Pending Comments
news.ycombinator.com
news.ycombinator.com
You can read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
Now the problem with this new system is this: for unpopular links or articles, they'll never come to the front page, and thus very few 1000 karma people will see those. And thus, those comments might never become 'live' and visible to others, not creating any discussion at all, even further causing it to never become popular, because only conversation attracts more conversation.
Personally I'm on the fence. Occasionally I get a chuckle out of some of the flippant one liners and rarely see anything that really bothers me. I only read maybe 10% of the threads though.
I chose not to comment since I didn't feel like I add value to the discussions. That may not be the same a year or 5 years or a decade down the line when I think HN will still be relevant and I will be more wiser to say something. Learning is forever and I would feel very sad if somehow my commenting in the future is buried because I did not have enough karma. Atleast, that's my take on it.
But I don't feel disincentivized to comment - if anything I may try to find ways to contribute more valuable comments. I'd wager that the chances of a good comment being read will be higher, not lower. And either way, c'est la vie. HN is provided for free, and it's tremendous. It'll be a learning experience to observe the experiment.
If anything, I expect it to be too easy to get your comments endorsed, just like it's too easy to get dumb comments upvoted right now.
Sometimes interesting things may come out of silly ones. Or maybe not. If we assume a conversation is also (not only) as a creative process, then mistakes and silliness are simply part of the process to get to something interesting.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating the "far west" attitude; I just think that the up/down voting works enough for the purpose.
Introducing an extra layer is going to push people to behave in a certain way (that somebody define, in an extreme way, groupthinking), which may make things more interesting in a certain way, but far less interesting in another.
There was a certain experiment on a certain site where they switched to Facebook comments, and they found that trolling comments were drastically reduced, but the posts started to look to nice and compliant.
Also, very important, the new system replaces a democracy with (more or less) an aristocracy, and I some doubts about this.
It feels like I'm the outsider at high school all over again and I'm scared the cool kids will notice me and tell me to get lost.
It's odd because HN inspired me to make lots of passive income projects that now make enough money for our family of 4 to live off of. I even got Angel funding by winning a hackathon for another company I'm building now.
I fit the criteria to be one of the HN crowd on paper, but I don't think I'll ever feel like I belong. A comment queue seems like it'll move HN even further into that judgmental direction.
A much more accurate portrayal is everyone second guessing whether or not their comment will please the HN group-think. People don't filter themselves when they think their idea is stupid, they filter themselves when they think their idea will be unpopular.
I think in practice that 'popular comment = good comment' works well enough that it seems to beat all competing systems for internet commenting so there must be some kind of truth in the statement. Maybe it has a low enough false positive rate to make a small false negative rate acceptable?
I don't worry so much about being up voted or down voted (but I dig getting karma points as I know I'm giving someone else some value). I do however care about end up in a disagreement with someone else that turns into a superiority match. I personally don't want to be that person.
But perhaps this is the problem of moderating comments on a binary scale of "good" and "bad".
A comment judgement/rating system that is more nuanced will not only help the readers to choose from but also help the commenting user to understand why his comments are being downvoted. Examples of nuanced downvote reasons may include:
Possibly ... 1. Non-sequitur 2. Racist/Bigotted/Sexist 3. Gratuitous Profanity ... etc
If we really want to get clinical about this, we can simply use this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
This of course is only for the downvote.
I personally would be interested in seeing whether, over time, my comments (and therefore my thinking) have been victim to certain patterns of thinking that I haven't noticed in myself.
> If we really want to get clinical about this, we can simply use this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
That struck me as somewhat non-parallel. Racism, sexism, bigotry, and profanity aren't fallacies.
Your approach is sound and honorable, but please do not silence yourself out of fear. By doing so you encourage a groupthink behavior on this forum.
Even though the content of the submissions of this site brings me back day after day, to pretend the comment section provides any reasonable environment for meaningful discourse is laughable. Why the suppression of certain view points and people via shadow bans is acceptable to most people is something I've never quite grasped.
It's certainly true that has downsides, but everything has.
It has at least one interesing upside though: one can learn to formulate opinions in a thoughtful, informed, and overall solid way. This is extremely valuable, and very importantly, it's entirely up to the user.
Groupthink is omnipresent; you just can't avoid it. But I've personally noticed one thing; most of the times, opinions which are against the establishment are respected and in best case admired, if they are solid and carry interesting/unexpected/creative information. I'm not talking about HN here.
So one can perfectly thrive here (and don't get me wrong, I don't endorse craving for upvotes) while still being non-conformant to the groupthink, everywhere. I'm pretty much "anti-technology" in some perspectives, but my account still survives pretty well, and so can yours.
But I also say comment away. Just try to be positive and constructive.
I say a lot here and I try to be insightful. Just as many of my comments are never voted on as are voted up. I only have a tiny handful of comments with 0 or negative score, and most of those were on the snider side of the spectrum. I try not to do that in the first place, but everyone makes mistakes.
On the other hand, I'm sometimes surprised how many upvotes I've gotten on comments that I thought might contradict HN groupthink.
I think the existing system works fine. I worry that the commentary is about to actually decrease in value and timeliness.
Your optimism shadows an extremely difficult reality.
Your comments have evidently not been disabled!
I've learnt that comments with 'meat' are valued and comments that have _positive_ things to say are valued. Negative comments and glib comments are downvoted here. Even if the negative comments have a point they are downvoted.
Don't feel like an outsider, if you have something to say, say it. For instance, this post of yours was articulate and informative. I'm not sure I'm in a position to agree with your last statement, I'd say we should have a trial run and have some sort of feedback mechanism up to and including abandoning the scheme if there's enough consensus.
If spending five or ten minutes to compose a comment is too much of an investment maybe HN is not the best place for the user.
Regularly I've posted comments that take as much as an hour to write. This is because I take the time to find sources to back up and support my position, and then I write my comment. After that, I reread what I wrote and edit the comment so that it is grammatically correct and factually sound. Finally, I reread it once more and really consider if I'm contributing to the discussion.
I've never really focused on karma. I've never tried to game the system. Because of this discussion I checked where I stand and I only have 132 points but with almost a 2 average. I think that supports my claim that I make thoughtful posts, but I don't know what the site average is.
I hope that this system doesn't backfire for me and for other similar contributors.
