Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

My issue with pending comments requiring endorsements is that I have been here for several years and I only have 247 karma. I browse regularly but only tend to comment when I have something good to add. I don't try to game the system, and I don't try to comment immediately on new posts. I'll probably never hit 1000 karma, and now I'm even more disincentived to post since the chances of someone actually seeing what I post will now be even lower.

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I'm actually scared to comment on here. If my comment is "too reddit" or if I am incorrect in what I write I could be shadow banned. I try to save my comments for when it's something really important.

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.

But what if that's the only thing keeping comments on HN any good? If you post something that isn't genuinely interesting or insightful the best case is that you get ignored and the worst case is that you get shadow banned. This means that everyone hovers over the submit button and second guesses whether what they're posting is any good. I know that I've probably aborted about 1/3rd of all my comments and I think that's a good thing.

>second guesses whether what they're posting is any good.

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.

Agreed - but the whole idea of upvotes is based on the idea that a popular comment = a good comment. The entire foundation of the system falls apart if you dispute that and the upvote system becomes the wrong choice.

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?

It's a good point. I've spent time responding to a comment and decided to abandon because the HN community will soon correct me if I'm being biased or saying things without any real source to back it up.

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.

Exactly.

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.

> 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

That struck me as somewhat non-parallel. Racism, sexism, bigotry, and profanity aren't fallacies.

Racism/Sexism/Bigotry can end up in logical fallacy territory pretty easily. "If women were unsuited for tech careers, there would be few of them in tech; there are few women in tech, therefore women are unsuited for tech careers" is a logical fallacy that I see around here pretty often. "Sexism" is just easier to remember than "Affirming the consequent".

But calling the problem there "sexism" has two major negative effects: it can lead you to believe that correct sexist arguments are flawed by their sexism, and it can lead you to accept affirming-the-consequent type arguments that aren't sexist. If something's wrong, you don't want to slam it for orthogonal traits, you want to slam it for the things that make it wrong.

> I try to save my comments for when it's something really important.

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.

The entire structure of this forum encourages groupthink. Look at shadow bans, their entire purpose is to permanently silence someone that speaks against the crowd without even letting him/her know and without providing any means of appeal.

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.

hueving, it's true that there is an arguable attitude in the forum, but even under this assumption, to say that the comments section [...] is laughable is unfair.

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.

Shadowbans/hellbans are meant to silence trolls, not unpopular views. They sometimes hit people with unpopular views, which is a problem that needs to be sorted out, but their purpose is not to enforce groupthink, merely civility.

I think what he's saying, though, is that to many people here the expression of "unpopular views" or any sort of criticism is always and directly synonymous with "trolling". This holds true for them even when what's said is completely valid, completely with merit, and expressed in a perfectly reasonable manner.

Just try saying "my favorite language is _" and you'll see what he's saying. I tried that once, on a thread about favorite languages I added a comment saying, I use these languages for these things, thinking I might get some good advice and I got downvoted. I was respectful about how I phrased it but I still got people ticked at me.

that's precisely how I feel about HN. Many times I wanted to express controversial opinions in a respectful way, but I am too scared to get downvoted. I ended up being just a reader and spending less and less time on HN. Too bad for a site supposedly for hackers (the real meaning of the term).

I agree with you.

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.

My votes and comments have been disabled. I don't know when or why it happened. I cannot go to anyone for advice or repair. I have become persona non grata and I have no idea why. There is no way to fix it.

Your optimism shadows an extremely difficult reality.

Of course there's a way to fix it: send an email, as the guidelines say.

Your comments have evidently not been disabled!

Thank you for the information. I'm not a heavy HN user; I didn't know there was an email address to send to.

I'd say 'scared' might be too strong a characterization? I have a slight wariness and a slight trepidation, which is completely absent when I post on (say) /. (which I rarely do any more but you know).

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.

I feel the same way about joining new online communities. Humans have highly evolved social instincts that make no sense in the world of the internet. Just tell yourself you are functionally anonymous and post anyways.

Our accounts are of a similar age (and probably like you, I read passively before ever even creating an account) and we've commented a similar number of times. Like others, I've also participated in mini-threads that add detail, but occur after the heated discussion has died down (here's a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295384). I almost never get to HN during peak hours, so it's my main form of interaction.

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.

+1. I never comment but have been lurking HN for 3 years now. This is my first comment.

So, one post every three years and you're worried it might not show up?

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 read HN every hour (almost) and stay updated on the comments of many posts that are very interesting. I read the comments more than the post itself.

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.

Yes? Why does it matter AT ALL how often you post? Censorship is not okay regardless.

Do you actually believe high-value comments will commonly go unendorsed? That seems pretty unlikely to me. I'd only worry about comments that aren't all that compelling — and for obvious reasons, I'm not too worried about losing those.

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.

I think it's not about how easy it is to be endorsed. The idea of relying on other people to make your comment visible doesn't sound right. I can probably guess, against which type of comments this measure is for and I'm not sure if it's going to be enough. However, there is a Turkish saying which fits to this situation perfectly: "Damp wood, too, will burn alongside the dry", meaning, drastic measures to get rid of the wrong would damage the correct too.

The core problem is that conversations aren't one way highways made of high-value comments.

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.

I created a new account to test out the system, and within 4 minutes of you posting your comment, I was able to see it and reply to it. For what it's worth, it was also the top comment of this thread.

This thread, and the day or so following, will be very different from the usual case. Today, everyone is playing with the endorse system. We will need to see how quickly it works when it's not the shiny new toy.

How does it work? Do people with over 1K karma also need to be endorsed?

It's not 100% clear yet since a lot of the lines are still being drawn, but it seems like users over ~10k karma do not need endorsements.

You can read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761

If your comment never gets endorsed and the delete goes away, does that mean you can't comment anymore? Like what happens if a pending comment is still around 48 hours later?

It sounds like if your comment is stuck in pending for 24 hours, it will just be removed altogether.

Isn't it a subtle irony? While you might be indicating that this new system is good because his comment became 'live' within 4 minutes of posting, at the same time it directly means a lot of people endorsed his thoughts that this new pending comments system is not that good? SMH...

It means that people thought the comment was a useful addition to the discussion. (or at the very least did not detract from the discussion) It does not mean that they agree with or endorse the opinion expressed in the comment.

That would be the ideal case, but the reality is a bit far off. As I said somewhere else, in the past the most upvotes I ever received were for sarcastic comments to a particular tech company (which I hate), but they arguably might not have contributed to the discussion. On the other hand, a few total negative votes were received on comments which I thought added to the discussion, but some people with high karma just didn't agree to it.

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.

I'm in the same situation. Have an upvote. Maybe you'll hit it with this comment...

Your incentive to post should be genuine interest in engaging in a mature and thoughtful discussion about HN topics. If you have something valuable to add the expectation is that it will not sit in the pending pile for too long and once the comment leaves the pending state it will not be drowned out by unhelpful/unwanted comments.

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.

Am I only supposed to send five or ten minutes to compose a comment?

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.

What part of my comment gave you the impression that I think 5 to 10 minutes was the upper bounds?

There wasn't, but I took it as the average, which still seems low. Since I discovered HN, I've been nothing but impressed with the audience. I think the nature of the site is one of the reasons the topics and comments are of higher quality than other news aggregation sites.

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.

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