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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Let's see how much of a problem there is first. I wanted to start with the simplest possible thing. If it breaks in some cases I'll add stuff to fix those.

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An additional suggestion- don't show username on pending comments. Let the comments get approved solely on their own merit.

That should cut out a lot of concern about a ol' boys club, and honestly should do a lot to improve comment quality as well.

This is a very important consideration.

The are discussions where user name matters, for instance when refering to the nth parent in the same thread, or when trying to bring more context to a point made previously or even retracting a comment (knowing it's the same user posting is important).

We could get away with temporary user names, changing on a per thread basis for instance, but that might be heavy to implement.

>for instance when refering to the nth parent in the same thread

waterlesscloud's suggestion is to hide them only while the comment is pending. Once the comment is approved, then the username can be displayed as normal, allowing references.

Apply the on first participation to the thread then ?

Or just copy 4chan's system directly, since that's what you're iterating towards, and they've already solved this problem.

My immediate thoughts were very similar to cperciva's. In the status quo, there's already a disincentive (for those who care about average karma) to comment on any posts that require scrolling down, especially if posts above them are heavily nested or if they themselves are. I can think of a particular discussion I had with a well-known HN user who has professional/financial incentive to care about his karma statistics, and as our two person back-and-forth got slightly too nested but very much unresolved, he merely liked my final comment and never replied.

If pending comments are applied to anything except the top-level, I could see this having disastrous effects on the quality of response in discussions since responses in low-traffic branches will likely not even show up.

With the availability of browser plugins and user scripts, I anticipate an "off-HN" application popping. Interested people can shadow the "canonical" HN discussion and continue a discussion that has legs, possibly grafting it onto HN itself.

Of course, it may be simpler to bot up a subreddit and do the same thing via convention. That may be the best result, redirecting the reddit-like dross back to reddit, where it belongs. Throwaway accounts will be mechanically discouraged along with the me-too, ya rite, and other useless posts.

Hopefully this will prove overly pessimistic. The way I see it, either we'll be proven wrong or pg will revert to the system we know and love until he comes up with a better method for improving the quality of comments.

I actually found it optimistic, in the "destroy a village to save it"[1] sense. HN, as it currently stands, will cease to exist. I suspect the volume of submissions pointing directly to old wikipedia articles will dry up. I consider this a good thing.

I suspect the volume of submissions that are reposts piling onto something already on the front page (Erlang, Erlang, Erlang, Erlang, Haskell, Haskell, Haskell, Go, Go, Go, Snowden, Snowden, NSA, Erlang, Lisp, Lisp, Lisp, Lisp-flavored Erlang, NSA, Erlang, Erlang, Bacon and Spam, Javascript, Framework, Framework, NSA, Erlang, Haskell, Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, 2048, will dry up. I consider this a good thing.

I suspect I will spend less time on the site, either because conversations will become static expressions of views or because I won't have to filter through as much content, even though much of which marginalia I find quite engrossing. I consider this a good thing.

What comes next is open to conjecture. It could be a more mature salon full of reasoned discussions or it could become a ghost town with lots of great, old, discussions.

[1] I know, apocryphal at best.

That seems rash. The 'simplest thing' is a first-order approximation of a good thing. It could quash conversations, lock out users for days perhaps. And how can someone even talk about problems, if they're locked out? Catch-22.

At least measure the results, including people who give up and go away. It doesn't take much frustration to discourage even an active user with cogent remarks. I can see the quality taking a dive when regulars are driven away.

Looking at it statistically - there's always going to be a chance that a given comment will remain pending indefinitely. Over a long enough timeline, a greater and greater percentage of contributors will be unable to post.

So, will this be only for top-level comments, or will each and every reply in a thread require this sort of endorsement?

Toxic replies in threads are even worse than toxic top-level comments. A toxic top-level comment probably will drop to the bottom of the page, and, more importantly, the toxic reply is personalized.

I totally agree here. The replies are the real issue.

Just from personal experience, if I have something to share on the topic, but the discussion already has a couple hundred comments, I look to contribute as a reply to an already highly rated comment. I'm much more likely to get actually engagement that way.

The issue isn't comment quality. It's UI. New comments, even on busy articles, should be discoverable. It should be possible to have discussions past the front-page-life of an article. It should be easy for the reader to decide whether to explore a given thread of conversation in depth or skip it altogether.

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