Updatev2: I think I may have interpreted it wrong, PG wrote "Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another" so I guess all comments will be pending but after being endorsed once can comment again?
^This makes a lot more sense to me than the one comment at a time idea. It gives people some slack and if the community decides one of your previous comments was unworthy to be in the official discussion thread, there's an incentive to delete it but also not too much time pressure on the part of the endorsers in the community...and thus on the commenter.
I predict this will reduce inane back and forth flamewars.
I more or less stopped participating a while ago due to decline in comment quality. I'm at 950 karma but if the system works I might make the effort reach 1000 lift the opinions I think are relevant to get this forum back to what I used to enjoy.
The only issue I have is that it might make the groupthink that exists here even worse. Sometimes the descending opinions are very important not just the status quo.
But will see how it goes, I just hope there isn't a rise in parroting comments like you see on stack overflow where people just start copying other people opinions to raise there own karma value, which would entrench the status quo.
Is this system current implemented so that users with greater than 1000 karma are now "moderators", or is the limit lower than that?
I have 910 at the moment, but after clicking "Endorse" on a comment it seemed to disappear from the page. It could be entirely coincidental, or was the limit lowered?
Also, I can't see an "Pending" link in the top menu unless I'm on the "Pending" page already. Not sure if this a part of having less than 1000 karma or just a caching issue/bug.
Agree, I see the same. I see posts prefixed with "[pending]" and with an Endorse button in the grey at the top; I hit Endorse and the "[pending]" goes away. So I'm pretty sure the system is live.
Out of curiousity, how do/will dead posts interact with the endorsement system?
Will dead posts that are not endorsed still be visible to users below 1k karma? Is endorsing a dead post (perhaps a good comment by a usually poor poster) a no-op, or will endorsement allow the dead post to be seen by users who are below 1k karma but have showdead turned on?
For now, things are going to be pretty silly, as everyone is paying attention to it and probably just endorsing for the hell of it. My guess is that PG started with the threshold being really low, meaning that a single endorsement will actually post the comment and that an endorser needs very little karma to give a good comment. As the karma and endorsements required go up, it will become harder and harder for bad posts to actually become viewable.
I really like this way of doing it; it starts off with the default HN and then makes the filter more and more selective.
That is exactly the plan. To prevent the change from being too disruptive I set all the parameters controlling pending comments very loose.
I know a lot of people are worried that this will break HN socially. I frankly am relieved it didn't break HN literally. The new code touches so many things. I'm amazed it works. But if it does seem to be breaking HN socially, we'll tweak it till it doesn't, and if that's impossible, we'll turn it off. I'm not wedded to having pending comments. I just wanted to try it to see if it can eliminate the very worst comments.
We already have upvoting/downvoting of comments. Why do we need to moderate each and every comment? A non-popular post will have no comments at all as all will be pending and no 1000+ karma users to endorse the comments. :(
Or, if the purpose is to have high karma users function as semi-moderators, why not just keep the upvote/downvote system but make a comment's precedence a function of weighted upvotes based on the karma of those voters? I guess that still wouldn't prevent a very deep off-topic tangent off of an ancestor post that's high up on the page, but it seems like a simpler and safer solution with much less potential downside, and there are always specific solutions to the above problem such as collapsable threads.
Please make the page a bit more mobile device (touch) friendly.
A simple HTML5 media query (CSS) that increase the font-size, add some space around the links (above the comments) and make the page content (table width) 100%. Thanks.
My issue with it is if you're posting link bait threads all the time you might get hundreds of karma for very little effort.
However In my case I have 6XX karma which was earned by people up-voting thoughtful comments over several years on HN.
Point being, not all karma is the same and I'm not sure we're going to get higher quality commentary with this new system. I actually think it's going to make users chase karma and try to game the system.
Chasing karma and gaming the system are entirely different in the context of HN.
Chasing karma means you're actively participating and gaining the positive attention of your peers.
Gaming the system would mean that you're somehow gaining karma without participating or without making positive contributions. I'm not sure how link baiting will work, unless you mean that people will go out of their way to be the first person to post a URL. That may become the best way to get karma, but it's also a positive for HN because relevant links will be getting posted immediately. Therefore you wouldn't technically be gaming the system.
I appreciate your commenting and believe that we're on similar tracks (I've been around for about a year and have about 250 karma), but maybe this feature is a signal that we could be doing a better job.
* pg, please move the "endorse" and "flag" links further apart? Upvoting on mobile devices is already a risky proposition (easy to accidentally downvote instead) unless I zoom the upvote arrow to ridiculous size. Now the same problem applies to /pending.
* /pending is moving pretty quickly right now, and I've seen at least one unhelpful comment get endorsed. Hopefully this will reduce as the novelty wears off (or the karma threshold to endorse increases).
* agree with georgemcbay that it's tricky to judge the quality/appropriateness of a comment out of context.
Hmm, on the thread view you are correct (I could only see "endorse"; now I can see only "flag"). But on /pending I see both "endorse" and "flag", and they're right next to each other.
I like pg constantly thinking of ways to improve the site.
But in my opinion, this is going to kill a lot of real-time commentary on posts that are only moderately popular, and it will kill discussion on scrolled-off posts almost completely, for obvious reasons.
I think pg is overestimating the number of >1000 karma users who are actively available to moderate and interested in moderating at any given time. This number needs to be fairly sizable for this system to work. I doubt it's very sizable at all.
Yup. I'm at 935 points and I can endorse comments. I feel like this is going to be such a dilemma for me, and HN, as a community, will soon discuss what really can be endorsed, even though PG already set some rules.
I feel bad that comments posted just to say they agree with someone/something cannot/will not be seen. This type of 'noise', as long as it is sprinkled lightly throughout, isn't so bad, in my opinion. I mean, I understand HN is meant to reward thoughtful comments, but at what point does this concept go into Less Wrong-type of ridiculousness? I'm totally not trolling, but we're only human. To deconstruct all aspects of a community/forum to only allow strict logical/cerebral behaviour seems like a community I would rather not be a part of.
In the end, I'll probably not endorse any comments, or at least extremely little, because I don't know if I agree with the concept and would rather not get involved.
> I feel bad that comments posted just to say they agree with someone/something cannot/will not be seen.
