Of course. We'd be pretty stupid not to revert something that wasn't working. Plus in any case if you tweak parameters like the number of endorsements a comment needs and how much karma you need to endorse, you can approach current HN as closely as you want.
I'd venture to guess that the difference between a requirement of just 1 endorsement from users with karma >= 1 and the current HN is fairly significant (a downvote differs conceptually from a nonexistent endorsement), so you may not be able to approach it too closely. I suppose only time will tell though.
This reminds me of the 'penny gap problem': that the steep drop-off in users from raising the price from zero to a penny is much larger than the (much smoother) drop from further price increases.
This is an excellent observation. It takes effort to downvote someone; it takes zero effort to ignore a pending post that doesn't meet whatever your standard is for endorsement.
Basically, it turns the system on its head; it's no longer "Bad posts will be removed," it's "Your posts will automatically be removed unless someone decides that they are good."
I'm actually really optimistic about this change; it will force people to be more civil if they actually want to participate. However, it will only work if lots of people are willing to put in the effort of endorsing quality posts.
That being said, I think people are especially worried that if it's a bad change, it won't be reverted or tinkered with in a timely manner. HN has a (deserved, I think...) reputation for being unresponsive to user feedback.
Some people might be worried that, if it's a bad change, it won't be reverted because nobody will be able to read their complaints.
This is one of the few cases where the worse a change is, the less of a voice you will have after it happens. I'm not saying it will be bad, but you can see why that would be frightening.
The "karma elite" will be able to read their complaints. Usefully, the people with the ability to revert the change are a strict subset of the karma elite.
Is there any information on how spread out geographically the "karma elite" is. If it's very US centric then users in other time zones may suffer most in terms of pending delays.
While that is true, I think most of the time people think they know what they want, and then when they get what they asked for, it can be fairly shitty.
As I see it, trying something, even for an extended period while it totally fails, means that pg et all want to improve the level of commentary as they have seen it decline, and are taking steps to do what they can to improve it.
I don't think any community has gotten it right so far, and I am willing to surf it out, even if it means my ability to comment is curtailed a bit.
I was first attracted to HN not for the stories, though they are good, but for the extremely good commentary from people who know what they are talking about.
I think the community is just nervous, but I'm willing to give it a shot (as a sub 1000 karma-er). I do feel the heaviness of the new comment system though; and I understand the uneasiness of those commenting--kind of like swapping files in production.
I think it would be great to have some sort of "Beta HN" where whoever is taking over HN could try out all sorts of new features before they become adopted into the main HN site.
Have you considered that bad content breeds bad discussion? Some subreddits have evolved to deal with content marketing shills, a plague on HN, by demanding submitters have no relationship to the content they submit.
I think this would go a long way to restoring a healthier commenting environment. I also think you should consider taking HN with you as you step back. YC are not appropriately positioned to deal with this problem because 1/2 the startups exploiting HN are YC and the other 1/2 are copying them.
Sir, I certainly hope this will not be taken as being overly critical. However the change as I understand it will mean that if a new user writes a single comment that is unpopular or simply gets missed, he will forever be banned from commenting again. This is unworkable because it will mean many people will be banned just by virtue of their comment being missed, or by making a mistake and saying something that isn't appreciated by whatever senior members happen upon it.
The previous thread said that pending comments will expire after 24 hours of non-acceptance (releasing their lock), and can also be deleted at any time while in the pending state (which also releases the lock.)
While I don't speak for others who will moderate, there is a difference between being unpopular and being a poor comment. I have no issue encouraging good content that I disagree with. However, all too often people confuse having an unpopular opinion and being rude. They'll get down voted because they are not being civil, and they also happen to have an unpopular opinion. They will then point to that comment and claim they are being silenced by the majority (they will do this in another comment, which will also get down voted for good reason).
Even if it's just a test, it seems a reasonable scenario that just the test will cause permanent damage. I understand trying to promote better discussion, but this system is downright unwelcoming to any newcomers. When I registered to comment I thought the downvote restrictions were odd and I was willing to try it out, but if this was in place I'd have closed the tab and never come back. Maybe subject-matter experts wouldn't be so put off, but novices and students like myself would feel shunned. That's not saying I'm the most valuable poster, but I am far from a troll and I contribute real opinions and questions. I think lesser experienced posters like myself are important.