Well over a decade ago, I was a regular reader of /. and I find that HN is reminiscent of those earlier days. After adding moderating and meta-moderating, the quality of /. suffered. I'm sure it wasn't moderation that actually brought about those problems and it had more to do with reaching a broader audience, but still it is unnerving to see my favorite forums gradually follow the same trajectories time and time again.
That doesn't happen on most threads, but it does happen on some, and pending comments may help fix the problem. I'm not sure it will. The moderator will have to experiment to see what works. But since the code was slightly complicated I wanted at least to get the initial version done before I left.
Does this mean that they are not enabled by default?
I was concerned with the idea of site-wide pending comments, as it could have a chilling effect on controversial ideas, and water down discussions. Or, worse, eliminate comments past the front page, as no one would want to risk being blocked from further commenting.
You could alleviate the problem by allowing people to delete pending comments, but it's like asking people to sacrifice their own creations. It would make me think twice before spending time to comment next time.
Having this disabled by default, and enabling only on particularly controversial threads (that tend to bring the majority of low-quality comments) solves most of these problems.
I think this is the best approach. A good balance between negative flagging, and positive endorsement.
There are certain categories of comment, in particular, that lend themselves to mischaracterization when viewed out of context. Humor, for instance. Sarcasm. Subtle parody. Tongue in cheek. Ideally you want more from a comment than just a snarky one liner. But sometimes a well-placed quip adds perspective and value to a conversation. (Most of the time, it probably doesn't. But you don't want to implement a system that filters all of it.)
I was actually worried on finding all about pending comment changes this morning; they seemed like quite meaningful changes that would have all but eliminated a lot of the ways I interact with Hacker News. It seems this was planned to be 'per thread' to begin with, which makes it a very appropriate moderation tool, so my worry was for naught.
Thanks for all, and hope leaving is for the best. I have never been involved with Y Combinator, but appreciate your writing, and the community. I hope you continue writing.
According to the dictionary [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/endorse] endorsement implies agreement (so at first sight it would be equivalent to the upvote button), but it was said in another thread that you can endorse something without agreeing with it. Have you considered other names for the button?
Instead of pro-active moderation by a crowd, we have reactive moderation by a few. I doubt it will have much positive impact at this point.
I'm also disappointed in the way most posters have reacted to this change, waving their arms around as if the world is going to end. Here, even in this subthread people are saying it would have ended the way they used HN. It would have done no such thing.
I know I shouldn't be surprised at how badly people react to the smallest changes, but I did think this group might be different.
Still, I'm going to keep this very conservative reaction from HN in mind next time someone is saying an industry who had their entire business model disrupted should just "deal with it".
There's also depressingly little faith in our fellow HNers to be able to moderate fairly. And that really is sad.
Then don't you think it would have been a bit useless? "Normal use" does tend to include wrong comment.
(Which have their utility, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law )
@PG: Thanks for the change.
How many moderators are on HN? It seems to me that unless the vast majority of threads are patrolled fairly quickly it will allow the same behavior, while stopping only a few comments from existing for the general public.
To me this seems like just an expansion of the downvote option, but giving a few an even bigger weight to swing. Maybe its just an intermediary place between a downvote and a hellban, but I don't know that it is needed.
But, of course, that does not work. Noise is helpful. It's still signal. I can construct more information from a noisy signal than an overly filtered one.
Back to forums, I was a participant in several for a different niche area. One was obsessed with post 'quality' - a horde of moderators swarming around, then after awhile they'd comb through every thread, deleting every comment they found not worthy so they would have some kind of pristine archive, and so on.
They utterly failed. Oh, they are still trundling along. But the sites with the industry leaders posting? Those are the ones with far less concern with 'quality'. Why would an expert spend time crafting an answer to somebody when it is likely or possible that it will either not get approved to show up, or later deleted? It made no sense to them, they vocally complained, were again and again told this was for the greater good, and so they all left. Now, if you want to talk to an expert, you go to one of the other forums; if you want to talk to a complete amateur, but with never a post off topic, well, you go to the controlled one. You'll get terrible advice, or no advice at all, but hey, it's civil and on topic.
I've concluded nothing about HN yet, but I don't forsee myself clicking away, endorsing post after post. This is mostly a 'consume' site for me, and occasionally, post. I don't want to spend my time endorsing and clicking away. I'll upvote once in a while, and almost never downvote. I can't see that changing much. I can't see posting anymore; I am giving you value (or trying to), and you hold it hostage. Ya, okay, if that is how you feel, I'll go elsewhere. I recognize that sounds petulant, but back to the site in the first paragraph - a lot of people stopped posting because so much did not survive the great purges that went on. Why go to this effort if others will silence you?
Noise is not the enemy of quality. It is not the enemy of value. It's a wonderful side effect of free thinking, innovative thinking, of creation, of invention. It's messy, it's beautiful. I love noise for what it represents. Long live noise.
TL;DR you really reduce your chance of finding diamonds if you don't let some dirt through too.
This.
The type of comment you're talking about ("This.") feels like an invented boogeyman used to justify overly harsh censorship by the Party (the HN karma elite).
I'm not saying HN is perfect as it is now - it's not - but personally, I feel the a greater problem lies with the quality of submissions rather than the quality of comments. Frankly, I'd rather see Pending Submissions instead of Pending Comments.
Also please note that the earlier system had upvotes/downvotes for comments. Through votes the community can decide the type of contribution it deems valid.
Visible scores worked far better for me.
Notice my argument was not for anarchy. Back to signal processing for a moment, I used 'noise' loosely. Signals of interest have noise and signal interspersed. It is often trivial to filter out pure noise, such as white noise. In forums, our white noise is 'this' comments, and we trivially filter those out with downvoting, and I suspect it is not particularly hard to write some lisp code to require endorsement for, say, one word or one sentence replies, and prevent the 'post' button from working if the text is 'this' in any variant.
But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal. Sure, there may be snarkiness there, or not the most civil tone, but we have doing a good job of handling that on a personal level - in the form of replies such as "RogerL, your post, while interesting, is a bit negative. We strive for better here". I see that all the time (well, not addressed to me, but you know what I mean). That is wonderful. Regardless, there is still a lot of signal there. I have my settings set so that I can see hellbanned people. They are all posting things of value, even the one person with the religious content occasionally posts something worth reading.