Unfortunately, most of my comments of this nature are replies to unpopular comments. I feel no need to tell someone I like their work if everyone else is already doing the same. However, this system may make comments designed to be read by only one other person a thing of the past.
If you don't have a thought to go with your agreement, just push the up arrow. I agree it isn't the same thing but I see the point of hiding relatively superficial stuff on a site with so many comments.
If you have something to say, even something fairly light, I expect it will still get unpended.
> this is going to kill a lot of real-time commentary on posts that are only moderately popular
I hope discussions become more drawn out, less intense, & more thoughtful; Instead of an intense period of commenting on the popular articles.
If some discussions are drawn out, then there would be less redundancy of comments, since people would have more time to view the entire conversation. Also, it would lessen incentive for quick, "kneejerk" comments to get the largest audience (thus karma).
> But in my opinion, this is going to kill a lot of real-time commentary on posts that are only moderately popular, and it will kill discussion on scrolled-off posts almost completely, for obvious reasons.
Real time discussion is overrated. I would rather prefer people think and research before commenting. That said, this could rapidly get out of hand if the pending queue gets too big.
The pending comments page has another problem in that it is quite context free. You only see the comment, not the context the comment is in (at least when I visited the page earlier).
EDIT:
The [pending] comment within a thread is poorly formatted. Maybe a different style?
Discussion isn't "efficient" !
Roundabout conversing is still optimal and useful in re the end goal of hitting potentially unreachable topics, and just because they are far-removed from the core topics or the central themes of the OP does not mean that they aren't still enlightening topics!
I left Reddit because it became more interested in policing rather than discourse, and I am so fudging blown that HN is devolving into the same priordial soup of authority that is more concerned with making sure that every submission has a pristine set of comments rather than a potentially controversial battery of back-and-forth argumentation.
Instead, why not allow anyone with +500 comment karma the authority to flag a post and if 3+ users flagged the same post it would die? It would be visible at inception but as time went on, if it was shitty it would get killed... Sure some folks would see shitty posts, but that's ok! Who cares? Its nbd, I see shit all day via the internet and I dont stop browsing! That way normal people could still influence the future of discussions while not deliberating precluding newbs posting just out of a silly fear of low-quality content...
Am I crazy or is what I'm saying make sense to the masses?
But the site is inherently real-time. Submissions pop onto and off of the front page in the course of a couple hours. The window for discussion is quite small before the next thing comes along. As it is, when I comment one something that's more than a few hours old, I halfway assume I'll never get a response/upvote/anything.
Just because a submission goes off the front page doesn't mean that nobody will comment on it anymore. Of course there will be fewer newcomers to the discussion, but people who are already in the thread will keep seeing it in their "threads" page so they can post replies even after a couple of days. Unless you post dozens of comments a day, it's relatively easy to keep track of threads that you're really interested in.
But that's part of the problem - comments will only show up if there are enough people looking at it to do the endorsing. A single site-wide list of pending comments won't work either - surely the whole point is that comments should be endorsed in the context of the thread?
It also runs the risk that things will only get endorsed if they agree with commonly-held views, and I'll also be interested to see how it effects things like whoishiring.
Some sort of moderation is fine, but I think that in its current implementation, this is a rather ham-fisted approach which will have a detrimental effect on HN.
I seriously doubt he's "constantly" thinking of ways to improve the site. That aside, (and I really apologize for anyone interpreting this as a negative comment), I highly respect pg but at the same time, wtf? Are the comments really that bad to deserve this honestly draconian new approach? This might seem like a short-term solution to the "problem" of poor comments but it is not a true solution! Rather, it is a poorly thought out filtering mechanism that doesn't apply merit into the determination of filtering, but instead uses the totally superficial criterion of "karma point count" instead of anything other than a time-based evaluation strategy. I think it only further contributes to the "redditization" of online communities and this inevitably lowers the quality of comments by increasing the barrier to entry of commenters and will over time force inter-comment dynamics into becoming increasingly censored.
Imagine an oldguy commenter with 2400 karma is in a discussion with a newb. He could be prowling the pending comments and could simply flag a newbreply just because he disagrees, thereby artificially making it look like he has "won" an argument even though he has just forced a newbreply into oblivion, despite whatever logical argumentation newb has employed in his reply.
But if the user with the higher karma is the only one interested in that thread they could easily just ignore the posts they disagree with so they never get endorsed. It leads to the same outcome, yet they appear to have done nothing wrong.
I don't really see the issue with this unless getting the last word in publicly on a discussion forum is vitally important.
The new person has posted, the higher karma one has seen it and chosen not to reply thus ending the conversation. If there is really no other attention then nothing has changed from the older person seeing the reply and ignoring it.
This isn't censorship and I think that word gets thrown around much too loosely.
If there are multiple people in the discussion then it is very likely more than one will pass the threshold to vote. If there isn't then nothing of value is lost as you still get to make your comment to the other side, you still get your last word in, it is just not public and the conversation will die immediately. Much how it is now if the other side doesn't reply to you.
I agree. I dislike slashdot because of their over-agressive moderation tactics. I think HN feels like a more natural conversation. As long as bad comments aren't in the majority I still like reading the threads.
>I dislike slashdot because of their over-agressive moderation tactics. //
I left /. because the story quality slid. I don't find the moderation there to be any more aggressive than here - 'cept here it's passive aggressive, you can just get hidden without being given a warning or any indication here. At least it seems to be distributed and open to meta-moderation whilst here it seems there's a hidden cabal of moderators who get to act independently [that may not be the case, that's the perception].
The UX is very bad on that page. You click endorse, and then you have to wait for the page to load (which takes some time, I might add). So, I get to endorse one comment at a time on that page.
Middle click doesnt really work on mobile and not at all on the various HN interface apps which people use due to HNs layout being 1990-era style and not usable at all even for reading on mobile.
Also, for the fuck of it, if I see ten good but un-endorsed comments, I have potentially ten tabs to load (hello latencies on UMTS links) and ten tabs to close! My netbook doesnt have enough pixels for the tabs, let alone RAM. Text-based browsers dont even have tabs.
The HN community may be great and all, but the technological part of it Just. Plain. Sucks.
