How about purging pending comments after a certain time (say 24 hours)? If they haven't been endorsed by that time, they will most likely never be endorsed. And even if they would be, nobody would read them anymore.
(they are perfectly fine most of the time, their light-greyness is in fact more of an annoyance than the actually quite rare racist slur)
Whilst I am always intrigued with what hits the front-page, I rather more often than occasionally, find myself getting to page 10 or so on the weekends.
Just to see what has been going on that I missed.
Your change will basically mean that someone like me who might have something to add to an existing conversation might as well not bother.
It'll be years before I have enough karma on ycombinator's hackernews >1000, and that means I might as well seek another avenue. I guess I am back to post link on social media and comment on it.
Oh well, back to the 00's I guess.
That is already the case. Very few people read or participate in threads more than 24 hours old. You're already walking into an empty room and having a conversation with yourself; all this change does is lock the door.
[1] For example, not realizing that RC4 is now hopelessly broken, and asking for a couple of recent references.
I don't reread the thread, but I will pay attention to someone replying to my comments even after several days.
Also, (not unlike this comment) I'll find myself late to the party and add comments to posts because I believe my thoughts might be relevant.
I actually treat HN comments to be a ledger of sorts. Like other industry forums around the net, it is a collection of some very strong minds on tech-related subjects, and a decent resource to check for opinion or tangential information on all sorts of topics. If there is a discussion on something that I have unique insight to, I will post on long dead threads just to know it was posted.
I'm probably an outlier, and this use case is probably not all that prevalent, but pending comments being purged without endorsements would make this forum unarguably more temporal, for better or worse.
(well I have an inkling and it's spelled pretty clearly in the OP but I fear it may be considered "gratuitous nastiness", to speak my heart)
In my experience, page 2 is inaccessible after carefully scanning page 1 for a minute or two, and maybe clicking on or two links and reading the articles. Some generated link to page 2 expires during the time I'm scanning page 1.
Five years, I thought that was by intent and not some bug. Equally frustrating, but damn.
TLDR: Yes, Virginia, there is a Page 10 of HN. You'll just have to take someone else's word on that.
You have any idea how much time I spend sometimes on a comment?
(it can sometimes be quite a bit longer than the average person would on a similar comment, for reasons I don't really want to go into)
The first time one of those gets flushed down the toilet for no other reason than that nobody with >1k karma happened to notice it within 24 hours, I will know not to bother contributing any more.
Sometimes when I make a contribution to an older or less popular thread, I take the trouble anyway because I know there will at least be a few people that see it. Random passers-by, maybe in a few years arriving from some Google search. There's gems there. But I don't like to gamble on whether my post will even be kept around or not.
Downvote, bury, sure. But to delete without ever even being seen?? Well I guess it ties in with the joyful hellbanning theme here, or something.
Several sub-kilo-karma users may realize the same useful and valuable thing to comment (say, a reference link or clarification). They all post this before the first one gets endorsed.
All the others get penalized with a 24 hour no-posting timeout, for contributing a thoughtful/useful post.
(maybe a few of them will eventually get endorsed, so they may suffer a somewhat shorter penalty, at the cost of everybody else seeing duplicate content)