I also fear that this may fail silently with an echo chamber as a result. I think this is a real concern here. Unless there is a great amount of monitoring on those posts that don't make it through, none of the automatic posters may even miss the ones who never get a voice. That doesn't make it a positive change though.
Can you elaborate on how a test might cause permanent damage? Keep in mind that it should be clear whether significant damage is occurring quite soon after it rolls out. (Eg. Whether comments are getting approved, rate of comments, etc.)
That's certainly a possibility. It would show up in HN's metrics. (perhaps not visible to you and I, though)
On the other hand, you might also see more people coming in the door. What if this makes conversation on HN so much better that more people want to get involved?
The one thing that is certain with the new system is that if your comments are abusive, they will probably not get endorsed. Perhaps at first they will (protesting 1k+ karma users) but eventually anyone who is endorsing poor quality comments would likely lose the ability to endorse.
At a minimum, I think this a really interesting experiment.
The thing is, this is a kind of change which makes it difficult to know the real impact since the users who would have a problem with it are the ones losing their voice (until a karma elite user intervenes, of course). That's one of the reasons most people are opposed to this.
Eg, if this policy precludes 1-on-1 dialogue between sub 1k users, that would (arguably) be a dis-service. It would be "permanent" in the sense that the rules# logically don't allow a two party conversation (ie, absent a 3rd party "endorsement"). So this meets the test of "damage" and "permanence" at some threshold.
HN is like EMACS not WordPad. It has a learning curve.To some extent, HN is unwelcoming to new comers by design. It filters out people who want to behave to the same standards as the rest of the internet.
To put it in perspective, your post would several standard deviations above the mean both in length and content on most sites. Would have written so thoughtfully and carefully a year ago?
Supposing that I was writing about something I cared about, yes I would have. Maybe that just means I already went through the learning curve on other communities though (vim -> emacs).
MetaFilter does that, and doesn't seem to have problems with quality of discourse. Of course, HN as it stands doesn't seem to have significant problems with quality of discourse, either, so I'm not sure that HN needs either solution; discussion here is already far superior to what you find on the vast majority of sites.
> MetaFilter does that, and doesn't seem to have problems with quality of discourse.
What also helps the level of discourse at Metafilter is moderation to the tune of showing up in threads, deleting comments, and saying "knock it off" when things get particularly bad.
Sure, but that's done on a case-by-case basis, when things actually do get out of hand; it's not a universal, preemptive moderation system that's built right into the structure of the site.
There's no reason the fee can't vary depending on the location of the person signing up.
I also think this is a far better solution than "pending comments". I'm not convinced that either solution is ideal, but I fear "pending comments" has the potential to silently strangle HN.
As a (mostly) lurker who's quite wary of this change, I agree that stifling newcomers and longtime but quiet users could deprive the HN community of something real.
That said, Hacker News is a high enough quality forum that it could fare quite well for some time even if it completely cut off registrations. I don't think the experiment will be catastrophic by any means; though it'll undoubtedly result in at least some useful content never reaching daylight.
Of course, the fact that the HN comment sections are right now orders of magnitude higher quality than the internet at large is precisely why this change seems unnecessary. HN has long been- and still very much remains- a secluded mini-Reddit for startups and hackers. Doesn't that ethos almost demand the welcoming of newcomers?
EDIT: I wonder if everyone realizes the feeling of being excluded arbitrarily by karma count. Sure felt weirder than I anticipated while this comment was pending.
The worst aspect of this change for me is the knowledge that because of my sub-500 status I am not even allowed to see pending comments. I am cut off from the full discourse.
PG indicated that he might add show pending/dead comment buttons so maybe that concern will be alleviated.
I come to HN to learn new things and to get the opinions of people who are well-trained in their fields. In that respect, I don't really care what a new user's, student's, or novice's opinion on something is unless they've had valuable firsthand experience, in which case the comment would definitely add to the discussion. IMO any change to this site that encourages listening over speaking is quite welcome.