YC is hunting for startups, and every single one of all the YC-backed companies has a better website UX than HN/YC itself. What a shame.
I've been here three years and have 9000 points. We have a similar karma average, so our comments are basically seen as the same quality. If you want community privileges, then contribute to the community! :)
Shouldn't it be about quality of contribution far more than quantity? If your quality is high then you should get equal privileges with those who merely contribute a lot (like me, my av. is down to 1.6 because I can't help but have my say ...).
Such examples would be in the extreme edges of the bell curve though, and rules designed to suit those rarities are often not suitable for the people in the main part of the curve.
And even so, a single commentor that only has 3 comments might make valuable comments when they pipe up, but the 2000-commentor is more a part of the community simply for having more frequent conversations.
You say you have a low average and therefore aren't as valuable a community member, but I recognise your handle and have a general idea of the flavour of your previous comments. In business parlance, you have 'brand recognition' :). If some wunderkind blows in tomorrow and posts a couple of popular posts (popular gets the votes, not insightfulness) and afterwards departs or lurks forever, I'm not going to remember them or their 'flavour', despite the high average. They might have made an interesting observation, but they wouldn't be as strong a part of the community as yourself.
Besides, getting back to context, who would I trust more when it comes to this 'endorsement' process, silly as it is? Someone who breezes in and out and mostly lurks, or someone for whom talking on the site is a frequent occurence and who knows the ins-and-outs of it? A lurker is an unknown quantity, but for someone to hit [number] karma, they generally have to have chatted or posted a bit (a few exceptions, sure).
My karma is >10k and my comments are still going into "pending" state. I don't know if they are being endorsed by other users or the system just automatically endorses them, but I do see a [pending] on them for at least a minute after I post them -- haven't tried to make a quick post while another is showing [pending].
There is way too little context in most of the comments in pending comments for me to decide if they should be endorsed, I really can't imagine scrolling through that page and then clicking 'parent', etc to figure out the context; particularly during rush hours when I'm already worried any click I make on this site might result in seeing the "HN Status" twitter history page.
My karma is >10k, so maybe the system still puts my posts into a pending state but then auto-endorses them? Not sure, but pg did say in another post that users with karma >10k were exempt.
I wonder if taking the age of an account into consideration could help. I feel that there are probably quite a few lurkers who have been here for quite some time, but haven't massed much karma since they very rarely comment, although are here all the time. Thoughts?
I understand the viewpoint that greater moderation power should go those who contribute more.
But as a fellow long-time lurker, I think accounts like ours make up for the long tail of HN contributions particularly in the form of comments.
I also think that long-time lurkers account for most of HN's readership.
The goal of HN isn't to please the majority, and pg seems to think that giving more moderation power to those with more karma will foster better discourse.
I urge pg to reconsider this. While it doesn't take any real effort to have an old account. And while it often feels that power, even moderation power, ought to be earned. I think giving long-time users the ability to endorse comments, even if they have little karma, won't degrade HN's discourse but instead improve it.
Lurkers post less, and therefore have less karma. Lurkers understand that when they don't have anything worthwhile to contribute, they aren't obligated to add to the noise in order to score internet points. I don't think that lurkers who have enjoyed HN for years without much individual activity are going to go out of their way to endorse pending comments that are low quality.
I hope that most would respect the higher standard HN holds comments to compared to some other sites. I suspect that those higher standards might be what has kept them coming back.
Oh. And since I'm posting this past 11 PM PDT on a Friday night, I doubt this comment will earn me much in the way of karma even though this is the type of constructive commenting that pg wants on HN, or so I hope. I think this goes to show that karma isn't a perfect stat for determining who can endorse comments. And while account age might not be perfect for this either, I think some combination of both would be better.
Your comments will need to be approved by a few users with ~1000+ karma before others on the site can see it. You can read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
I'm curious about how many endorsements are needed. My endorsement caused your comment to go live, but I don't know if you'd been previously endorsed by someone else or not.
My issue with pending comments requiring endorsements is that I have been here for several years and I only have 247 karma. I browse regularly but only tend to comment when I have something good to add. I don't try to game the system, and I don't try to comment immediately on new posts. I'll probably never hit 1000 karma, and now I'm even more disincentived to post since the chances of someone actually seeing what I post will now be even lower.
I created a new account to test out the system, and within 4 minutes of you posting your comment, I was able to see it and reply to it. For what it's worth, it was also the top comment of this thread.
This thread, and the day or so following, will be very different from the usual case. Today, everyone is playing with the endorse system. We will need to see how quickly it works when it's not the shiny new toy.
If your comment never gets endorsed and the delete goes away, does that mean you can't comment anymore? Like what happens if a pending comment is still around 48 hours later?
Isn't it a subtle irony? While you might be indicating that this new system is good because his comment became 'live' within 4 minutes of posting, at the same time it directly means a lot of people endorsed his thoughts that this new pending comments system is not that good? SMH...
It means that people thought the comment was a useful addition to the discussion. (or at the very least did not detract from the discussion) It does not mean that they agree with or endorse the opinion expressed in the comment.
That would be the ideal case, but the reality is a bit far off. As I said somewhere else, in the past the most upvotes I ever received were for sarcastic comments to a particular tech company (which I hate), but they arguably might not have contributed to the discussion. On the other hand, a few total negative votes were received on comments which I thought added to the discussion, but some people with high karma just didn't agree to it.
Now the problem with this new system is this: for unpopular links or articles, they'll never come to the front page, and thus very few 1000 karma people will see those. And thus, those comments might never become 'live' and visible to others, not creating any discussion at all, even further causing it to never become popular, because only conversation attracts more conversation.
So, one post every three years and you're worried it might not show up?
Personally I'm on the fence. Occasionally I get a chuckle out of some of the flippant one liners and rarely see anything that really bothers me. I only read maybe 10% of the threads though.
I read HN every hour (almost) and stay updated on the comments of many posts that are very interesting. I read the comments more than the post itself.
I chose not to comment since I didn't feel like I add value to the discussions. That may not be the same a year or 5 years or a decade down the line when I think HN will still be relevant and I will be more wiser to say something. Learning is forever and I would feel very sad if somehow my commenting in the future is buried because I did not have enough karma. Atleast, that's my take on it.