It is true that there will be no set group of moderators. I don't see how that changes the fundamental equation, but it might. As I said, I haven't formed any solid conclusion, but my gut reaction is that I don't think I feel like participating in endorsement.
If we have a quality problem, it is one of submissions, of bad titles, not of 'this' comments.
There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote. In order for this to work, you need a (1) mechanism for the an individual to tell the community that a particular story or comment is worth it to the community (we have this, but it's partially broken on stories since you can't downvote, only flag) and (2) you need a community that is motivated to protect the community.
The problem I see is number 2. The community is now full of people who don't want the community to succeed - they want themselves to succeed. Are there people who want to see the community as a whole progress, sure. But as the community grows it means more people trying to climb the ladder (karma) and gain more influence. Influence is powerful here, we can't simply pretend it doesn't exist.
> But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal.
It depends on what you're measuring. A paragraph of time doesn't mean the post isn't any higher value to someone. If I'm at a rock festival and the stage that Nickelback are on is louder than the one that Rolling stone is at, it doesn't mean I necessarily want to hear Nickelback. IMO, without curators, it's pretty much impossible for human beings to even discern their own signal-to-noise ratios. Maybe I might hear that one Nickelback song and fall in love, I don't know?
EDIT: grammar
There are actually three. Upvotes, downvotes and moderation. The moderators seem to be very active on HN. Turn on the "Show Dead" option on your account and you'll see a half dozen people every day that post comments, blissfully unaware that nobody is ever seeing them. Many of them are actually insightful comments, but because they posted something that rubbed someone the wrong way at some point in the past, they're hellbanned for eternity.
This particular account of mine is about a year old, has almost 4,000 comment karma and it seems to have been slowbanned a few months ago. I have no idea what I might have done to get a slowban and honestly just suffer through the 10-12 second page loads when I'm logged in. If I'm not logged in, I get subsecond page load times. If I'm logged in with an alternate account, I get the same subsecond page load times. It's only when I'm logged in with this particular ID that I get 10-12 second page load times.
From what I can see, moderation is the far bigger influence of identifying signals on HN than up/down voting.
Some comments of this form are very useful.
I've been a reader of HN for a long time. I am not am industry thought leader. I'm one of the nameless horde of programmers that have been integral and famous at companies you've never heard of. I've had an account for over 2200 days, but have less than 250 karma. You know why? I only comment when I have something to say that I think is pertinent. When I do comment, I spend 5-10 minutes getting my wording good enough that I won't waste anyone's time.
I will watch how this plays out, but I suspect this will be my final HN comment. This change confirms that PG does not want people like me participating in his forum. I hope I'm proved wrong; HN had been my main RSS feed for like 5 years. There's always lobste.rs
Might be a better idea to test the system and see how it affects your posts in actuality instead of relying on anecdotes from others though. Just a thought.
Forget about making unpopular viewpoints, no matter politeness or evidence; they're not getting past the pending comments filter.
Look, it's just a little change. It's not the end of the world. The impact is likely to be minimal, with only the very worst comments remaining unendorsed.
Give it some time before you write up essays about why it's a bad idea.
Accept a little disruption.
That said, I'm modestly optimistic for the "pending" policy.
It's that same ethos that makes it counterintuitive to heavily moderate such a community. It's a little ironic that it's a problem that the "the rebels are being disorderly".
Or perhaps the irony is that such a community actually does require moderation.
One thing I noticed while it was turned on was that the comments were actually pretty good. It may be that bad comments tend to be concentrated on particular threads, and that the right way to implement pending comments is per-thread rather than site-wide. That was actually the original plan, but it was simpler to implement site-wide, and I usually try to do the simplest thing first, in case it works.
if post.created > 10 hours {
comments.pending(false);
}
So what about this? Here comments is a vector of all the scores of comments inside one particular thread.
----
(defn filter? [comments threshold]
(let [size (count comments)]
(if (< threshold (/ (reduce + comments) size)) false
true)))
;;false
;;user=> (filter? [1 2 3 4] 3)
;;true
This could/should probably be a/b tested (eg: on/off on odd/even numbered submissions or whatnot).
Sage advise for every developer and the fervent wish of every system admin. Goodnight sir.
As support, I would ask them "Please don't do that. You don't watch to make sure it works okay"
They would respond 'It's okay, because we'll be back online at 8am'.
"Yes, but our primary customers are farmers, who check our SaaS at 6am to plan their day. It's the point of our software."
'It's okay, because we'll be back online at 8am'
"I don't think you understand how this works..."
When is the best time to push new changes to production based on probability they will fall over, usage patterns and day of the week.
I'm relatively lucky as the stuff I do is mostly for businesses so the (obvious to me) push point is 8am Saturday morning, that gives me two days to sort out any problems and there is always some low level usage.
Pending what? Approval? By whom? Sounds scary. Perhaps I missed the tps report. If so, sorry. But as an outsider who spends a lot of time here (work; analogue; fortuitous), I can't wait to have the comments here that I've come to love be editorialized by some cabal of power users.
Simple indeed.
Maybe that's the problem? That is, maybe bad comments are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, like the weather; everyone talks about them but nobody bothers to downvote them to unreadable greyness.
(either that, or there are voting rings that devote themselves to upvoting greyed-out comments).
• Parameters are loose (click link for more) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447668
• You can post 5 pending comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447568
• You can endorse at 500 karma https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447701
• Might make it more AJAXy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447778
• Users can retract pending comments with the delete link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446490
• The HN feature suggestion thread is exempt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446395
• A code snippet showing how it works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446596
• in this thread: "turning it off for now"
Here's why: It says that you can't post another comment when you have a comment pending. Let's assume that:
a) Most "good" contributors write comments of varying quality (maybe on average 90% good 10% not so good)
b) Most people, when they interrupt their work flow to participate in the HN community, write on average more than one comment (if they comment at all).
So inevitably, the average user will repeatedly bump into the "can't comment, have to wait" wall. Which is inconvenient and constitutes a blunt reminder of the "value asymmetry" between the site and the lowly user.
I'd say it is fairly reasonable to assume that being stopped and having to wait is rather off-putting to most HN users. So it hangs on how many repetitions of the wait cycle the average HN user can stand.
There are enough 1k+ karma posters that, at least unless the karma bar is either raised or a lot of malcontents are culled, consensus on controversial topics is likely to be impossible. At least I hope so.
