The comments on HN aren't perfect, but they're far from bad when compared to other sites of this nature. There has been a downwards trend most probably due to the increasing popularity of HN. A response is warranted. However, this system has the potential to silence a lot of high quality comments on any threads that aren't on the front-page for an extended period of time. Thus, you get a feedback loop. Good posts require quality discussion to stay on top, but must stay on top to get quality discussion going with this added approval lag.

I think you should ease these changes in as conservatively and gradually as possible. For example, apply it only to the top page at first, and reduce the number of endorsements required for display to 1. You might also consider merely greying out comments that have not yet been endorsed, as currently happens to down-voted comments. Another option would be to apply the endorsement system only after threads have reached a certain age so as to jump-start discussions. Additionally, I would recommend that authors of a parent post should be able to see all child posts regardless of their karma. Below, Babuskov raised the point that the endorsement system will obstruct useful back-and-forth discussions between sub-kilokarma users in buried threads that often takes the place of a private messaging system on HN. This would fix that more effectively than merely reducing the endorsement requirement.

You should not entertain any illusions that you can flip the switch and watch this system work perfectly, and that you will therefore be able to avoid confusing people with many changes over a lengthy period of time. Tweaking will almost certainly be required.

One of the most powerful things about HN is that it is currently not like reddit - we don't end up with 400+ comments that sit at the bottom of the page gathering dust and downvotes. I feel that a system of pending comments plays better in a more moderated community - especially so as sometimes the most seemingly innocuous comments here can be important or generate discussion that would not otherwise occur.

If the system were to be brought in immediately I'd like to see something along the lines of a 24 hour window; all comments are published after 24 hours with karma directly correlating to the reduction of that window - i.e. Those users with karma of 1440+ can comment with relative impunity on the assumption that their past contributions merit their voice being heard instantly, whilst users with lower karma must either wait for their comment to be 'approved' by a higher user or of course wait out the period of 1440-karma. A relatively simple fix, I would hope, given that you are willing to let 1000+ karma users basically moderate the comments.

I absolutely agree with beloch that these changes should be eased in as conservatively as possible: the worst thing that can happen to HN, and the tech industry as a whole, is presenting itself as a closed community in which you must gain favour to advance - we all quite literally live on the new blood that so often disrupts the status quo.

I must admit I do not feel compelled by this change.

Perhaps the best idea might not involve trying to determine the best path to take. At least we're asking, right?

It still makes it take extremely long for a new user to obtain 1000 karma, though. Much harder than previously, I imagine. Although maybe not, since there will be less posts visible, those that are will get relatively more karma points?

And although there are ways to improve the actual implementation of the system, I still think it is fundamentally flawed for a few reasons.

First, any system in which a comment is assumed to be spam or trash until proven otherwise will produce less meaningful discussion. Maybe most of the good comments will be filtered through; but some will invariably be missed, and people with valid ideas will not have their comments seen by anyone. Moreover, from my understanding, the HN user base is primarily in North America. (I could be wrong.) If this is true, won't users in other countries be disproportionately affected by this kind of oversight because there are simply fewer high-karma users in the rest of the world?

This is fundamentally a debate over whether HN should have 50% fewer good comments and 100% fewer bad ones, or whether we should just get everything. I believe that latter.

Second, this program places excess responsibility in the hands of high-karma users. HN is now moving from a passive system (eg. one where everything is visible and the best stuff gets voted to the top), to one where every comment must be scrutinized and evaluated just to be visible. Logistically, I don't see how this works. Users with over 1000 karma are rare. From what I've seen they are less than 5% of the total HN user base. This minority is now going to be responsible for evaluating every single comment?! I truly do not see the small number of high-karma users on HN being able to sort through every comment. Many, many comments will be missed or ignored.

Overall, I believe that any effort to stop spam on HN should be given consideration, but this system poses substantial logistical problems and will, in all likelihood, hurt the community.