Our accounts are of a similar age (and probably like you, I read passively before ever even creating an account) and we've commented a similar number of times. Like others, I've also participated in mini-threads that add detail, but occur after the heated discussion has died down (here's a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295384). I almost never get to HN during peak hours, so it's my main form of interaction.
But I don't feel disincentivized to comment - if anything I may try to find ways to contribute more valuable comments. I'd wager that the chances of a good comment being read will be higher, not lower.
And either way, c'est la vie. HN is provided for free, and it's tremendous. It'll be a learning experience to observe the experiment.
Do you actually believe high-value comments will commonly go unendorsed? That seems pretty unlikely to me. I'd only worry about comments that aren't all that compelling — and for obvious reasons, I'm not too worried about losing those.
If anything, I expect it to be too easy to get your comments endorsed, just like it's too easy to get dumb comments upvoted right now.
I think it's not about how easy it is to be endorsed. The idea of relying on other people to make your comment visible doesn't sound right. I can probably guess, against which type of comments this measure is for and I'm not sure if it's going to be enough. However, there is a Turkish saying which fits to this situation perfectly: "Damp wood, too, will burn alongside the dry", meaning, drastic measures to get rid of the wrong would damage the correct too.
The core problem is that conversations aren't one way highways made of high-value comments.
Sometimes interesting things may come out of silly ones. Or maybe not. If we assume a conversation is also (not only) as a creative process, then mistakes and silliness are simply part of the process to get to something interesting.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating the "far west" attitude; I just think that the up/down voting works enough for the purpose.
Introducing an extra layer is going to push people to behave in a certain way (that somebody define, in an extreme way, groupthinking), which may make things more interesting in a certain way, but far less interesting in another.
There was a certain experiment on a certain site where they switched to Facebook comments, and they found that trolling comments were drastically reduced, but the posts started to look to nice and compliant.
Also, very important, the new system replaces a democracy with (more or less) an aristocracy, and I some doubts about this.
I'm actually scared to comment on here. If my comment is "too reddit" or if I am incorrect in what I write I could be shadow banned. I try to save my comments for when it's something really important.
It feels like I'm the outsider at high school all over again and I'm scared the cool kids will notice me and tell me to get lost.
It's odd because HN inspired me to make lots of passive income projects that now make enough money for our family of 4 to live off of. I even got Angel funding by winning a hackathon for another company I'm building now.
I fit the criteria to be one of the HN crowd on paper, but I don't think I'll ever feel like I belong. A comment queue seems like it'll move HN even further into that judgmental direction.
But what if that's the only thing keeping comments on HN any good? If you post something that isn't genuinely interesting or insightful the best case is that you get ignored and the worst case is that you get shadow banned. This means that everyone hovers over the submit button and second guesses whether what they're posting is any good. I know that I've probably aborted about 1/3rd of all my comments and I think that's a good thing.
>second guesses whether what they're posting is any good.
A much more accurate portrayal is everyone second guessing whether or not their comment will please the HN group-think. People don't filter themselves when they think their idea is stupid, they filter themselves when they think their idea will be unpopular.
Agreed - but the whole idea of upvotes is based on the idea that a popular comment = a good comment. The entire foundation of the system falls apart if you dispute that and the upvote system becomes the wrong choice.
I think in practice that 'popular comment = good comment' works well enough that it seems to beat all competing systems for internet commenting so there must be some kind of truth in the statement. Maybe it has a low enough false positive rate to make a small false negative rate acceptable?
It's a good point. I've spent time responding to a comment and decided to abandon because the HN community will soon correct me if I'm being biased or saying things without any real source to back it up.
I don't worry so much about being up voted or down voted (but I dig getting karma points as I know I'm giving someone else some value). I do however care about end up in a disagreement with someone else that turns into a superiority match. I personally don't want to be that person.
But perhaps this is the problem of moderating comments on a binary scale of "good" and "bad".
A comment judgement/rating system that is more nuanced will not only help the readers to choose from but also help the commenting user to understand why his comments are being downvoted. Examples of nuanced downvote reasons may include:
I personally would be interested in seeing whether, over time, my comments (and therefore my thinking) have been victim to certain patterns of thinking that I haven't noticed in myself.
Racism/Sexism/Bigotry can end up in logical fallacy territory pretty easily. "If women were unsuited for tech careers, there would be few of them in tech; there are few women in tech, therefore women are unsuited for tech careers" is a logical fallacy that I see around here pretty often. "Sexism" is just easier to remember than "Affirming the consequent".
But calling the problem there "sexism" has two major negative effects: it can lead you to believe that correct sexist arguments are flawed by their sexism, and it can lead you to accept affirming-the-consequent type arguments that aren't sexist. If something's wrong, you don't want to slam it for orthogonal traits, you want to slam it for the things that make it wrong.
The entire structure of this forum encourages groupthink. Look at shadow bans, their entire purpose is to permanently silence someone that speaks against the crowd without even letting him/her know and without providing any means of appeal.
Even though the content of the submissions of this site brings me back day after day, to pretend the comment section provides any reasonable environment for meaningful discourse is laughable. Why the suppression of certain view points and people via shadow bans is acceptable to most people is something I've never quite grasped.
hueving, it's true that there is an arguable attitude in the forum, but even under this assumption, to say that the comments section [...] is laughable is unfair.
It's certainly true that has downsides, but everything has.
It has at least one interesing upside though: one can learn to formulate opinions in a thoughtful, informed, and overall solid way. This is extremely valuable, and very importantly, it's entirely up to the user.
Groupthink is omnipresent; you just can't avoid it. But I've personally noticed one thing; most of the times, opinions which are against the establishment are respected and in best case admired, if they are solid and carry interesting/unexpected/creative information. I'm not talking about HN here.
So one can perfectly thrive here (and don't get me wrong, I don't endorse craving for upvotes) while still being non-conformant to the groupthink, everywhere. I'm pretty much "anti-technology" in some perspectives, but my account still survives pretty well, and so can yours.
Shadowbans/hellbans are meant to silence trolls, not unpopular views. They sometimes hit people with unpopular views, which is a problem that needs to be sorted out, but their purpose is not to enforce groupthink, merely civility.