I guess I'm just worried that I will go to the front page and see two or more interesting stories I want to comment on and know I will only be able to pick one. I comment in bursts during breaks. I will also probably not comment on stories on the new page because it will be iffy on them getting the attention needed to not block me for a long time.
That sounds reasonable and yet isn't always good advice; you don't throw yourself out the window and "wait to see what it's like".
I fail to see the problem with the current system / current comments; bad comments usually drown at the bottom of the page and that's that.
What would be the point of preventing noobs from commenting? What's with this love of aristocracy? "We were here first!!" So what? (I have 4k+ "karma" and my account is more than 2k days old but that does not make me special in any way, shape or form. If anything, it probably means I have already said all I ever had to say and should be shot in the head to make room for the young!! ;-)
But in this supposedly "democratic" system we're not given any choice so I guess we simply have to take it...
It'd be more useful if the graph was in terms of comments per story per month, I think. As it is, the data could just mean that stories hit the front page, get discussed, and disappear increasingly quickly.
Stories hit the front page and disappear as a part of Hacker News's time weighting for determining ranking. It's extremely, extremely unusual for an article to be on the front page more than a day.
Right, but they can be on the front page for much less than a day, depending on how quickly we move onto discussing the next thing. And that "much less" can shrink further over time.
Why is it necessarily a bad thing that the number of comments has grown? This only matters if the overall quality of posts has decreased. More comments can also mean more good posts.
Rank is only apparent when a comment has siblings. When two people are having a reply-to-reply back-and-forth debate, I'm usually left very curious to which side HN agrees with.
It just occurred to me that it'd actually be nice to display scores on threads when they become archived--in other words, when knowing the score can no longer encourage you to upvote.
It was hard to compare a yes/no poll with a yes/no/idk poll. So I dropped the idk. They didn't think it wouldn't work, and they didn't think it would work, so there was no parallel to the other poll.
Prove that it was a positive change. If anything it's made parsing the comments harder IMO as the comment count provides extra context about how the community feels about the comment.
About 5 facebook engineers are answering questions. They are of course buried by a meta discussion about whether facebook should use PHP at all.
Since the change, I have written a few 50+ karma comments, and all were trolls. The change makes me like my own comments less. Getting a "high score" just requires posting something popular and mildly offensive, where as before, people could weigh, "what conversation is most important".
Agree. I'll add that the most frustrating thing to me is this: 3 comments in a row, are ranked as #1, #2, and #3. I end up reading crap, or not reading good things because that order tells me almost nothing. If I saw the scores, and they were 200, 5, 3, I could know to skip the bottom 2 if I wasn't very interested in the topic. If the scores were 200, 199, 198, I would be sure not to neglect reading #3.
Not seeing the scores also encourages hijacking visibility by replying to the top comment.
#1 score 1000
->#2 score 5
#3 score 800
We end up reading comment #2 before and often instead of #3.
Most really popular posts load 4-5 comments in reply to the actual post in the first page of comments. It's honestly ridiculous. I would really love to be able to collapse comment trees like on reddit, and even better if they aggressively collapsed by default based on their score.
Some simple comment auto-collapsing logic (like Reddit has, it's nothing magic) would actualy be "the simplest thing that could possibly work", a lot better and more straight-forward than adding yet another (third!) layer of voting to the comments.
Also I agree that hiding scores was not "decidedly a positive change", for the reason rando289 points out, among other things. It's just so useful information. Sure it changes the way people deal out votes, but in the end it's all about how the posts are sorted, not the individual points, and I doubt the sort-order will change much (and if it does, whether it'd be worse).
Jeebus. I been waiting SOOOO long for a chance to tell everyone how much I hate hidden comment karma. Here is my chance. Ok. I am done. Sorry I just had to vent.
Edit: Crap! my comment is pending... I guess I won't get to say it at all.
