Poll: The new HN comment system – agree, disagree, or wait and see?
title says all
The issue with the current model is that all I see is a list of green comments. What articles are they related to, what other discussions are they replying to?
Realize my comments come from the perspective of someone with 8600+ karma. I won't be silenced by this, but most people that come afterwords will be.
Its a bad, bad idea.
Thinking about this again I realize that would kind of defeat the whole idea as established users would still see all the "bad" comments, maybe someone can elaborate on how exactly it's supposed to work.
The problem with HN's comments is the overwhelming negativity. Anything new, any change to something that already exists, is met with a reaction of fear or anger in the comments. I'd like to see effort go into fixing that problem, rather than wasting effort trying to solve a problem that other forums have and this one doesn't. And yes, I know i'm being part of this problem right now.
I think this solution approaches the problem backwards. Instead of blocking all comments until they pass some endorsement threshold, why not make 1000+ karma users' downvotes count as 'denouncements' and hide the post if they get three or four denouncements? This should have essentially the same effect on noise levels without filtering out massive amounts of quality posts.
I suppose we'd do well to remember what business YC is in, and how critical public messaging and perception is to that business, not just in terms of their existing investments, but also ongoing recruitment.
And if not. Oh well. Anyone who matters is likely to be intelligent enough to detect company bullshit/groupthink and this would be the end of it.
Y Combinator is not turning into a charity or a non-profit. How does that make logic? It's primary intention is to make a profit. It is a business.
Part of that business is public relations and community management, but it's a business first and last.
The original post had said "how critical public messaging and perception is to that business". Hmm. In my opinion, what is somewhat critical to them (business-wise) is this upcoming 10B DropBox IPO. Everything else doesn't look that critical to me. I doubt that a change to a comment system here can have any observable interaction with the IPO process. So I doubt that 'enforcing groupthink on a news company outlet' is critical to them and that it was it. Just pg working on his pet project seems more like it.
It seems to me that this change moves further toward a select group of individuals owning and controlling the dialog on this site. This is bad news for the people who are not in this select group.
Before this change, a hacker news thread represented the collective dialog of the users on this site. Now, even though everyone can still comment, a hacker news thread is the collective dialog of everyone who can approve comments.
This is a dramatization; of course people with 1K karma will approve any reasonable comments and do so without any sort of agenda. Still, we can afford to be knitpicky about this change because the current system isn't broken. There is, in my mind, not any significant problem with comment quality. Why make a change now when it can potentially make the site worse and doesn't offer that great of an upside?
Only 38.5% of users were in favor of comment scores being hidden, but it was decidedly a positive change for the site.
Was it?
When things were transparent, there were no reason to upvote interesting trollish comments.
Now they get blindly up-voted for being interesting. For example, consider this article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7436401
About 5 facebook engineers are answering questions. They are of course buried by a meta discussion about whether facebook should use PHP at all.
Since the change, I have written a few 50+ karma comments, and all were trolls. The change makes me like my own comments less. Getting a "high score" just requires posting something popular and mildly offensive, where as before, people could weigh, "what conversation is most important".
#1 score 1000
->#2 score 5
#3 score 800
Most really popular posts load 4-5 comments in reply to the actual post in the first page of comments. It's honestly ridiculous. I would really love to be able to collapse comment trees like on reddit, and even better if they aggressively collapsed by default based on their score.
Also I agree that hiding scores was not "decidedly a positive change", for the reason rando289 points out, among other things. It's just so useful information. Sure it changes the way people deal out votes, but in the end it's all about how the posts are sorted, not the individual points, and I doubt the sort-order will change much (and if it does, whether it'd be worse).
"2048 is HN's Flappy Bird"
Hardly enlightening or interesting.
(I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but interesting none the less.)
Hiding comment karma actually took something away from the community.
If it added something. I did not see it.
Edit: Crap! my comment is pending... I guess I won't get to say it at all.
1) That poll was conducted well after the change. That makes it a very different type of poll.
2) This change has half as much support, if you ignore the wait-and-sees.
So no, it was not widely regarded to be a decidedly positive change.
I also fear that this may fail silently with an echo chamber as a result. I think this is a real concern here. Unless there is a great amount of monitoring on those posts that don't make it through, none of the automatic posters may even miss the ones who never get a voice. That doesn't make it a positive change though.
I hope you reconsider this change,
A concerned member of this community
That said, Hacker News is a high enough quality forum that it could fare quite well for some time even if it completely cut off registrations. I don't think the experiment will be catastrophic by any means; though it'll undoubtedly result in at least some useful content never reaching daylight.
Of course, the fact that the HN comment sections are right now orders of magnitude higher quality than the internet at large is precisely why this change seems unnecessary. HN has long been- and still very much remains- a secluded mini-Reddit for startups and hackers. Doesn't that ethos almost demand the welcoming of newcomers?