I think what he's saying, though, is that to many people here the expression of "unpopular views" or any sort of criticism is always and directly synonymous with "trolling". This holds true for them even when what's said is completely valid, completely with merit, and expressed in a perfectly reasonable manner.
Just try saying "my favorite language is _" and you'll see what he's saying. I tried that once, on a thread about favorite languages I added a comment saying, I use these languages for these things, thinking I might get some good advice and I got downvoted. I was respectful about how I phrased it but I still got people ticked at me.
that's precisely how I feel about HN. Many times I wanted to express controversial opinions in a respectful way, but I am too scared to get downvoted. I ended up being just a reader and spending less and less time on HN. Too bad for a site supposedly for hackers (the real meaning of the term).
But I also say comment away. Just try to be positive and constructive.
I say a lot here and I try to be insightful. Just as many of my comments are never voted on as are voted up. I only have a tiny handful of comments with 0 or negative score, and most of those were on the snider side of the spectrum. I try not to do that in the first place, but everyone makes mistakes.
On the other hand, I'm sometimes surprised how many upvotes I've gotten on comments that I thought might contradict HN groupthink.
I think the existing system works fine. I worry that the commentary is about to actually decrease in value and timeliness.
My votes and comments have been disabled. I don't know when or why it happened. I cannot go to anyone for advice or repair. I have become persona non grata and I have no idea why. There is no way to fix it.
Your optimism shadows an extremely difficult reality.
I'd say 'scared' might be too strong a characterization? I have a slight wariness and a slight trepidation, which is completely absent when I post on (say) /. (which I rarely do any more but you know).
I've learnt that comments with 'meat' are valued and comments that have _positive_ things to say are valued. Negative comments and glib comments are downvoted here. Even if the negative comments have a point they are downvoted.
Don't feel like an outsider, if you have something to say, say it. For instance, this post of yours was articulate and informative. I'm not sure I'm in a position to agree with your last statement, I'd say we should have a trial run and have some sort of feedback mechanism up to and including abandoning the scheme if there's enough consensus.
I feel the same way about joining new online communities. Humans have highly evolved social instincts that make no sense in the world of the internet. Just tell yourself you are functionally anonymous and post anyways.
Your incentive to post should be genuine interest in engaging in a mature and thoughtful discussion about HN topics. If you have something valuable to add the expectation is that it will not sit in the pending pile for too long and once the comment leaves the pending state it will not be drowned out by unhelpful/unwanted comments.
If spending five or ten minutes to compose a comment is too much of an investment maybe HN is not the best place for the user.
Am I only supposed to send five or ten minutes to compose a comment?
Regularly I've posted comments that take as much as an hour to write. This is because I take the time to find sources to back up and support my position, and then I write my comment. After that, I reread what I wrote and edit the comment so that it is grammatically correct and factually sound. Finally, I reread it once more and really consider if I'm contributing to the discussion.
I've never really focused on karma. I've never tried to game the system. Because of this discussion I checked where I stand and I only have 132 points but with almost a 2 average. I think that supports my claim that I make thoughtful posts, but I don't know what the site average is.
I hope that this system doesn't backfire for me and for other similar contributors.
There wasn't, but I took it as the average, which still seems low. Since I discovered HN, I've been nothing but impressed with the audience. I think the nature of the site is one of the reasons the topics and comments are of higher quality than other news aggregation sites.
Well over a decade ago, I was a regular reader of /. and I find that HN is reminiscent of those earlier days. After adding moderating and meta-moderating, the quality of /. suffered. I'm sure it wasn't moderation that actually brought about those problems and it had more to do with reaching a broader audience, but still it is unnerving to see my favorite forums gradually follow the same trajectories time and time again.
It would be nice if the page didn't reload when you click endo rse. I lost my place on the page and my first thought was, "Well I won't be doing that again."
I was driving back from meeting with my co-founder so came late to the party. I posted then deleted this in the old thread.
As a long time lurker and reader of HN I really hope that you reconsider this change. I made an account just to explain why I dread the impact of this change on the quality, openness, and character of discourse at HN.
Put bluntly this change inspires a visceral feeling of loss and disappointment in me. I have viewed HN as a community where anyone can participate fully if they have something useful to say. This change feels like it will destroy this character of HN and turn it into a system where elites will have all the knowledge of a discussion and the rest of us will not. They will be able to incorporate ideas into their own posts before others can and can choose which ideas get general airtime. Particularly in low traffic stories this feels unjust and noninclusive.
I really enjoy reading the comment threads at HN and some of the best comments come as replies to comments that are unlikely to get endorsed in this system. This is because this system contains powerful disincentives for approving anything other than comments that will universally be viewed as high quality. If you approve enough comments that are viewed as low quality by moderators you will lose your ability to even view non approved comments and therefore your ability as an elite to fully participate in discourse at HN.
When this goes live hopefully people will be very very liberal with approving comments and people will do the public service of approving most comments in a pending global queue quickly. For me it will be very sad that I cannot read the lone, often very informative, comment to a story that will never make it to the front page but that nonetheless I and other lurkers want to see any response at all to the story. I am willing to read the trolls if I am allowed to read those who will be neglected by +1000 karma users.
I agree that sometimes the best comments are replies to otherwise "bad" comments, simply because the person replying is trying to correct/educate the bad commenter.
It's similar to Cunningham's Law – "the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is ... to post the wrong answer."
So by banishing all "bad" comments to the forever-pending state, perhaps this won't encourage the "better" commenters to come out of the woodwork to correct him/her.
In the AskHN thread I made, only one person responded to it, but it was VERY USEFUL.
Would Pending Comments have hidden that post from me? (I am assuming not many other people saw or cared about my thread) If so, then this policy seems like a big step towards focusing discussion to only what is on the front page.
310 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadCase in point: http://i.imgur.com/8Oa3z0H.png
Update: apparently this comment was still pending http://i.imgur.com/KBuY5fx.png
Updatev2: I think I may have interpreted it wrong, PG wrote "Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another" so I guess all comments will be pending but after being endorsed once can comment again?
I predict this will reduce inane back and forth flamewars.
