Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else who finished the quiz think that the comment moderation process is bonkers in terms of work load? 11,000 comments a day. I got 2 out of 5 and it took me 46 seconds, which means it would take me more than 28.1 hours to do a day's work.

Even split across a few staff members that's insane. But this is something they needlessly put on themselves by making comments hidden by default. An editor has to read every comment before approving it. This could easily be fixed by having it show-by-default, queue-after-flags/downvotes (which is how I assume HN mods act so quickly)

There are a few "trusted" users who are auto-approved. I complained that there doesn't seem to be any automated filters or heuristics. If they know "Repugnican" is a word used in name-calling, why isn't it blacklisted so that all such comments either get thrown out or just thrown to the bottom of the queue?

I've subscribed to the NYT paper edition for several years, which means I've paid at least $1000, nevermind the ad revenue they get form my page visits to the site. And yet I have to wait in the queue, usually 15 minutes to an hour, before my comment is approved, like any of the free registered users. I believe they have a million subscribers. I think it is a logical courtesy and efficiency to give paying members the benefit of the doubt. Not many people pay 3x a Netflix subscription just to be an asshole on the comment boards.

edit: Made it clear that even longtime paying subscribers are treated as untrusted commenters.

Minor gripe: that's the time it takes you to read both the introduction, think about the context and judge the comment. Presumably, one would save a few seconds (and thus a lot of time in the long run) by being aware of the context and the article while working.

Still: major amounts of work. Though I presume that having comments hidden by default would take off some pressure: commenters won't know/notice their comments takes 14:55 or 13:29 to show up publicly.

The flagging solution does not necessarily work for a biased readership. Valid comments that go against the echo chamber will be flagged more often than those that don't, and will rise to the top. This will bury inappropriate comments that go along with the echo chamber to the bottom.

It could act like the downvote on YouTube, in which something registers but the actual tally is not visible to the public. It'd take some tweaking depending on the actual dynamics of how NYT readers interact. Maybe have a threshold of 3 to 5? And perhaps have a hidden karma score that drops (like in StackOverflow) with each downvote, so that chronic flaggers have diminishing influence

metafilter.com has a $5 lifetime fee to sign up. They have an extremely strict moderation policy and fairly frequently ban people who don't interact in positive ways, almost always refunding the sign-up fee. They have one of the most readable comments sections of any site i read, although it has it's own problems.

The comments are civil, but lack a certain diversity of thought, to put it politely.

I agree, and it's why I stop posting there, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem. Not every opinion needs to be expressed everywhere.

In that regard, I've been kind of curious to know how Hacker News deals with comments. It seems like there's only a single upvote button (no downvoting), and you can't see how much something has been upvoted. It kind of kills the popularity contest part of things.

The whole psychology of online commenting and having groups rate things is quite interesting.

I believe there is a 'downvote' button, but it's only available once you've scored above a certain karma threshold.

Also, while you don't know how often something has been upvoted, a comment with a higher score will be at the top of the page, and you'll see it first and be more likely to give it an additional upvote.

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