Since I don't comment often, this probably doesn't mean much, but this is the last comment I'll post on HN until the policy is reversed.

I didn't even know HN had a commenting problem until HN told me. As is often the case, the comments are pretty informative on this topic too.

Well, so long everyone. Logging out for now. Someone please let me know on Twitter if this gets reversed.

But a much higher percentage of people who actually post. The top 10 posts on this page (for me, right now) are about 50% from such users, and of the top 10 newcomments right now there's only 3 from users with 1000+ Karma, but several more from >900. If you're participating on the site for a while, it doesn't take that long.

  You might also consider merely greying out comments that 
  have not yet been endorsed, as currently happens to down-
  voted comments.

Either way, I'd advocate for a "showpending" toggle for users with under 1000 karma.

Perhaps after a post has reached a certain age (few hours) comments would slowly open up to users with less and less karma. Just a thought, but I agree a "show pending" toggle would be nice too.

Color coding comments to flag they as 'pending' is fine. But complete hiding them sounds too strong

Its great to have the conversation on how to improve HN comments

Not all accounts are new users of course.

Number of HN submissions over 3 years: http://i.imgur.com/r9Ayvb1.png

Number of HN comments over 3 years: http://i.imgur.com/4FwglA8.png

Of course, this scenario assumes that # of submissions follows a power law distribution: a small percentage of posters make the majority of submissions. That pattern emerges on many content sites, especially sites with active forms of communal self-moderation. I have no idea if it's the case here, but it seems feasible.

IMO, the quality has degraded due to more people viewing the site, not the submissions. If I get my post on the frontpage of HN I can expect roughly 1,000 hits per hour. This wasn't the case 4 years ago when I first starting lurking here.

There are two problems with this:

1. More people (of poor quality) upvoting stories that attract the most attention (link bait, stories that aren't relevant, etc)

2. More people (of poor quality) upvoting comments that are not relevant to the discussion.

No graph will be able to chart this - it's purely subjective.

If the number of comments, on the other hand, hadn't gone up since 2012, I'd be shocked.

Here is a chart of the comments: http://i.imgur.com/4FwglA8.png

I always wonder how useful it is to really try to get down to defining what it is you want out of the conversations, and then giving the ability to narrow based on that. Obviously, the narrowing would have to be quick, because it's hard enough to get people to click an up/down arrow once, but if it were to include even two or three more specific categories, or flags, could you put enough information into the system to automate some of the problem folks.

For instance, having a way for users to flag a post as vitriolic, or not containing real information, and then collating the data and either stopping that user from posting, or putting them into a state where their posts are pending.

I also wanted to mention that it seems as though he does address not having illusions in the last sentence: "I hope this will improve the quality of HN comments significantly, but we'll need your help to make it work, and your forbearance if, as usually happens, some things go wrong initially."

I think all of that spitballing is predicated on having a well-defined course you'd like conversations to follow with well-defined rules that don't block the flow of useful discourse, or stifles the community.

This isn't a topic I've done any research on. Just throwing some thoughts out there. I appreciate the parent post, though, because it raised a lot of notions I hadn't thought of immediately when I read the pending idea. I think I tend to lean toward giving people with higher karma the ability to flag people into a status that makes there posts go into pending, according to a set of defined criteria (like were posted) rather than starting folks in that state. I think it would be less impactful to the rate of conversation, but obviously then you have people who make accounts to get around it, which would be solved by the solution to be implemented.

Also everything I'm suggesting is complicated and possibly overkill/overengineered. I wonder if there's an elegant way to get more useful classification information into the voting system to give it more focussed goals.

Well. Enough rambling on my part.

Comments not only receive a +/- minus score, but they receive a reason for that score. Additionally, meta-moderators are selected randomly from eligible moderators who go behind and moderate whether the scores given to a particular comment were justified. Get metamoderated down often enough and you lose your ability to moderate.

It baffles me that every site on the web keeps using simple up/down systems and then complains about how hard it is to generate quality discussion when this is hardly a new problem set.