EDIT: I wonder if everyone realizes the feeling of being excluded arbitrarily by karma count. Sure felt weirder than I anticipated while this comment was pending.
PG indicated that he might add show pending/dead comment buttons so maybe that concern will be alleviated.
I'm skeptical about the hypothesis of how this would play out, but I'll reserve judgment until it goes live.
I just hope this isn't abused by users with over 1000 karma as a way to stifle dissenting views on topics some users may feel strongly about.
To put it in perspective, your post would several standard deviations above the mean both in length and content on most sites. Would have written so thoughtfully and carefully a year ago?
What also helps the level of discourse at Metafilter is moderation to the tune of showing up in threads, deleting comments, and saying "knock it off" when things get particularly bad.
I also think this is a far better solution than "pending comments". I'm not convinced that either solution is ideal, but I fear "pending comments" has the potential to silently strangle HN.
On the other hand, you might also see more people coming in the door. What if this makes conversation on HN so much better that more people want to get involved?
The one thing that is certain with the new system is that if your comments are abusive, they will probably not get endorsed. Perhaps at first they will (protesting 1k+ karma users) but eventually anyone who is endorsing poor quality comments would likely lose the ability to endorse.
At a minimum, I think this a really interesting experiment.
well, I'm going to voice my concerns and complain about it, but I'm not going to sabotage the system out of spite. that's childish.
> but eventually anyone who is endorsing poor quality comments would likely lose the ability to endorse.
If that happens it'll be because some invisible moderator has a different idea about "quality comments" than I do.
If it happens, I will lose the ability over endorsing puns.
# The original ones, at least.
I fail to see the problem with the current system / current comments; bad comments usually drown at the bottom of the page and that's that.
What would be the point of preventing noobs from commenting? What's with this love of aristocracy? "We were here first!!" So what? (I have 4k+ "karma" and my account is more than 2k days old but that does not make me special in any way, shape or form. If anything, it probably means I have already said all I ever had to say and should be shot in the head to make room for the young!! ;-)
But in this supposedly "democratic" system we're not given any choice so I guess we simply have to take it...
That being said, I think people are especially worried that if it's a bad change, it won't be reverted or tinkered with in a timely manner. HN has a (deserved, I think...) reputation for being unresponsive to user feedback.
This is one of the few cases where the worse a change is, the less of a voice you will have after it happens. I'm not saying it will be bad, but you can see why that would be frightening.
As I see it, trying something, even for an extended period while it totally fails, means that pg et all want to improve the level of commentary as they have seen it decline, and are taking steps to do what they can to improve it.
I don't think any community has gotten it right so far, and I am willing to surf it out, even if it means my ability to comment is curtailed a bit.
I was first attracted to HN not for the stories, though they are good, but for the extremely good commentary from people who know what they are talking about.
You can also delete the comment in a certain time period.
There were also some suggestions about restrictions of the single comment.
It does mean he can only participate in one discussion at a time, though, provided his comment isn't endorsed immediately.
for what it's worth, i hated the removal of the comment scores too and i'm still here.
Basically, it turns the system on its head; it's no longer "Bad posts will be removed," it's "Your posts will automatically be removed unless someone decides that they are good."
I'm actually really optimistic about this change; it will force people to be more civil if they actually want to participate. However, it will only work if lots of people are willing to put in the effort of endorsing quality posts.
I think it would be great to have some sort of "Beta HN" where whoever is taking over HN could try out all sorts of new features before they become adopted into the main HN site.
You even held a poll[0], the outcome of which was the majority didn't like it, but you left everything as it was anyway.
Edit: rabble rabble.
The system kind of gives me the feeling of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I think it'll be much tougher to get to that 1000 karma threshold which will make sub 1000 users less likely to comment if their comments aren't actually getting posted. 1000+ users may also get bored of having to endorse other peoples comments. From what it sounds like it could seem like a job.
One alternative could be to only allow 1000+ users to upvote and all other users can only downvote comments. That way you still get your idea of having top karma users pick what everyone else reads. In either case I'm a fan of the Reddit model for all users.
There are lots of ideas that I think are dumb that still manage to do well so it'll be interesting to see. The free market will decide soon enough.
The number of comments has been growing significantly; perhaps change won't be bad.
Reddit's approach is slightly more sophisticated and works well in practice. You generally see only quality comments, but you can read all of them if you want to. And you can contribute content without worrying that it may be delayed or outright rejected.
What I do find annoying is (as some have mentioned days/weeks ago)- the OP can delete his own post, even though there are many replies below. So now the other hackers have no idea what the rest of people are replying to.
So while I think there is a lot going for the idea, I think there will be a lot of good comments that won't ever be displayed so on balance I think HN will lose more than it gains.