Well _of course_ consensus on controversial topics is impossible. That's kind of what makes them controversial topics. But how is that related to whether you never even see controversial posts because group-think has not resulted in uncensoring them?
If that's group think, then awesome. Let the group think begin.
I can recall a number of occasions where somebody told me something important and they might as well have started out with "Look, asshole". Deservedly so, because I was not just wrong but wrong in a way that was conveniently self-serving and harmful to them.
I would also like to see the dickishness taken down a notch or three here. But if it comes at the cost of making this more of an echo chamber, then it will be a Pyrrhic victory.
The people running this site have asked that this not be one of them.
I say this as a person who appreciates and uses sarcasm more than most... people can communicate just fine, often more effectively, without it.
Plus, it's more than just how something is said. If you read PG's short request, he's looking for a change in attitude in how points are even argued. Argue as colleagues coming to a solution together, not as adversaries trying to take each other down.
However, you've created a false dichotomy; there are things in the world that are neither abusive nor particularly collegial.
The concern is that in getting rid of the abuse, Hacker News will also get rid of uncomfortable truth.
Like I said, I'm sarcastic - but I definitely have seen HN go downhill since I've been here over the last couple of years. I look at the need to say things more constructively as a learning and growth opportunity.
The policy doesn't have to say that people shouldn't endorse uncomfortable truths for it to have that result. That people will misuse power to keep comfortable is something that you shouldn't have to have explained to you.
I'm not personally worried. I'm seen as an insider. As Louis CK says, "How many advantages can one person have?" [1]
But people who aren't part of the HN tribe already think they're treated unfairly here, and from what I read on Twitter, they're confident that this change will only increase the level of groupthink by making sure their comments never get even seen.
Personally, I think that comments that incite and inflame are often useful. I agree that there's plenty of pure dickishness here, and I'd love to see that go. But sometimes comments are upsetting because they contain uncomfortable truth. Sometimes we skate on by the polite statement when a passionate outburst will force to see things through someone else's eyes.
One of the nice things about HN is that users are rather blunt in their critiques. I think the gatekeepers (>1k karma) will generaly do a good job separating frankness from hostility.
At any rate, it's an interesting experiment and I'm truly curious to see how it plays out.
Personally I like the idea of pending comments.
If this becomes reality, I see a future where we have no bad comments, a lot of decent/good comments from the same people and therefore turning into an elitist society (more-so than it already sort-of is). I feel this will push new users away, and therefore slow our knowledge diversification.
I'm afraid that current change will increase mono-culture.
The potential issue I see is that this feature adds a layer of complication and indirection to solve a cultural problem.
There are two classes of low-grade comments: the "normal" ones which quickly sink to the bottom because they're downvoted into oblivion, and the "crafty" ones that get a lot of upvotes even though they're cheap, inflammatory, personal, repetitive, or just generally trollish (like for example the maneuver where someone posts a reply disagreeing with an imaginary point that was never made in the parent).
The existing voting system is pretty good at filtering out the normal trash, but it fails to address the crafty pieces - so I assume the Pending Feature is designed to address those. I'm not sure it can though, because the crafty trolls seem to have a lot of fans and the same people who upvote these things today are just going to endorse them in the future.
Sorry for spit-balling from the cheap seats, I'm actually excited to find out how the new system works in practice. It intuitively it feels like a layer of complexity with dubious benefits, but that said: addressing the underlying problem is a worthy cause.
Details in my comment on "Coming Soon...": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449597
As a long time lurker and reader of HN I really hope that you reconsider this change. I made an account just to explain why I dread the impact of this change on the quality, openness, and character of discourse at HN.
Put bluntly this change inspires a visceral feeling of loss and disappointment in me. I have viewed HN as a community where anyone can participate fully if they have something useful to say. This change feels like it will destroy this character of HN and turn it into a system where elites will have all the knowledge of a discussion and the rest of us will not. They will be able to incorporate ideas into their own posts before others can and can choose which ideas get general airtime. Particularly in low traffic stories this feels unjust and noninclusive.
I really enjoy reading the comment threads at HN and some of the best comments come as replies to comments that are unlikely to get endorsed in this system. This is because this system contains powerful disincentives for approving anything other than comments that will universally be viewed as high quality. If you approve enough comments that are viewed as low quality by moderators you will lose your ability to even view non approved comments and therefore your ability as an elite to fully participate in discourse at HN.
When this goes live hopefully people will be very very liberal with approving comments and people will do the public service of approving most comments in a pending global queue quickly. For me it will be very sad that I cannot read the lone, often very informative, comment to a story that will never make it to the front page but that nonetheless I and other lurkers want to see any response at all to the story. I am willing to read the trolls if I am allowed to read those who will be neglected by +1000 karma users.
It's similar to Cunningham's Law – "the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is ... to post the wrong answer."
So by banishing all "bad" comments to the forever-pending state, perhaps this won't encourage the "better" commenters to come out of the woodwork to correct him/her.
But in my opinion, this is going to kill a lot of real-time commentary on posts that are only moderately popular, and it will kill discussion on scrolled-off posts almost completely, for obvious reasons.
I think pg is overestimating the number of >1000 karma users who are actively available to moderate and interested in moderating at any given time. This number needs to be fairly sizable for this system to work. I doubt it's very sizable at all.
I feel bad that comments posted just to say they agree with someone/something cannot/will not be seen. This type of 'noise', as long as it is sprinkled lightly throughout, isn't so bad, in my opinion. I mean, I understand HN is meant to reward thoughtful comments, but at what point does this concept go into Less Wrong-type of ridiculousness? I'm totally not trolling, but we're only human. To deconstruct all aspects of a community/forum to only allow strict logical/cerebral behaviour seems like a community I would rather not be a part of.
In the end, I'll probably not endorse any comments, or at least extremely little, because I don't know if I agree with the concept and would rather not get involved.
I'm probably in the minority here, though.
Unfortunately, most of my comments of this nature are replies to unpopular comments. I feel no need to tell someone I like their work if everyone else is already doing the same. However, this system may make comments designed to be read by only one other person a thing of the past.
If you have something to say, even something fairly light, I expect it will still get unpended.
I hope discussions become more drawn out, less intense, & more thoughtful; Instead of an intense period of commenting on the popular articles.