And that's also entirely beside the point.

Does HN have the same level of comment quality as reddit? They both use simple up/down systems.

The point is that Slashdot's metamoderation system better leverages the community as a means of directing discussion. The initial upvote has a reason attached to it, and the meta level moderation allows the community to filter out people that are moderating inappropriately. What constitutes appropriate is going to depend on the standards in place for that community.

I wouldn't expect to see an option to moderate a comment +1, Funny on HN, for example. The system itself, however, is designed specifically to bring quality content to the top.

But I think you're making the mistake of conflating the design of a system that is meant to address one problem with the state of a site that declined for other reasons years ago.

[1] - http://floodyberry.com/carmack/slashdot.html#s19991123x08382...

> It baffles me that every site on the web keeps using simple up/down systems and then complains about how hard it is to generate quality discussion when this is hardly a new problem set.

It sounded like you were saying "if those sites just used a better moderation system, it would be easy to generate quality discussion". But the moderation system you propose does not generate quality discussion on slashdot.

If that's not what you're saying, then I'm not sure what particular benefit you think slashdot's sytem does have. What does it mean for a system to be good at directing discussion, but not at generating high-quality discussion? Why is it useful to be able to revoke mod privileges, if that doesn't generate high-quality discussion?

Or are you saying something like, it would be easy to generate quality discussion with slashdot's system given certain other factors (where simple +/- does not make this easy), but slashdot lacks those factors?

I can't objectively say that slashdot was better or worse here. Firstly, because I didn't go to slashdot nearly as often as I do here, and secondly, because I haven't done anything to thoroughly define and measure what I would consider a quality community.

If my problem is that the community is bad, I think I need a way to show to myself that it really is. I need a set of guidelines which I want my community to interact according to, or standards for the goodness I'm trying to push, and a way to see how much goodness there is, then a plan to drive that goodness.

And I'm not even saying that you need to be rigorous about it. Maybe that would help, but I think you can get some ideas with some general notions like tiny surveys, or something like that. I guess you could start getting more interesting and use sentiment analysis after auto-classifying posts, looking for meta content talking about the board.

As another aside, I think more specialized, smaller fragmented communities tend to be better for me, which is why I also enjoy subreddits like r/types and such, but again, I think that by no objective standard

There's probably a parallel to make between moderation systems and Russel's paradox[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_paradox

Exactly. Mostly I try to make constructive comments, but the most upvotes I have received were on comments which were hateful to one of the tech companies - they might still not be the best comments in pg's dictionary.

They can roll it out tonight and immediately roll it back if it is stifling conversation in a way that causes more harm than it resolves. They can also iterate on it if any part of it works in a way that isn't optimal.

Essentially, if you trust HN/YC to not leave something horribly broken, there is nothing to worry about. The code is not set in stone, and you can bet they'll be watching closely for anything not working well about the new system.

Social systems can be broken in a way that won't manifest until a certain type of discussion comes up. So while I trust HN/YC to do their best to protect and promote discourse, I don't know that the types of conversation that come up during the evaluation period will be representative of all future conversation on HN

We can summarize this change as moving from a system where (at least some of) the system's weaknesses are known, to a system where the people running HN believe it should be a better system, but it still probably has points where it breaks in some way. Doing changes like this and reacting to breakage is the only way that progress can be made.

I foresee this causing an even worse problem than low quality comments: The front page will be flooded with stories that make it their not because of the quality of the accompanied discussion, but because of the "clickability" of the article title.

However, it seems like there is a relatively simple solution. The number of "endorsements" required to activate a comment could be inversely proportional to the articles points. Or as some other users have suggest, it could be inversely proportional to the quantity of other comments on the same article.

At a minimum, I'd suggest lowering the karma threshold to 100 and/or only gray out comments that are 'pending'.

No way can I afford to spend a lot of mousing and clicking on a zillion "pending" comments to make them visible to the hoi polli. Heck, ignoring the greater good, why would I personally care, I've probably got enough karma to see everything.