I'm also interesting in seeing where / how pending comments look on a specific thread, I guess posting this will show that
HN users with > 1000 karma. Will you actively spend time to endorse new comments?
Yes, while I regularly read HN. I'm not going to go out of my way or anything, though.
The only issue I have is that it might make the groupthink that exists here even worse. Sometimes the descending opinions are very important not just the status quo.
But will see how it goes, I just hope there isn't a rise in parroting comments like you see on stack overflow where people just start copying other people opinions to raise there own karma value, which would entrench the status quo.
If that happens I'll probably be out for good.
Not to mention this won't get seen by anybody.
edit: just for research I noted how long this took to go from [pending] to not. It took 10 minutes for what it's worth
I have 910 at the moment, but after clicking "Endorse" on a comment it seemed to disappear from the page. It could be entirely coincidental, or was the limit lowered?
Also, I can't see an "Pending" link in the top menu unless I'm on the "Pending" page already. Not sure if this a part of having less than 1000 karma or just a caching issue/bug.
Will dead posts that are not endorsed still be visible to users below 1k karma? Is endorsing a dead post (perhaps a good comment by a usually poor poster) a no-op, or will endorsement allow the dead post to be seen by users who are below 1k karma but have showdead turned on?
Question: if a comment is never endorsed does that mean that user is effectively banned?
I really like this way of doing it; it starts off with the default HN and then makes the filter more and more selective.
I know a lot of people are worried that this will break HN socially. I frankly am relieved it didn't break HN literally. The new code touches so many things. I'm amazed it works. But if it does seem to be breaking HN socially, we'll tweak it till it doesn't, and if that's impossible, we'll turn it off. I'm not wedded to having pending comments. I just wanted to try it to see if it can eliminate the very worst comments.
A simple HTML5 media query (CSS) that increase the font-size, add some space around the links (above the comments) and make the page content (table width) 100%. Thanks.
However In my case I have 6XX karma which was earned by people up-voting thoughtful comments over several years on HN.
Point being, not all karma is the same and I'm not sure we're going to get higher quality commentary with this new system. I actually think it's going to make users chase karma and try to game the system.
Chasing karma means you're actively participating and gaining the positive attention of your peers.
Gaming the system would mean that you're somehow gaining karma without participating or without making positive contributions. I'm not sure how link baiting will work, unless you mean that people will go out of their way to be the first person to post a URL. That may become the best way to get karma, but it's also a positive for HN because relevant links will be getting posted immediately. Therefore you wouldn't technically be gaming the system.
I appreciate your commenting and believe that we're on similar tracks (I've been around for about a year and have about 250 karma), but maybe this feature is a signal that we could be doing a better job.
* pg, please move the "endorse" and "flag" links further apart? Upvoting on mobile devices is already a risky proposition (easy to accidentally downvote instead) unless I zoom the upvote arrow to ridiculous size. Now the same problem applies to /pending.
* /pending is moving pretty quickly right now, and I've seen at least one unhelpful comment get endorsed. Hopefully this will reduce as the novelty wears off (or the karma threshold to endorse increases).
* agree with georgemcbay that it's tricky to judge the quality/appropriateness of a comment out of context.
But in my opinion, this is going to kill a lot of real-time commentary on posts that are only moderately popular, and it will kill discussion on scrolled-off posts almost completely, for obvious reasons.
I think pg is overestimating the number of >1000 karma users who are actively available to moderate and interested in moderating at any given time. This number needs to be fairly sizable for this system to work. I doubt it's very sizable at all.
I feel bad that comments posted just to say they agree with someone/something cannot/will not be seen. This type of 'noise', as long as it is sprinkled lightly throughout, isn't so bad, in my opinion. I mean, I understand HN is meant to reward thoughtful comments, but at what point does this concept go into Less Wrong-type of ridiculousness? I'm totally not trolling, but we're only human. To deconstruct all aspects of a community/forum to only allow strict logical/cerebral behaviour seems like a community I would rather not be a part of.
In the end, I'll probably not endorse any comments, or at least extremely little, because I don't know if I agree with the concept and would rather not get involved.
I'm probably in the minority here, though.
Unfortunately, most of my comments of this nature are replies to unpopular comments. I feel no need to tell someone I like their work if everyone else is already doing the same. However, this system may make comments designed to be read by only one other person a thing of the past.
If you have something to say, even something fairly light, I expect it will still get unpended.
I hope discussions become more drawn out, less intense, & more thoughtful; Instead of an intense period of commenting on the popular articles.
If some discussions are drawn out, then there would be less redundancy of comments, since people would have more time to view the entire conversation. Also, it would lessen incentive for quick, "kneejerk" comments to get the largest audience (thus karma).
Either there are just not many comments, or people are actively moderating. Or some combo.
The thing is to see how that page looks in the next few days and weeks.
edit: Also surprised that this comment skipped the pending page.
Real time discussion is overrated. I would rather prefer people think and research before commenting. That said, this could rapidly get out of hand if the pending queue gets too big.
The pending comments page has another problem in that it is quite context free. You only see the comment, not the context the comment is in (at least when I visited the page earlier).
EDIT: The [pending] comment within a thread is poorly formatted. Maybe a different style?
I left Reddit because it became more interested in policing rather than discourse, and I am so fudging blown that HN is devolving into the same priordial soup of authority that is more concerned with making sure that every submission has a pristine set of comments rather than a potentially controversial battery of back-and-forth argumentation.
Instead, why not allow anyone with +500 comment karma the authority to flag a post and if 3+ users flagged the same post it would die? It would be visible at inception but as time went on, if it was shitty it would get killed... Sure some folks would see shitty posts, but that's ok! Who cares? Its nbd, I see shit all day via the internet and I dont stop browsing! That way normal people could still influence the future of discussions while not deliberating precluding newbs posting just out of a silly fear of low-quality content...
Am I crazy or is what I'm saying make sense to the masses?
It also runs the risk that things will only get endorsed if they agree with commonly-held views, and I'll also be interested to see how it effects things like whoishiring.
Some sort of moderation is fine, but I think that in its current implementation, this is a rather ham-fisted approach which will have a detrimental effect on HN.