If some discussions are drawn out, then there would be less redundancy of comments, since people would have more time to view the entire conversation. Also, it would lessen incentive for quick, "kneejerk" comments to get the largest audience (thus karma).
Either there are just not many comments, or people are actively moderating. Or some combo.
The thing is to see how that page looks in the next few days and weeks.
edit: Also surprised that this comment skipped the pending page.
Real time discussion is overrated. I would rather prefer people think and research before commenting. That said, this could rapidly get out of hand if the pending queue gets too big.
The pending comments page has another problem in that it is quite context free. You only see the comment, not the context the comment is in (at least when I visited the page earlier).
EDIT: The [pending] comment within a thread is poorly formatted. Maybe a different style?
I left Reddit because it became more interested in policing rather than discourse, and I am so fudging blown that HN is devolving into the same priordial soup of authority that is more concerned with making sure that every submission has a pristine set of comments rather than a potentially controversial battery of back-and-forth argumentation.
Instead, why not allow anyone with +500 comment karma the authority to flag a post and if 3+ users flagged the same post it would die? It would be visible at inception but as time went on, if it was shitty it would get killed... Sure some folks would see shitty posts, but that's ok! Who cares? Its nbd, I see shit all day via the internet and I dont stop browsing! That way normal people could still influence the future of discussions while not deliberating precluding newbs posting just out of a silly fear of low-quality content...
Am I crazy or is what I'm saying make sense to the masses?
It also runs the risk that things will only get endorsed if they agree with commonly-held views, and I'll also be interested to see how it effects things like whoishiring.
Some sort of moderation is fine, but I think that in its current implementation, this is a rather ham-fisted approach which will have a detrimental effect on HN.
Imagine an oldguy commenter with 2400 karma is in a discussion with a newb. He could be prowling the pending comments and could simply flag a newbreply just because he disagrees, thereby artificially making it look like he has "won" an argument even though he has just forced a newbreply into oblivion, despite whatever logical argumentation newb has employed in his reply.
This is bad. :(
The new person has posted, the higher karma one has seen it and chosen not to reply thus ending the conversation. If there is really no other attention then nothing has changed from the older person seeing the reply and ignoring it.
If there are multiple people in the discussion then it is very likely more than one will pass the threshold to vote. If there isn't then nothing of value is lost as you still get to make your comment to the other side, you still get your last word in, it is just not public and the conversation will die immediately. Much how it is now if the other side doesn't reply to you.
I left /. because the story quality slid. I don't find the moderation there to be any more aggressive than here - 'cept here it's passive aggressive, you can just get hidden without being given a warning or any indication here. At least it seems to be distributed and open to meta-moderation whilst here it seems there's a hidden cabal of moderators who get to act independently [that may not be the case, that's the perception].
Slashdot devolved into irrelevant memes by their moderation point system. Every Subreddit eventually becomes an echo chamber. Only on hacker news can you find very divergent opinions expressed side by side without banning, censoring, downvoting or trolling. I'm not saying that pending comments will destroy that, but I already while writing this comment I'm worried about being liked by the big guys. New people with valid opinions who might not know how to appeal to the site's group-think will have a bad time. People with poor language skills will have a bad time. And of course, jokes will have a bad time, and too much seriousness can just as surely dry up a forum as too much frivolity.
I personally thought the satoshi identity thing was mainstream bullshit.
My assumption was that people in power have a lot of incentive to find out who he is, and would have done so were it possible.
The only time it makes sense to comment is when you think you can avoid downvotes and flags.
I think it's pretty bad that I have to prefix my argument with that. The outcome of this change will be to alienate new users or get them to suck up to older users long enough to boost their karma beyond noob-level. HN will become much more of an echo chamber.
Beyond that, are HN comments really that bad? There may be a few people who just know that HN is turning into Reddit. If you believe that, go read a few comments on Reddit and then read a few comments on HN.
I really like this way of doing it; it starts off with the default HN and then makes the filter more and more selective.
I know a lot of people are worried that this will break HN socially. I frankly am relieved it didn't break HN literally. The new code touches so many things. I'm amazed it works. But if it does seem to be breaking HN socially, we'll tweak it till it doesn't, and if that's impossible, we'll turn it off. I'm not wedded to having pending comments. I just wanted to try it to see if it can eliminate the very worst comments.
A simple HTML5 media query (CSS) that increase the font-size, add some space around the links (above the comments) and make the page content (table width) 100%. Thanks.
However In my case I have 6XX karma which was earned by people up-voting thoughtful comments over several years on HN.
Point being, not all karma is the same and I'm not sure we're going to get higher quality commentary with this new system. I actually think it's going to make users chase karma and try to game the system.
Chasing karma means you're actively participating and gaining the positive attention of your peers.
Gaming the system would mean that you're somehow gaining karma without participating or without making positive contributions. I'm not sure how link baiting will work, unless you mean that people will go out of their way to be the first person to post a URL. That may become the best way to get karma, but it's also a positive for HN because relevant links will be getting posted immediately. Therefore you wouldn't technically be gaming the system.
I appreciate your commenting and believe that we're on similar tracks (I've been around for about a year and have about 250 karma), but maybe this feature is a signal that we could be doing a better job.
* pg, please move the "endorse" and "flag" links further apart? Upvoting on mobile devices is already a risky proposition (easy to accidentally downvote instead) unless I zoom the upvote arrow to ridiculous size. Now the same problem applies to /pending.
* /pending is moving pretty quickly right now, and I've seen at least one unhelpful comment get endorsed. Hopefully this will reduce as the novelty wears off (or the karma threshold to endorse increases).
* agree with georgemcbay that it's tricky to judge the quality/appropriateness of a comment out of context.
I don't see myself or many of the others with 1000+ karma as the kind of people that would enjoy acting as HN police, and it seems like it will introduce internet politics to a community that has managed to avoid it. The net effect of this, IMO, will be that very few comments get endorsed and the quality and breadth of discussion will diminish.
Finally, while we are talking about new ideas, I would love it if HN would track and display not only the net points a comment receives, but also the actual number of upvotes/downvotes. A controversial comment may have 1 net point, but may also have had 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes. Being able to see if a comment I posted was really interesting to people but opinion was divided, or that no one voted and thus the comment simply wasn't that interesting to others, would be be great.