Is there some timeout? If not, commenting on a several-day-old thread will guarantee that you can never post another comment, since once threads drop off the front page it's not likely that many 1000+ karma users will even see those comments, never mind endorse them.

I'll add a pending page that collects pending comments. Maybe that will solve the problem.

How about only placing comments into the "pending" purgatory if the submission they're attached to has received more than X comments in the past Y minutes? I assume it's the chatty discussions which you're concerned about cooling down, so this would handle the problem case while avoiding the side effect on quiet/abandoned threads.

Well, I guess it really comes down to just how much (proper) endorsing ends up happening. One thing I like about HN is that it's open and fast to use. Having a pending mode on everyone's comments affects not only the troll-users, but many of the normal ones too who aren't abusing the system ><.

I'll try to do my part, but I worry about the tragedy of the commons here. The current incentives may actively discourage endorsements.

[ed: spelling]

It's fun to consider that a dynamic system could provide someone on the back end (or a smart algorithm) with a variable nozzle controlling comment flow.

There are about 5500 such users. There have been around 245,000 users to ever post on Hacker News and around 85,000 users have posted over the last year.

Source: I'm working on a fork of the Hacker News Karma tracker (not ready to be live yet) that uses Algolia's new HN Search API; I also downloaded every comment ever made similar to how minimaxir downloaded all of the submissions.

Looks like in the last 10 minutes we've had 30 comments on HN - that's about 180 and hour - that's 4,320 comments in a 24-hour period.

Let's say 50% of those are worthy of being seen. If we assume it takes two upvotes per comment to bring it out of pending status then that group of 5500 people need to cast 4,320 upvotes a day collectively to to stay caught up.

Given the fact that A: it's unlikely that all 5500 of these users are still active, and B: it's very unlikely that they would be upvoting the same comments then it seems almost certain that there will be a SIGNIFICANT backlog of pending comments created each day.

But, I wonder how the lack of visible scores on comments has affected the overall comment scoring rate. For the average new user today, how long do they have to wait to get to 1000 karma? How long was it a few years ago? These would be interesting questions to answer.

If you really do want to reach some karma threshold I would suggest trying to get it from submissions instead. You can easily get hundreds of karma per submission if you submit the newest release of some popular software product or the latest Zed Shaw rant with very little invested. This also has the bonus that you are not actually lowering the quality of your commenting for more karma.

I'm mentioning this because I believe such posts are genuinely useful and surely deserve the points they get.

BTW I don't think I ever got near a hundred points for a comment. But I suppose it can happen in the above circumstance in a popular thread.

Honestly, the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems, which is usually not a good sign.

The best idea I've heard so far is a timeout, such that even if no one endorses your comment is to let you comment again anyway after a day.

I'm still not sure what the benefit of adding endorsements is compared to using a generic upvote as the endorsement.

Fluff will pass through.

Another option would be to enable the pending machine on big stories for the time they are on the home page, then auto-validate everything (but mark the unendorsed comments as such).

It would be nice if users with a lower karma could validate the replies to their own comments, once they have been validated.

That should cut out a lot of concern about a ol' boys club, and honestly should do a lot to improve comment quality as well.

We could get away with temporary user names, changing on a per thread basis for instance, but that might be heavy to implement.

waterlesscloud's suggestion is to hide them only while the comment is pending. Once the comment is approved, then the username can be displayed as normal, allowing references.

If pending comments are applied to anything except the top-level, I could see this having disastrous effects on the quality of response in discussions since responses in low-traffic branches will likely not even show up.

Of course, it may be simpler to bot up a subreddit and do the same thing via convention. That may be the best result, redirecting the reddit-like dross back to reddit, where it belongs. Throwaway accounts will be mechanically discouraged along with the me-too, ya rite, and other useless posts.

