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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

I like pg constantly thinking of ways to improve the site.

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.

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I seriously doubt he's "constantly" thinking of ways to improve the site. That aside, (and I really apologize for anyone interpreting this as a negative comment), I highly respect pg but at the same time, wtf? Are the comments really that bad to deserve this honestly draconian new approach? This might seem like a short-term solution to the "problem" of poor comments but it is not a true solution! Rather, it is a poorly thought out filtering mechanism that doesn't apply merit into the determination of filtering, but instead uses the totally superficial criterion of "karma point count" instead of anything other than a time-based evaluation strategy. I think it only further contributes to the "redditization" of online communities and this inevitably lowers the quality of comments by increasing the barrier to entry of commenters and will over time force inter-comment dynamics into becoming increasingly censored.

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. :(

If you're abusing the flag system you're going to lose the right to it really quickly or flat out be banned same as it is currently.

But if the user with the higher karma is the only one interested in that thread they could easily just ignore the posts they disagree with so they never get endorsed. It leads to the same outcome, yet they appear to have done nothing wrong.

I don't really see the issue with this unless getting the last word in publicly on a discussion forum is vitally important.

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.

The entire issue is that you don't see a problem with censorship. They would have to endorse ANY comment, not just replies to their own posts.

This isn't censorship and I think that word gets thrown around much too loosely.

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.

> this is going to kill a lot of real-time commentary on posts that are only moderately popular

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).

> 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.

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?

Discussion isn't "efficient" ! Roundabout conversing is still optimal and useful in re the end goal of hitting potentially unreachable topics, and just because they are far-removed from the core topics or the central themes of the OP does not mean that they aren't still enlightening topics!

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?

But the site is inherently real-time. Submissions pop onto and off of the front page in the course of a couple hours. The window for discussion is quite small before the next thing comes along. As it is, when I comment one something that's more than a few hours old, I halfway assume I'll never get a response/upvote/anything.

Just because a submission goes off the front page doesn't mean that nobody will comment on it anymore. Of course there will be fewer newcomers to the discussion, but people who are already in the thread will keep seeing it in their "threads" page so they can post replies even after a couple of days. Unless you post dozens of comments a day, it's relatively easy to keep track of threads that you're really interested in.

But that's part of the problem - comments will only show up if there are enough people looking at it to do the endorsing. A single site-wide list of pending comments won't work either - surely the whole point is that comments should be endorsed in the context of the thread?

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.

I could be wrong, but I think the karma threshold for endorsing has been lowered. I'm at ~850 and I'm able to endorse comments.

It's at least above 300, because I can't endorse.

It's also above 429.

It's 500 at the moment.

Yup. I'm at 935 points and I can endorse comments. I feel like this is going to be such a dilemma for me, and HN, as a community, will soon discuss what really can be endorsed, even though PG already set some rules.

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.

> I feel bad that comments posted just to say they agree with someone/something cannot/will not be seen.

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 don't have a thought to go with your agreement, just push the up arrow. I agree it isn't the same thing but I see the point of hiding relatively superficial stuff on a site with so many comments.

If you have something to say, even something fairly light, I expect it will still get unpended.

I've been watching the /pending page and I've been surprised that the number of pending comments has stayed really low.

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.

You are part of the 10k karma cabal.

I agree. I dislike slashdot because of their over-agressive moderation tactics. I think HN feels like a more natural conversation. As long as bad comments aren't in the majority I still like reading the threads.

>I dislike slashdot because of their over-agressive moderation tactics. //

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].

He does improve the site quite a bit. He also has made the source for it available online which is nice.

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