Second law of the internet: nobody will remember in a week.
But then I thought that pending comments are somewhat analogous to the "new" page for submissions. And it sort of makes sense.
My ambivalence is that I don't upvote every comment that isn't bad, and I'm not sure I want to be responsible for moderating comments. And I certainly don't spend a lot of time wading through the new stories.
On the other hand, these days interesting threads are often swamped with several hundred comments in the first hour or two, and it seems like a lot of the comments are the same noise.
In the long run I suspect it will be a win.
How many of the comments on the page would you endorse?Those with greater than 1000 karma will now have more of a reason to upvote comments, whereas before, they might have mildly found a comment not awful but not upvoted it because there was no reason to.
We'll see what happens.
I am confident that with some refinements a good outcome will be reached.
The relative score is all that matters, and a comment's position on the page tells you all you need to know.
--comment A (1000 karma)
--comment B (2 karma)
--comment C (1 karma)
--comment A (1000 karma)
--comment B (999 karma)
--comment C (1 karma)
This way 'comments' filters out the noise yet HN still keeps all unflagged comments transparently available, avoiding accusations of censorship.
This is about good judgment, which cannot be enforced by rules.
I think that many people (myself included) would feel more relaxed about the change if there were a commitment that the system would be reverted quickly at the end of the trial period, if a majority of users (perhaps 2/3 of poll participants) decided that they preferred the old system.
It seems that some of the deeper concerns about this change are: 1. These types of changes often seem to be made unilaterally, without any idea of what a significant majority might prefer. 2. Changes like this often seem to be one-way changes.
FWIW I have showdead set to "Yes"; I want to see everything.
Unless they get more coverage and land on the front page.
Shame :(
Make the high karma approved comments be the core design feature of the commenting section, yet have some filter to view all if one desires.
edit: additionally, it sounds like they will continue to see all posts to Hacker News (since they will have to endorse the one they approve of) so I'm not sure what they stand to benefit from this change.
Luckily this is not the only tech/startup forum on the web.
edit: I saw [pending] pop up so I guess the trial is on
(That being said, my answer is "wait and see.")
The thing is, HN doesn't have a problem with rudeness or bad comments that existing voting can't solve (as far as I can see). But, I do think that HN has a problem with the amount of comments on popular submissions, and of a huge amount of comments which are nominally OK (i.e. not rude, not wrong, not trolling...) and therefore cannot in good conscience be downvoted, but whose information content is near 0. With low total amount of comments, this wouldn't be a problem because most of these kinds of comments are a consequence of there being a non-manageable amount of total comments for the speed at which content goes through HN---most people don't have the time to go through the whole lot and check what has been said/pointed out/asked, and that leads to a lot of redundancy. This is very exhausting to read through, and really is a problem of signal to noise ratio, but the "noise" on HN is not the stupid or the rude (those get blasted away quickly), it's just the well meaning, decent but redundant comment made because one has something to say but can't be bothered (rightfully so when there are 300+ comments already!) to check if it's been said already.
A recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7427542 This was just horrible! Comment after comment telling him the exact same thing (change your CV) with almost the exact same specific advices. I went through the whole thing because I was interested and wanted to see what people have to say about this, but I was completely exhausted at the end because there was so much redundancy.
Why do I think pg's plan with pending comments would improve this? The first order effect would probably be a dramatic decrease in number of comments. The second order effect would then be that it's much, much easier to go through the whole thing and see if there's any new information you can contribute to the topic, which, if we are sane people, will lead to a dramatic decrease in noise (redundancy) (I say "if we are sane" because I take it that a sane person won't repeat already stated ideas just for the sake of repeating).
This is why I'm currently strongly in favour of the way the idea was presented originally with some tweaks that have been mentioned in the original thread yesterday. I see now that it's off by default and only per item tree, thus only serving as a weapon against rudeness and flame wars. As I don't think HN has that problem so I don't see the point of the whole thing as it stands now. I would much rather if the original form was given a chance with the mentioned fixes and attentive parameter tweaking.
As for fears of "echo chambers" and such, I don't see that currently on HN and I'm willing to give people here the benefit of the doubt that they would in aggregate do the right thing. If, on the other hand the community is so bad to end up using this as a tool for censorship then I don't think it would be a shame to have it fall apart anyway. So I don't think there's anything to lose. Useful back and forth discussions would still be able to go on with parameters reasonably tuned.
Also, I notice that a lot of people mistakenly think that 1000+ karma means your posts get auto-approved. But that's not the case, it requires 10k+ karma! Realistically, most people will never reach that even with the system as it is now, so that's completely irrelevant. Users with 1000+ karma would not be in any particular commenting advantage if the proposed change went through.