Is it possible to restrict a poll to users with >1000 karma, since they are clearly the ones who will be inheriting both the power and the burden?
edit: additionally, it sounds like they will continue to see all posts to Hacker News (since they will have to endorse the one they approve of) so I'm not sure what they stand to benefit from this change.
disagree: I just don't see the problem it's trying to solve. HN doesn't have a fluff problem or a flamewar problem - it happens, but not frequently enough to really be a problem.
The problem with HN's comments is the overwhelming negativity. Anything new, any change to something that already exists, is met with a reaction of fear or anger in the comments. I'd like to see effort go into fixing that problem, rather than wasting effort trying to solve a problem that other forums have and this one doesn't. And yes, I know i'm being part of this problem right now.
Why not pending delete instead of pending acceptance? Any comment is posted immediately but can be marked inappropriate by >1000 users within a certain (short) time span. If the comment reaches an inappropriateness threshold within that span it's deleted automatically.
Point is, this isn't just some visual tweak to get used to or not. It's a structural change that will have visible effects on the quality of the comments.
I read HN everyday and I value the commentary as much as the articles. This change has the potential to censor my contribution to that commentary.
So while I think there is a lot going for the idea, I think there will be a lot of good comments that won't ever be displayed so on balance I think HN will lose more than it gains.
I disagreed, and am pretty happy with the openness of current HN system. I'd rather see some negative comments than missing out a few inspiring ones.
What I do find annoying is (as some have mentioned days/weeks ago)- the OP can delete his own post, even though there are many replies below. So now the other hackers have no idea what the rest of people are replying to.
I'm not a big fan of the change. In theory there is nothing wrong with the new system, but I generally think HN has one of the best online communities around. Overall the average comment is polite, intelligent, and generally worth reading. So maybe I'm just not seeing the problem that it is trying to fix.
Call me cynical, but this sure seems like an effort to enforce groupthink on the company news outlet.
I suppose we'd do well to remember what business YC is in, and how critical public messaging and perception is to that business, not just in terms of their existing investments, but also ongoing recruitment.
There is no such thing as the threshold of "threshold of not being money-hungry and now is in the community-building mode". What on earth is that idea from? Is it a capitalist view, that if you becoming immensely wealthy that your wealth confers benefits automatically on society? I'm curious.
Y Combinator is not turning into a charity or a non-profit. How does that make logic? It's primary intention is to make a profit. It is a business.
Part of that business is public relations and community management, but it's a business first and last.
Even if you'd drop completely selfless motives out of the picture (rich and eccentric folks sometimes fancy these and in particular this hackernews site seems to be pg's pet project), as far as I understand it, the long term success of YC as a business depends upon the long term success of Bay Area / Silicon Valley. If this is indeed the case (and if they don't need to squeeze every cent out of ppl right now), they may as well be in the 'community building' mode.
The original post had said "how critical public messaging and perception is to that business". Hmm. In my opinion, what is somewhat critical to them (business-wise) is this upcoming 10B DropBox IPO. Everything else doesn't look that critical to me. I doubt that a change to a comment system here can have any observable interaction with the IPO process. So I doubt that 'enforcing groupthink on a news company outlet' is critical to them and that it was it. Just pg working on his pet project seems more like it.
I don't like it. I don't mind waiting to see what happens - I'm actually kind of curious to see how it changes the community - but my guess is it will decimate the number of comments per thread because it filters the signal as well as the noise. 1000+ karma users aren't going to endorse even 10 comments per thread on average (unless they are exceptionally enthusiastic), so only the most popular threads will have any possible discussion. In my experience the most popular threads are often the least interesting so I probably won't be able to read or participate in worthwhile discussions while this system is in place, though this depends on the balance of comments vs. upvotes which pg et. al have at their disposal to tinker with.
I think this solution approaches the problem backwards. Instead of blocking all comments until they pass some endorsement threshold, why not make 1000+ karma users' downvotes count as 'denouncements' and hide the post if they get three or four denouncements? This should have essentially the same effect on noise levels without filtering out massive amounts of quality posts.
This may be difficult for some people to understand such as famous users, but quite a few of my best comments were never upvoted. So I believe that this will also filter out many valid comments.
156 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadBasically, it turns the system on its head; it's no longer "Bad posts will be removed," it's "Your posts will automatically be removed unless someone decides that they are good."