What I would like would be to have a tagging system on comment threads, so that I could filter out comment threads with rough edges if I didn't like them, or threads with endless back and forth nitpicking, or threads that have been covered endlessly before. Something like the old slashdot "Informative" or "Funny" system. Then the ones that wanted could troll and flame away to their hearts content, without disrupting the general discussion of a topic. The "no censorship" crows could turn off filtering alltogether and get HN exactly as it is today.
I think a tagging system is a fantastic idea, especially if users can assign different weights to different tags for sorting and filtering purposes. I haven't seen a discussion system, apart from Slashdot's very limited implementation, that allows comment tagging, and a broader implementation might be wildly successful. You could have a voting mechanic that assigns a score to the comment, then allow users to assign different coefficient values to each qualitative modifier to build their own view. No need to limit it to a small set of predefined tags, either; users could define their own tags a la Delicious.
The sites that attempt to overstructure and gamify discussion to excess end up suppressing the capacity for emergent conversation and undermining the development of coherent community. I almost never visit StackExchange sites anymore, because interacting with their convoluted discussion mechanics is too much of a chore to be worth the constrained, limited payoff. I really hope HN doesn't go that route, because there's really not much else like it on the internet.
By attempting to heavy-handedly shoehorn discussion into a very narrow Q&A paradigm, SE drastically limits the kind of open-ended discourse that makes online communities worth participating in.
And the reality is that I can find answers to specific, objective questions just as easily on Reddit or the myriad topic-specific discussion forums across the web, without having to jump through hoops to do it.
- upvote and take the risk that other cliques will tag that as not worthy of an upvote, punishing both the commenter and yourself, possibly even pushing you back into the powerless silent majority.
- don't upvote: don't take risks, only grind up hoping others will take risks for you.
Sounds like it kills most discussions and only radical threads between cliques will remain :(
So given that will probably be my last comment here if that change remain, what other sites would you guys suggest as HN alternatives?
Would Pending Comments have hidden that post from me? (I am assuming not many other people saw or cared about my thread) If so, then this policy seems like a big step towards focusing discussion to only what is on the front page.
If you look in this thread, the original thread, or the latest poll you see a different attitude. It's not viewed as an experiment where reality will be the judge at all. Instead the comments basically boils down to "This is good." or "This is bad.", plus a few technical questions.
How come so few people think of it in terms of an experiment? Isn't this the supposed standard m.o. for startups as well as for coding?
Is it just that people who have the wait-and-see attitude don't comment, so all we hear about is from the vocal crowd? (This was the case for me before writing this post.) Is it some form of domain dependence going on here? I find this to be a very curious pattern.
I feel like you're unfairly giving pg the benefit of the doubt and placing the blame on the people against this idea. When you tell people this is the way things are going to be, it's reasonable for them to get upset by that.
Seeing as 19 hours ago* he apparently hadn't thought of the blindingly obvious problem that an un-endorsed comment was equivalent to a ban maybe he hadn't actually thought a lot about it.
The reason not to move fast and break things is that reality does not come with source control; destroyed communities do not tend to recover.
And even so, a single commentor that only has 3 comments might make valuable comments when they pipe up, but the 2000-commentor is more a part of the community simply for having more frequent conversations.
You say you have a low average and therefore aren't as valuable a community member, but I recognise your handle and have a general idea of the flavour of your previous comments. In business parlance, you have 'brand recognition' :). If some wunderkind blows in tomorrow and posts a couple of popular posts (popular gets the votes, not insightfulness) and afterwards departs or lurks forever, I'm not going to remember them or their 'flavour', despite the high average. They might have made an interesting observation, but they wouldn't be as strong a part of the community as yourself.
Besides, getting back to context, who would I trust more when it comes to this 'endorsement' process, silly as it is? Someone who breezes in and out and mostly lurks, or someone for whom talking on the site is a frequent occurence and who knows the ins-and-outs of it? A lurker is an unknown quantity, but for someone to hit [number] karma, they generally have to have chatted or posted a bit (a few exceptions, sure).
For example, if language X has had a new release with a bunch of features and someone posts the announcement to HN, language X users will typically form the majority of the comment pool.
Now, when someone comes along that feels differently about language X and the direction it's going in, foundation, etc., naturally the dissenting opinion will be suppressed as pro language X users will be incentivized to not promote the comment, no matter how constructive the comment is, and the dissenter will therefore need to rely on members of the minority (dissenters) to come to the rescue, so to speak, in order for the comment to go live.
I prefer to see the _whole_ picture, if something comes up on HN it's important to see the pros and cons, not just the pros of the pro-X-posting crowd (i.e. clique affect).
Gut reaction is thumbs down, comment quality on HN is generally quite good, but PG must have seen a need (or had an itch) to implement pending comments.
We'll see how it plays out
p.s. seems a little heavy handed for the under 1000 karma crowd, which must quite large...
Ward invented the wiki itself, and years later invented the Federated Wiki to allow unlimited truth forks, so that Wikipedia would not require expunging any viewpoint. In other words, all "truth tree" branches remain valid. Branchs may be sorted by up/down voting, but they may not be struck by editors.
To me a better HN would allow a multitude of HN's (think colors) ... where anyone applying time/effort could edit an HN truth fork. Thereby, people might say, which color of HN do you read? "My favorite is green", might be a typical reply.
My sense is that PG thinks of HN as top down authority driven, and therefore refuses to open HN to public editorship, even though there's a way to do it and truly improve comment quality, rather than just adding this new layer of winner take all.
More deeply, I believe PG has tired of building HN, and is looking for an honest way out. To me, that means abandoning the 4th-5th most important startup in YC history (up there with Airbnb in importance), and the all too familiar slow degradation of startup quality as they get bigger.
I have always felt that YC is a dictatorship, and that "peak HN" and "peak YC" have already occurred. Accordingly, an open approach to HN, where public editors might flourish was never likely.
Two links on Ward Cunningham's ideas -
TED Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdwLczSgvcc
Wired article: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/wiki-inventor/
The brain plays tricks on you and makes you believe that your perception/ideas are "good", while those opposing you are 'bad'. Letting humanity play into the hands of this cognitive bias of the elites or the majority. Nothing worse for progress. We could've come much further had it not been for this.
If no one in the 'elite' club thinks that my ideas are 'good', does that mean my ideas are wrong?
