" yet) if that is the desired system. Or an option like showdead for low karma comments (perhaps count only total upvotes or "endorsements" rather than upvotes-downvotes.)

ryandrake 13y ago

Did you give any thought to the "showpending" idea posted in the previous discussion? Account config for those of us who don't mind reading the full, uncensored firehose.

tbirdz 13y ago

To further the endorsing aspect, how about we link the endorser to the endorsee? If the user endorses a comment which gets downvoted or flagged, there should be some negative reinforcement for the endorser. Similarly, if the user endorses a post that then goes on to get lots of upvotes, the endorser should also receive some positive reinforcement.

Semiapies 13y ago
In that case, then nobody would dare endorse even the most remotely controversial statements. Result: Total echo chamber.

walexander 13y ago

It seems like a lot of flame wars could be prevented without a pending comment feature, or at least a watered down one. If a comment is particularly offensive/offtopic, it is already downvoted, eventually greyingout. To prevent flame wars, the reply button could simply be disabled on those comments, or in comment threads with high vote volatility (high numbers of up and down votes on parent comment). Vote volatility could indicate a flamebait worthy topic, and the reply depth could be limited based on the volatility. Similarly the reply button could be pulled when two users are chaining long reply threads alone. Perhaps with higher levels of karma, the reply thread depth is relaxed for those particular users. Modifying reply access should prevent flame wars, but if there is still a desire to police the content more, then I think a "flag" button is more effective. If enough people flag your post (regardless of your karma), it could be placed in a type of quarantine area and then be pending until someone with the karma privileges decides to moderate it back in or not. I believe this is what reddit does, though the comments must be approved by mods rather than users.

eps 13y ago

pg, how many moderators are there?

InclinedPlane 13y ago

I've been thinking about pending comments and some of the issues I foresee from it. I have a major suggestion on how to change pending comments functionality to make it more useful and keep comments productive: The basic idea is to move away from the model of censorship/moderation and toward a model around rate limiting, as well as to integrate more seamlessly into the existing workflow of HN rather than to bolt on new things for people to do that cause the site to break down if they're not done. So, instead of hiding pending comments and making them visible only on the pending comments page until they've been upvoted enough to graduate to real comments you show them inline, but not 100% of the time. There are lots of algorithmic options on this part but one simple idea would be to display them to X% of users with over 500 karma who have been active within the last few days. The posts would simply appear as normal, and have normal up/down vote buttons on them. If the post gathers enough upvotes then it gets promoted to universally visible. If not then it continues to be only partially visible until some timeout where it becomes visible. Additionally, the amount of upvotes/downvotes could change the rate limit timeouts on the post. If a post receives a few upvotes then it could be automatically promoted out of pending status faster than one with no upvotes. If a post receives a few downvotes then it could be promoted slower than normal. If a post receives enough downvotes then perhaps it disappears, or simply takes a very long time to show up (days? a week?) The advantages of doing it this way are many fold. It blends into the normal functioning of the site. People won't even know they're voting on pending comments, they'll just use the site as usual. More importantly, it gets rid of a lot of the clunkier problems of pending comments, such as the potential for comments to languish in the pending state. In that case this model simply falls back to the rate limiting model. The site would still continue to function just fine even if nobody voted on pending comments, but the pace of discussion would be slower. And it avoids the censorship problem. Moderation is a fundamentally hard problem even with humans in the loop, by defaulting to allowing all comments to surface eventually you solve the problem of denying people a voice while also putting the brakes on overheated emotionally fueled flame wars and so forth. Also, I'd propose a few tweaks. First, make it so that high karma users' comments usually skip the pending step. To me this just seems logical and a good way to avoid excessive friction. If necessary you can add a toggle which forces pending comments behavior on a per thread basis. Also, you can add functionality which pushes a comment into pending status if it's downvoted. Second, consider making direct replies always visible to the parent poster, perhaps gated based on karma of the parent/child or both. Third, perhaps make it impossible to reply to a pending comment unless it has at least one upvote. That would preserve constructive back and forth comment threads while discouraging flame wars and vitriol. I don't want to see commentary, even controversial commentary, squashed in a misguided effort to turn HN into the digital equivalent of "Pleasantville". Sometimes controversy leads to extremely valuable discussion. But I think discouraging and quieting non-constructive commentary is well within the realm of possibility.

NicoJuicy 13y ago

PS. Release the HN Code. Need changes to the code, ask for the HN community :)