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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

The sort of incivility we're worried about is the more explicit type where someone replies to a comment with "You are an idiot. Don't you realize that x y z?" when they could have simply said "x y z." I'm pretty sure if HN cuts down on that type of comment, people who are earnest but upset about something will be net ahead of people they might be arguing with who are merely thoughtless jerks.

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So, a lot of people's first introduction to all of this was the comment Sam made in his article "What I've Learned From Female Founders So Far" about how "we're working on something to improve the quality of Hacker News comments". It is thereby not surprising that people are trying to analyze whether this feature will help that specific issue ;P.

FWIW, I think that this is a different problem than the "you are an idiot" problem: I think a lot of the threads that people are finding issue with when it comes to attitudes towards under-represented groups are not (at least entirely) filled with this "explicit type" of negative comment: it is instead the more insidious, implicit type being stared at.

Regardless, I don't see why the endorsement system will somehow work against either of these problems when the voting mechanism hasn't: the comments that start with "you are an idiot, don't you realize that" are currently getting upvotes, so why would we presume they won't also get endorsements? Are high-karma users voting differently?

I would love to see that kind of comment cut out too, but I am concerned that pending comments won't actually achieve that goal - that biases (unconscious and not) will sneak into the patterns of what gets approved.

The moderator is concerned about that too. But if it did start to happen it would be pretty obvious. So it seems worth trying to see if pending comments can be tuned to cut obvious crap without eliminating stuff that's merely controversial.

That sort of thing needs a flag mechanism, not an a priori vetting of each comment. Enough flags = lock replies, a few more flags = hide comment.

Exactly! And really, we already have a flagging system: the downvote. My understanding is that comments on HN should only really be downvoted for the same reasons as pending comments would not be approved. So why not improve on that existing system? When a comment is downvoted, it should ask the reason for the 'flag', with choices representing the various commenting rules. This should help ensure that people are using downvotes correctly, which should allow them to be acted on more strongly. Sufficient downvotes (or sufficient downvotes with the same reason) could hide the comment entirely.

Mmm. This smells a bit like the League of Legends flagging and Tribunal system, which has worked very well for them. I wonder if HN has enough active readers to make a Tribunal work well.

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