I'm actually really optimistic about this change; it will force people to be more civil if they actually want to participate. However, it will only work if lots of people are willing to put in the effort of endorsing quality posts.
Edit: rabble rabble.
for what it's worth, i hated the removal of the comment scores too and i'm still here.
That being said, I think people are especially worried that if it's a bad change, it won't be reverted or tinkered with in a timely manner. HN has a (deserved, I think...) reputation for being unresponsive to user feedback.
This is one of the few cases where the worse a change is, the less of a voice you will have after it happens. I'm not saying it will be bad, but you can see why that would be frightening.
As I see it, trying something, even for an extended period while it totally fails, means that pg et all want to improve the level of commentary as they have seen it decline, and are taking steps to do what they can to improve it.
I don't think any community has gotten it right so far, and I am willing to surf it out, even if it means my ability to comment is curtailed a bit.
I was first attracted to HN not for the stories, though they are good, but for the extremely good commentary from people who know what they are talking about.
I think it would be great to have some sort of "Beta HN" where whoever is taking over HN could try out all sorts of new features before they become adopted into the main HN site.
I think this would go a long way to restoring a healthier commenting environment. I also think you should consider taking HN with you as you step back. YC are not appropriately positioned to deal with this problem because 1/2 the startups exploiting HN are YC and the other 1/2 are copying them.
It does mean he can only participate in one discussion at a time, though, provided his comment isn't endorsed immediately.
You can also delete the comment in a certain time period.
There were also some suggestions about restrictions of the single comment.
I also fear that this may fail silently with an echo chamber as a result. I think this is a real concern here. Unless there is a great amount of monitoring on those posts that don't make it through, none of the automatic posters may even miss the ones who never get a voice. That doesn't make it a positive change though.
I hope you reconsider this change,
A concerned member of this community
On the other hand, you might also see more people coming in the door. What if this makes conversation on HN so much better that more people want to get involved?
The one thing that is certain with the new system is that if your comments are abusive, they will probably not get endorsed. Perhaps at first they will (protesting 1k+ karma users) but eventually anyone who is endorsing poor quality comments would likely lose the ability to endorse.
At a minimum, I think this a really interesting experiment.
well, I'm going to voice my concerns and complain about it, but I'm not going to sabotage the system out of spite. that's childish.
> but eventually anyone who is endorsing poor quality comments would likely lose the ability to endorse.
If that happens it'll be because some invisible moderator has a different idea about "quality comments" than I do.
If it happens, I will lose the ability over endorsing puns.
https://news.ycombinator.com/pending
# The original ones, at least.
To put it in perspective, your post would several standard deviations above the mean both in length and content on most sites. Would have written so thoughtfully and carefully a year ago?
What also helps the level of discourse at Metafilter is moderation to the tune of showing up in threads, deleting comments, and saying "knock it off" when things get particularly bad.
I also think this is a far better solution than "pending comments". I'm not convinced that either solution is ideal, but I fear "pending comments" has the potential to silently strangle HN.
That said, Hacker News is a high enough quality forum that it could fare quite well for some time even if it completely cut off registrations. I don't think the experiment will be catastrophic by any means; though it'll undoubtedly result in at least some useful content never reaching daylight.
Of course, the fact that the HN comment sections are right now orders of magnitude higher quality than the internet at large is precisely why this change seems unnecessary. HN has long been- and still very much remains- a secluded mini-Reddit for startups and hackers. Doesn't that ethos almost demand the welcoming of newcomers?
EDIT: I wonder if everyone realizes the feeling of being excluded arbitrarily by karma count. Sure felt weirder than I anticipated while this comment was pending.
PG indicated that he might add show pending/dead comment buttons so maybe that concern will be alleviated.
I'm skeptical about the hypothesis of how this would play out, but I'll reserve judgment until it goes live.
I just hope this isn't abused by users with over 1000 karma as a way to stifle dissenting views on topics some users may feel strongly about.
I fail to see the problem with the current system / current comments; bad comments usually drown at the bottom of the page and that's that.
