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Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

This is answered under the subheading "Why not just invest in more moderation?".

Or all comments can only be posted once approved by the moderator. This obviates the need for 24 hour vigilance.

No it doesn't, you'll still need someone moderating to approve posts 24 hours a day or else the site stops working. No one wants to have a conversation through hours-long gaps in a moderation queue.

I've participated in such forums before, such as comp.lang.c++.moderated, and it works.

A counterpoint to that was given in Philadelphia Magazine back in 2013. The Philadelphia Inquirer also tried a system of moderation by volunteers in 2015. The headlined article tells us that they did not work.

I didn't see anything in the headlined article that says anything about a moderation system where posts are not posted until they are approved. It only talks about removal of posts after they are posted.

comp.lang.c++.moderated used a system where submissions needed approval by the moderator(s) before posting. It worked well for many years. The delay could be up to a day, but people accepted that.

After all, it's like the pre-internet "Letters to the Editor" section of the newspaper.

I did say that a counterpoint was in that 2013 Philadelphia Magazine piece. The headlined article says that nothing tried worked. One has to actually look up what was tried, and beyond that what was not even attempted, over at least a decade.

It can work, but you need enough moderators to keep the pace of posting moving and users willing to put up with the delays.

The fact that you've already changed between two supposedly simple approaches in under an hour might suggest that there's more to it than you initially thought.

I do work as a moderator myself, and understand that different forums need different styles of moderation.

Why go to all this trouble for a worthless addition to your site? It’s obviously not profitable or productive - any startup would kill such a feature so why are you demanding low-margin businesses have to keep such features around forever and actively invest in moderating them?

> demanding

I don't see any words like that in what I posted.

On a tiny blog, sure. On a news aggregation site, engagement will collapse.

comp.lang.c++.moderated is not a good example, that's a niche topic with relatively high barriers to entry. On mainstream news websites a big story can attract hundreds of comments a minute.

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