Imagine an oldguy commenter with 2400 karma is in a discussion with a newb. He could be prowling the pending comments and could simply flag a newbreply just because he disagrees, thereby artificially making it look like he has "won" an argument even though he has just forced a newbreply into oblivion, despite whatever logical argumentation newb has employed in his reply.
This is bad. :(
The new person has posted, the higher karma one has seen it and chosen not to reply thus ending the conversation. If there is really no other attention then nothing has changed from the older person seeing the reply and ignoring it.
If there are multiple people in the discussion then it is very likely more than one will pass the threshold to vote. If there isn't then nothing of value is lost as you still get to make your comment to the other side, you still get your last word in, it is just not public and the conversation will die immediately. Much how it is now if the other side doesn't reply to you.
I left /. because the story quality slid. I don't find the moderation there to be any more aggressive than here - 'cept here it's passive aggressive, you can just get hidden without being given a warning or any indication here. At least it seems to be distributed and open to meta-moderation whilst here it seems there's a hidden cabal of moderators who get to act independently [that may not be the case, that's the perception].
Of course, you can just middle click, so maybe that's not so effective.
Also, for the fuck of it, if I see ten good but un-endorsed comments, I have potentially ten tabs to load (hello latencies on UMTS links) and ten tabs to close! My netbook doesnt have enough pixels for the tabs, let alone RAM. Text-based browsers dont even have tabs.
The HN community may be great and all, but the technological part of it Just. Plain. Sucks.
YC is hunting for startups, and every single one of all the YC-backed companies has a better website UX than HN/YC itself. What a shame.
And even so, a single commentor that only has 3 comments might make valuable comments when they pipe up, but the 2000-commentor is more a part of the community simply for having more frequent conversations.
You say you have a low average and therefore aren't as valuable a community member, but I recognise your handle and have a general idea of the flavour of your previous comments. In business parlance, you have 'brand recognition' :). If some wunderkind blows in tomorrow and posts a couple of popular posts (popular gets the votes, not insightfulness) and afterwards departs or lurks forever, I'm not going to remember them or their 'flavour', despite the high average. They might have made an interesting observation, but they wouldn't be as strong a part of the community as yourself.
Besides, getting back to context, who would I trust more when it comes to this 'endorsement' process, silly as it is? Someone who breezes in and out and mostly lurks, or someone for whom talking on the site is a frequent occurence and who knows the ins-and-outs of it? A lurker is an unknown quantity, but for someone to hit [number] karma, they generally have to have chatted or posted a bit (a few exceptions, sure).
But as a fellow long-time lurker, I think accounts like ours make up for the long tail of HN contributions particularly in the form of comments.
I also think that long-time lurkers account for most of HN's readership.
The goal of HN isn't to please the majority, and pg seems to think that giving more moderation power to those with more karma will foster better discourse.
I urge pg to reconsider this. While it doesn't take any real effort to have an old account. And while it often feels that power, even moderation power, ought to be earned. I think giving long-time users the ability to endorse comments, even if they have little karma, won't degrade HN's discourse but instead improve it.
Lurkers post less, and therefore have less karma. Lurkers understand that when they don't have anything worthwhile to contribute, they aren't obligated to add to the noise in order to score internet points. I don't think that lurkers who have enjoyed HN for years without much individual activity are going to go out of their way to endorse pending comments that are low quality.
I hope that most would respect the higher standard HN holds comments to compared to some other sites. I suspect that those higher standards might be what has kept them coming back.
Oh. And since I'm posting this past 11 PM PDT on a Friday night, I doubt this comment will earn me much in the way of karma even though this is the type of constructive commenting that pg wants on HN, or so I hope. I think this goes to show that karma isn't a perfect stat for determining who can endorse comments. And while account age might not be perfect for this either, I think some combination of both would be better.
I'm curious about how many endorsements are needed. My endorsement caused your comment to go live, but I don't know if you'd been previously endorsed by someone else or not.
You can read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
Now the problem with this new system is this: for unpopular links or articles, they'll never come to the front page, and thus very few 1000 karma people will see those. And thus, those comments might never become 'live' and visible to others, not creating any discussion at all, even further causing it to never become popular, because only conversation attracts more conversation.
Personally I'm on the fence. Occasionally I get a chuckle out of some of the flippant one liners and rarely see anything that really bothers me. I only read maybe 10% of the threads though.
I chose not to comment since I didn't feel like I add value to the discussions. That may not be the same a year or 5 years or a decade down the line when I think HN will still be relevant and I will be more wiser to say something. Learning is forever and I would feel very sad if somehow my commenting in the future is buried because I did not have enough karma. Atleast, that's my take on it.
But I don't feel disincentivized to comment - if anything I may try to find ways to contribute more valuable comments. I'd wager that the chances of a good comment being read will be higher, not lower. And either way, c'est la vie. HN is provided for free, and it's tremendous. It'll be a learning experience to observe the experiment.
If anything, I expect it to be too easy to get your comments endorsed, just like it's too easy to get dumb comments upvoted right now.
Sometimes interesting things may come out of silly ones. Or maybe not. If we assume a conversation is also (not only) as a creative process, then mistakes and silliness are simply part of the process to get to something interesting.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating the "far west" attitude; I just think that the up/down voting works enough for the purpose.
Introducing an extra layer is going to push people to behave in a certain way (that somebody define, in an extreme way, groupthinking), which may make things more interesting in a certain way, but far less interesting in another.
There was a certain experiment on a certain site where they switched to Facebook comments, and they found that trolling comments were drastically reduced, but the posts started to look to nice and compliant.
Also, very important, the new system replaces a democracy with (more or less) an aristocracy, and I some doubts about this.
It feels like I'm the outsider at high school all over again and I'm scared the cool kids will notice me and tell me to get lost.
It's odd because HN inspired me to make lots of passive income projects that now make enough money for our family of 4 to live off of. I even got Angel funding by winning a hackathon for another company I'm building now.
I fit the criteria to be one of the HN crowd on paper, but I don't think I'll ever feel like I belong. A comment queue seems like it'll move HN even further into that judgmental direction.
A much more accurate portrayal is everyone second guessing whether or not their comment will please the HN group-think. People don't filter themselves when they think their idea is stupid, they filter themselves when they think their idea will be unpopular.