What would be the point of preventing noobs from commenting? What's with this love of aristocracy? "We were here first!!" So what? (I have 4k+ "karma" and my account is more than 2k days old but that does not make me special in any way, shape or form. If anything, it probably means I have already said all I ever had to say and should be shot in the head to make room for the young!! ;-)
But in this supposedly "democratic" system we're not given any choice so I guess we simply have to take it...
You even held a poll[0], the outcome of which was the majority didn't like it, but you left everything as it was anyway.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605
The number of comments has been growing significantly; perhaps change won't be bad.
The relative score is all that matters, and a comment's position on the page tells you all you need to know.
Only 38.5% of users were in favor of comment scores being hidden, but it was decidedly a positive change for the site.
1) That poll was conducted well after the change. That makes it a very different type of poll.
2) This change has half as much support, if you ignore the wait-and-sees.
(I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but interesting none the less.)
Hiding comment karma actually took something away from the community.
If it added something. I did not see it.
So no, it was not widely regarded to be a decidedly positive change.
Was it?
When things were transparent, there were no reason to upvote interesting trollish comments.
Now they get blindly up-voted for being interesting. For example, consider this article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7436401
About 5 facebook engineers are answering questions. They are of course buried by a meta discussion about whether facebook should use PHP at all.
Since the change, I have written a few 50+ karma comments, and all were trolls. The change makes me like my own comments less. Getting a "high score" just requires posting something popular and mildly offensive, where as before, people could weigh, "what conversation is most important".
Most really popular posts load 4-5 comments in reply to the actual post in the first page of comments. It's honestly ridiculous. I would really love to be able to collapse comment trees like on reddit, and even better if they aggressively collapsed by default based on their score.
Also I agree that hiding scores was not "decidedly a positive change", for the reason rando289 points out, among other things. It's just so useful information. Sure it changes the way people deal out votes, but in the end it's all about how the posts are sorted, not the individual points, and I doubt the sort-order will change much (and if it does, whether it'd be worse).
"2048 is HN's Flappy Bird"
Hardly enlightening or interesting.
Edit: Crap! my comment is pending... I guess I won't get to say it at all.
edit: additionally, it sounds like they will continue to see all posts to Hacker News (since they will have to endorse the one they approve of) so I'm not sure what they stand to benefit from this change.
The problem with HN's comments is the overwhelming negativity. Anything new, any change to something that already exists, is met with a reaction of fear or anger in the comments. I'd like to see effort go into fixing that problem, rather than wasting effort trying to solve a problem that other forums have and this one doesn't. And yes, I know i'm being part of this problem right now.
(That being said, my answer is "wait and see.")
So while I think there is a lot going for the idea, I think there will be a lot of good comments that won't ever be displayed so on balance I think HN will lose more than it gains.
What I do find annoying is (as some have mentioned days/weeks ago)- the OP can delete his own post, even though there are many replies below. So now the other hackers have no idea what the rest of people are replying to.
I suppose we'd do well to remember what business YC is in, and how critical public messaging and perception is to that business, not just in terms of their existing investments, but also ongoing recruitment.
And if not. Oh well. Anyone who matters is likely to be intelligent enough to detect company bullshit/groupthink and this would be the end of it.
Y Combinator is not turning into a charity or a non-profit. How does that make logic? It's primary intention is to make a profit. It is a business.
Part of that business is public relations and community management, but it's a business first and last.
The original post had said "how critical public messaging and perception is to that business". Hmm. In my opinion, what is somewhat critical to them (business-wise) is this upcoming 10B DropBox IPO. Everything else doesn't look that critical to me. I doubt that a change to a comment system here can have any observable interaction with the IPO process. So I doubt that 'enforcing groupthink on a news company outlet' is critical to them and that it was it. Just pg working on his pet project seems more like it.
I think this solution approaches the problem backwards. Instead of blocking all comments until they pass some endorsement threshold, why not make 1000+ karma users' downvotes count as 'denouncements' and hide the post if they get three or four denouncements? This should have essentially the same effect on noise levels without filtering out massive amounts of quality posts.
Second law of the internet: nobody will remember in a week.