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Comment by frankc | Hacker News Reader

I propose the following system for commenting on news sites:

-comment period open for 3 days after publication -comments are not published until the end of the comment period, then all published at once -you can submit 1 comment per article only

After the comments are published, then a voting/ranking system is enabled for automatic sorting, but nothing is deleted except for spam

This eliminates any back and forth arguments. It would function like an online letters to the editor.

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I really like this. When I think about the most interesting comments, they are the ones where a reader adds something to the article, whether an anecdote, a correction, an educated opinion, etc. This system preserves that and removes the mud slinging. It also preserves the page views, as people are encouraged to return and read--perhaps with some "remind-me" mechanism.

I could see other permutations of his idea as well: you can only reply to the article, once you view the comments, it no longer accepts a comment from you; keep comments open but delay comments by one or two days--allows slow back and forth, not flame wars. Or allow replies, but only one comment per user. There are a lot of mechanisms to explore here.

I would imagine such a system would be mostly equivalent to no comment system at all. I'm not going to bother commenting if nobody can even see it, and 3 days later when they can I won't even remember that I commented.

Feature.

I'd hope that my comments mean something, even after three days.

I like it the idea of an interval between publication and comment! However I don't think back-and-forth is necessarily bad. I'd modify your proposal to include two or three rounds of rebuttal, each at a 3-day interval. You'd have to be seriously invested in the discussion to participate, and there's very little room for a flamewar to develop.

Nope, don't like that idea. I enjoy reading replies to comments - that's usually where discussion gets interesting. A static list of "letters to the editor" can be interesting, but there's no life or action happening there. More spice and counter-arguments are found in someone's reply to a comment. Sure this increases odds of domination by few users... so perhaps limiting people to 3 comments per article would be an idea.

That's really better than me being able to reply to you and ask for clarifications? I think you described letters to the editor, not comments.

Explicitly slowing down the conversation is essential.

I like it.

Why can I only downvote some comments here? I don't downvote much, but any time I see a comment such as "I like it" it really deserves a downvote for reasons that shouldn't need to be explained.

There's an eight hour downvote window.

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