I think in practice that 'popular comment = good comment' works well enough that it seems to beat all competing systems for internet commenting so there must be some kind of truth in the statement. Maybe it has a low enough false positive rate to make a small false negative rate acceptable?
I don't worry so much about being up voted or down voted (but I dig getting karma points as I know I'm giving someone else some value). I do however care about end up in a disagreement with someone else that turns into a superiority match. I personally don't want to be that person.
But perhaps this is the problem of moderating comments on a binary scale of "good" and "bad".
A comment judgement/rating system that is more nuanced will not only help the readers to choose from but also help the commenting user to understand why his comments are being downvoted. Examples of nuanced downvote reasons may include:
Possibly ... 1. Non-sequitur 2. Racist/Bigotted/Sexist 3. Gratuitous Profanity ... etc
If we really want to get clinical about this, we can simply use this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
This of course is only for the downvote.
I personally would be interested in seeing whether, over time, my comments (and therefore my thinking) have been victim to certain patterns of thinking that I haven't noticed in myself.
> If we really want to get clinical about this, we can simply use this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
That struck me as somewhat non-parallel. Racism, sexism, bigotry, and profanity aren't fallacies.
Your approach is sound and honorable, but please do not silence yourself out of fear. By doing so you encourage a groupthink behavior on this forum.
Even though the content of the submissions of this site brings me back day after day, to pretend the comment section provides any reasonable environment for meaningful discourse is laughable. Why the suppression of certain view points and people via shadow bans is acceptable to most people is something I've never quite grasped.
It's certainly true that has downsides, but everything has.
It has at least one interesing upside though: one can learn to formulate opinions in a thoughtful, informed, and overall solid way. This is extremely valuable, and very importantly, it's entirely up to the user.
Groupthink is omnipresent; you just can't avoid it. But I've personally noticed one thing; most of the times, opinions which are against the establishment are respected and in best case admired, if they are solid and carry interesting/unexpected/creative information. I'm not talking about HN here.
So one can perfectly thrive here (and don't get me wrong, I don't endorse craving for upvotes) while still being non-conformant to the groupthink, everywhere. I'm pretty much "anti-technology" in some perspectives, but my account still survives pretty well, and so can yours.
But I also say comment away. Just try to be positive and constructive.
I say a lot here and I try to be insightful. Just as many of my comments are never voted on as are voted up. I only have a tiny handful of comments with 0 or negative score, and most of those were on the snider side of the spectrum. I try not to do that in the first place, but everyone makes mistakes.
On the other hand, I'm sometimes surprised how many upvotes I've gotten on comments that I thought might contradict HN groupthink.
I think the existing system works fine. I worry that the commentary is about to actually decrease in value and timeliness.
Your optimism shadows an extremely difficult reality.
Your comments have evidently not been disabled!
I've learnt that comments with 'meat' are valued and comments that have _positive_ things to say are valued. Negative comments and glib comments are downvoted here. Even if the negative comments have a point they are downvoted.
Don't feel like an outsider, if you have something to say, say it. For instance, this post of yours was articulate and informative. I'm not sure I'm in a position to agree with your last statement, I'd say we should have a trial run and have some sort of feedback mechanism up to and including abandoning the scheme if there's enough consensus.
If spending five or ten minutes to compose a comment is too much of an investment maybe HN is not the best place for the user.
Regularly I've posted comments that take as much as an hour to write. This is because I take the time to find sources to back up and support my position, and then I write my comment. After that, I reread what I wrote and edit the comment so that it is grammatically correct and factually sound. Finally, I reread it once more and really consider if I'm contributing to the discussion.
I've never really focused on karma. I've never tried to game the system. Because of this discussion I checked where I stand and I only have 132 points but with almost a 2 average. I think that supports my claim that I make thoughtful posts, but I don't know what the site average is.
I hope that this system doesn't backfire for me and for other similar contributors.
Well over a decade ago, I was a regular reader of /. and I find that HN is reminiscent of those earlier days. After adding moderating and meta-moderating, the quality of /. suffered. I'm sure it wasn't moderation that actually brought about those problems and it had more to do with reaching a broader audience, but still it is unnerving to see my favorite forums gradually follow the same trajectories time and time again.
As a long time lurker and reader of HN I really hope that you reconsider this change. I made an account just to explain why I dread the impact of this change on the quality, openness, and character of discourse at HN.
Put bluntly this change inspires a visceral feeling of loss and disappointment in me. I have viewed HN as a community where anyone can participate fully if they have something useful to say. This change feels like it will destroy this character of HN and turn it into a system where elites will have all the knowledge of a discussion and the rest of us will not. They will be able to incorporate ideas into their own posts before others can and can choose which ideas get general airtime. Particularly in low traffic stories this feels unjust and noninclusive.
I really enjoy reading the comment threads at HN and some of the best comments come as replies to comments that are unlikely to get endorsed in this system. This is because this system contains powerful disincentives for approving anything other than comments that will universally be viewed as high quality. If you approve enough comments that are viewed as low quality by moderators you will lose your ability to even view non approved comments and therefore your ability as an elite to fully participate in discourse at HN.
When this goes live hopefully people will be very very liberal with approving comments and people will do the public service of approving most comments in a pending global queue quickly. For me it will be very sad that I cannot read the lone, often very informative, comment to a story that will never make it to the front page but that nonetheless I and other lurkers want to see any response at all to the story. I am willing to read the trolls if I am allowed to read those who will be neglected by +1000 karma users.
It's similar to Cunningham's Law – "the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is ... to post the wrong answer."
So by banishing all "bad" comments to the forever-pending state, perhaps this won't encourage the "better" commenters to come out of the woodwork to correct him/her.
Would Pending Comments have hidden that post from me? (I am assuming not many other people saw or cared about my thread) If so, then this policy seems like a big step towards focusing discussion to only what is on the front page.
This is absolutely the single greatest and subtly brilliant motivator for anyone interested in doing a startup to leap right now.
All of your competition is going to be wasting hours of their day upvoting pending comments.
Their time sink is your opportunity!
Here's a free startup idea: autobot commenter to turk task the producers of the valley.
This is only going to affect the very bottom of the barrel as it stands now.
So I think everyone can safely relax and let it work its course.