It has been and will be bad science to suppress "bad"/"crazy"/"stupid" ideas. "Bad" of today might be the status quo tomorrow. Interfering with this evolution is "bad". No matter how smart you think you are.
This is the problem with centralization. A service that is centralized in the hands of the person or organization hosting it leaves all the power in their hands to change the rules on a whim. We are lucky that pg is reasonable and cares about feedback. Remember what happened with the facebok newsfeed? Also, democracies don't mitigate all the problems of centralization. Facebook even attempted to have a vote on the new privacy features, heavily promoted it, but had a ridiculously low turnout. Most people don't spend their time on sites trying to govern them, but simply use the tool.
Compare this to decentralized systems like git or the web. Any particular publisher's decision is mitigated by the fact that the audience is small. Even if this while site disappeared tomorrow, the web would continue to exist. Can such a principle be implemented for communities in general?
Yes. But it requires open source software to be installed and published by many people, and clients could interact with publicly signed versions of servers (or their plugins). The key question here is who is trying to protect whom and why.
When a small group forms (such as the discussion thread) the participants are the most interested party, and if the host changes something from what they expected they should be able to fork the discussion and easily continue it somewhere else.
On the other hand, a publisher who is interested in trying out a new (version of a) plugin can install it and see people's reactions. If they like it, they may start more discussions hosted by this publisher.
But the key to a "free market" in improvements is the switching cost. People should be able to easily move the entire discussion somewhere else in case the particular installation has been sabotaged.
Ideally such distributed software could be a bitcoin agent.
HN users with > 1000 karma. Will you actively spend time to endorse new comments?
Yes, while I regularly read HN. I'm not going to go out of my way or anything, though.
The only issue I have is that it might make the groupthink that exists here even worse. Sometimes the descending opinions are very important not just the status quo.
But will see how it goes, I just hope there isn't a rise in parroting comments like you see on stack overflow where people just start copying other people opinions to raise there own karma value, which would entrench the status quo.
If that happens I'll probably be out for good.
There could be serious liability issues to think about.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
And if you are referring to case law what decision?
Case in point: http://i.imgur.com/8Oa3z0H.png
Update: apparently this comment was still pending http://i.imgur.com/KBuY5fx.png
Updatev2: I think I may have interpreted it wrong, PG wrote "Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another" so I guess all comments will be pending but after being endorsed once can comment again?
I predict this will reduce inane back and forth flamewars.
But as a fellow long-time lurker, I think accounts like ours make up for the long tail of HN contributions particularly in the form of comments.
I also think that long-time lurkers account for most of HN's readership.
The goal of HN isn't to please the majority, and pg seems to think that giving more moderation power to those with more karma will foster better discourse.
I urge pg to reconsider this. While it doesn't take any real effort to have an old account. And while it often feels that power, even moderation power, ought to be earned. I think giving long-time users the ability to endorse comments, even if they have little karma, won't degrade HN's discourse but instead improve it.
Lurkers post less, and therefore have less karma. Lurkers understand that when they don't have anything worthwhile to contribute, they aren't obligated to add to the noise in order to score internet points. I don't think that lurkers who have enjoyed HN for years without much individual activity are going to go out of their way to endorse pending comments that are low quality.
I hope that most would respect the higher standard HN holds comments to compared to some other sites. I suspect that those higher standards might be what has kept them coming back.
Oh. And since I'm posting this past 11 PM PDT on a Friday night, I doubt this comment will earn me much in the way of karma even though this is the type of constructive commenting that pg wants on HN, or so I hope. I think this goes to show that karma isn't a perfect stat for determining who can endorse comments. And while account age might not be perfect for this either, I think some combination of both would be better.
I'm also interesting in seeing where / how pending comments look on a specific thread, I guess posting this will show that
The end result is I'll probably just stop visiting hacker news so frequently (if at all).
As without the ability to have conversations with people better than me at interesting stuff what does this place offer that reddit doesn't.
It offers the opportunity to read insightful thoughfulncomments from people who know what they're talking about, without also having to tolerate vicious and stupid comments.
So do many other sites, for me the main draw is the ability to take part in the conversation.
> It offers the opportunity to read insightful thoughfulncomments from people who know what they're talking about, without also having to tolerate vicious and stupid comments.
I'll take having to read the odd vicious/stupid comment (and on here they are the oddity) if it allows me to take part in the conversation.
I'll resist the urge for a knee-jerk reaction but as it currently stands I'll probably just stop using Hacker News if I can't comment, I don't see much of anything on here I wouldn't find by subscribing to the right sub-reddits, it really is the conversation that sets this place apart.
I guess we will see what happens.
They already do that (and ironically that was one of the suggestions made on the Pending Comments Post).
This is absolutely the single greatest and subtly brilliant motivator for anyone interested in doing a startup to leap right now.
All of your competition is going to be wasting hours of their day upvoting pending comments.
Their time sink is your opportunity!
Here's a free startup idea: autobot commenter to turk task the producers of the valley.
Not to mention this won't get seen by anybody.
edit: just for research I noted how long this took to go from [pending] to not. It took 10 minutes for what it's worth
Will dead posts that are not endorsed still be visible to users below 1k karma? Is endorsing a dead post (perhaps a good comment by a usually poor poster) a no-op, or will endorsement allow the dead post to be seen by users who are below 1k karma but have showdead turned on?
Surely just adding a button that says "report" to comments that sends the message to a pending queue and sees how 1000's respond to it?
I also assume that >1000ers go unmoderated?
Lastly, you should also consider the intelligent but quiet guys in the classroom. Those who are uber conscious about speaking up despite having good suggestions. The fear of not being able to speak, if they don't say anything good enough will silence them.
Because of this power law distribution, it may not necessarily turn out to be that bad, since at any given time there may only be 3-4 comments pending for every eligible reviewer.
Of course, you can just middle click, so maybe that's not so effective.
Also, for the fuck of it, if I see ten good but un-endorsed comments, I have potentially ten tabs to load (hello latencies on UMTS links) and ten tabs to close! My netbook doesnt have enough pixels for the tabs, let alone RAM. Text-based browsers dont even have tabs.
The HN community may be great and all, but the technological part of it Just. Plain. Sucks.
YC is hunting for startups, and every single one of all the YC-backed companies has a better website UX than HN/YC itself. What a shame.
I have 910 at the moment, but after clicking "Endorse" on a comment it seemed to disappear from the page. It could be entirely coincidental, or was the limit lowered?
Also, I can't see an "Pending" link in the top menu unless I'm on the "Pending" page already. Not sure if this a part of having less than 1000 karma or just a caching issue/bug.
Question: if a comment is never endorsed does that mean that user is effectively banned?
(I don't understand the mathematics of this entirely, just have an intuitive understanding of it)
I hope it addresses something I've noticed lately, something I refer to as "Poisoning the Well".
What I've seen again and again and again is that the first (highest rated?) comment on the thread is either negative or off topic. Discussion ensues. Lots of discussion. Screens of discussion.
Most of which is entirely irrelevant to the primary topic.
By the time I wade through that mess to get to the real discussion, I'm burnt. I can't imagine I'm the only one, it seems like the comments further below, while typically of much higher quality are fewer and farther between.
I wonder how often we collectively read the first thread, get frustrated, and move on. For me, it happens all too often.
Great idea!
Also it exposes HN to something that irritates about Stack Overflow, this idea that there are a bunch of people who somehow know what I want to read. The amount of questions on SO that are 'closed as deemed none relevant' is ridiculous.
Also remember, the bad comments are the exact benchmark on which you judge a good comment. Without bitter there is no sweet.
Particularly this part: "Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another".
Am I seriously expected to keep a "queue" of posts I want to make in Notepad or something?
Seems pretty stupid to me. The way I use HN is to spend 30ish minutes on it by opening a bunch of tabs...reading the articles...and then either posting a root comment or responding to something interesting. I do this for every tab.
Sounds like this breaks my work flow, and I don't understand what the purpose of this part is.
I don't comment much, but when I do think back on the comments I have made that have been somewhat popular, they are of this longer type. Maybe there's something to this.
But just be aware you're positioning yourself as kind of a catalyst in the opposite direction of most small, quick messaging fora.
Maybe that's good for us. Maybe it will come to be appreciated. Maybe people will abandon it for something easier.
I look at 1000 karma and wonder why you would empower people who could simply be post happy.
This is only going to affect the very bottom of the barrel as it stands now.
So I think everyone can safely relax and let it work its course.
I'm curious about how many endorsements are needed. My endorsement caused your comment to go live, but I don't know if you'd been previously endorsed by someone else or not.
That would be a good way to promote good commentators to the "next level", whatever it brings with karma.
I saw it before and could see comments in the queue, although my score was/is too low to do anything about them.
What about older threads? Sometimes I don't visit HN actively throughout the day, but partake in the discussion at night or the next morning if I have spare time. Many times my comments are slight clarifications of a point being made, or providing some citations or links to resources that I happen to know about on the subject. They almost always go unnoticed with 1 karma, but I continue to do so because they provide helpful resources for someone who comes along later, perhaps by search, or through the discussion view on their user page. If no users with the ability to approve the comment browse the old threads, and my comment is quickly pushed off the earlier pages of the pending comments section, they'll be lost.
More generally, I get why this is being done, and it's even a touch exciting. I would love to see general comment quality improve if for the only reason that the general quality forms expectations in the community, and this can help raise the bar a little. However, it's also pretty concerning. It's a big surprise to see human activity be what is reached for.
Edit: Woah, so it turns out my main concern was discussed in the thread by cperciva [0], and it was an oversight by pg which resulted in the page of pending comments being added. This certainly has the potential to raise comment quality dramatically, but is fraught with danger.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445916
Edit 2: I don't want to flood this comment thread with another post, so I'll make it here. Close to 40 minutes after making the above, I find even my lingering doubt has close to disappeared and been replaced by excitement. My initial horror disappeared surprisingly quickly, even before I made the above comment, as I realized quickly how much this could improve comment quality. Yet, after some reading in the announcement thread, I find myself feeling like a slightly modified system would require much less activity from users, but be nearly as effective.
Why not have, after a certain threshold of endorsed comments, comments by the user be automatically endorsed. Then, instead of requiring active endorsement for every comment, give high karma users the ability to require further comments by a bad commenter to require endorsement before appearing. This ensures that they can only make a handful of low quality comments before being pushed to active moderation, and presumably the event would happen rarely so that abuse of the ability can be more accurately monitored. I imagine that the opposite idea, having bad comments being endorsed by a user resulting in the removal their ability to endorse, would be more work.
Another 20 minutes later, and one last edit just for posterity: I still remain fairly bullish about the potential, but reading the discussion threads leaves me bouncing back and forth between excitement and concern. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, in either case.
Those comments with even an air of controversy will not be approved because if it ends up with down-votes, that will go toward the approving member's record and may end up getting them banned eventually.
Controversial points and less popular opinions and facts will never be seen to counter. PG, you are building a Censorship wall so that controversial or unpopular comments now don't even exist to refute/debate. There is a reason that anytime you take away people's free speech or expression, they eventually revolt.
Why do comments that are not mainstream have to go away (as in never be seen). Why not engage in debate about them. I never understood this. Sure I can see censoring comments containing personal threats or vulgar content, but this is ridiculous. Keeping information from someone's eyes just because one group does not agree with it is censorship.
Honestly, the way that disagreeable comments are handled now are quite refreshing and are one of the reasons that HN is so popular. Anyone can post their opinion. If people don't agree with it, they can engage in civil opposition. If it is inappropriate, they can down-vote.
Perhaps the biggest reason for not pending comments is that you are going to dramatically change what shows up here. You have members of one group (or classification if you will) who are very active and will all have 1000 points, this group now is the voice of HN. Those who post more occasionally, post late, or don't pad their numbers by replying to the hot thread (rather they create their own which drops 3/4 down the page) now have a limited voice. Other groups likely have many differing opinions than the over 1000 class, they now have no voice. You see, your over 1000 (certainly the minority of your members) mostly all have common opinions, ideologies and viewpoints about things. This group now has the power to silence those others (though perhaps even larger in numbers) groups.
I would have liked it if you ran a poll before coding something like this. A last minute pseudo-courtesy notification shows just how much HN is really all about you and does not really belong to the people who actually own it (the public). Without us, you've got and idle server. No stories posted, no comments, nothing. Your totalitarianism attitude put a bad taste in my mouth.