I suspect the volume of submissions that are reposts piling onto something already on the front page (Erlang, Erlang, Erlang, Erlang, Haskell, Haskell, Haskell, Go, Go, Go, Snowden, Snowden, NSA, Erlang, Lisp, Lisp, Lisp, Lisp-flavored Erlang, NSA, Erlang, Erlang, Bacon and Spam, Javascript, Framework, Framework, NSA, Erlang, Haskell, Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, 2048, will dry up. I consider this a good thing.

I suspect I will spend less time on the site, either because conversations will become static expressions of views or because I won't have to filter through as much content, even though much of which marginalia I find quite engrossing. I consider this a good thing.

What comes next is open to conjecture. It could be a more mature salon full of reasoned discussions or it could become a ghost town with lots of great, old, discussions.

[1] I know, apocryphal at best.

At least measure the results, including people who give up and go away. It doesn't take much frustration to discourage even an active user with cogent remarks. I can see the quality taking a dive when regulars are driven away.

Just from personal experience, if I have something to share on the topic, but the discussion already has a couple hundred comments, I look to contribute as a reply to an already highly rated comment. I'm much more likely to get actually engagement that way.

The issue isn't comment quality. It's UI. New comments, even on busy articles, should be discoverable. It should be possible to have discussions past the front-page-life of an article. It should be easy for the reader to decide whether to explore a given thread of conversation in depth or skip it altogether.

  (newsop pending () (pending-page user))

  (newscache pending-page user 60
    (listpage user (msec) comments* [if (and (cansee user _) _!pending) _]
              "pending" "Pending Comments" "pending" nil))

Regarding the square bracket syntax:

    [... _ ...]  is an abbreviation for (fn (_) (... _ ...))

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_%28programming_language%29

http://arclanguage.org

Do we really believe positive moderation will be in the range of a few seconds to a minute?

I know there's been really great experiences[1] with negative moderation/flagging -- but then all users could flag, not just a subset -- and flagging something that's clearly wrong (as in goatsex wrong) is much less effort and much higher incentive than approving a somewhat contributing comment to a story.

Which brings us to what the goal of a comment policy should be. Should we really work towards discouraging people to post things like github-links to stories missing them, because sometimes they'll be beat to the punch by someone else, and now have to wait before contributing to the discussion on a different post?

Perhaps allowing "one pending post per story" might work better?

[1] I'm not sure which talk this was from, but I think it was "building web reputation systems" with an example from Yahoo that touched on flagging (users flagged in sub-second time, much better than automated spam detection). Not sure if this is the same thing(s), but they seem relevant to this discussion:

Randy Farmer (I think this is what I remember) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn7e0J9m6rE

Bryce Glass (similar topic/similar takeaways) http://www.slideshare.net/soldierant/designing-your-reputati...

>the thing I'd overlooked

but this is a drastic overhaul you are proposing, and I believe you have overlooked many other things too.

Let me give you some examples of other consequences: The amount of activity on HN varies with time of day. This is a problem, because on low activity hours, there will be fewer approvers (presumably, every approver has a particular taste, so the more people around, the higher the likelihood someone with compatible taste will find and approve your comment) around. This will mean that the few people that are there during the off-hours will have reduced posting speed. Since the site is more American than European, this will favor american posts over european. Furthermore it will be risky to respond to people down low on the page. Longer post delay! This will (further) encourage threadjacking people up high on the page. One potential consequence is that you will have to be attention grabbing. Probability of approval=eyeballs*individual probability.

Also, from what I've noticed, the Ask HN posts tend to receive comments of higher quality since the questions/submissions there aren't as sensationalist or polarizing, yet that particular section of the site receives only a fraction of the attention that the front page gets, so implementing the pending system there might unnecessarily stifle discourse.

Personally, I wouldn't read a "pending comments" page, because I come to HN to read and discuss stories that interest me, not to browse piles of random, context-free comments. I suspect that most users will feel the same, so it won't help much.

This entire thing is a bad idea, and the current state of Hacker News comments is nowhere near bad enough to warrant such drastic measures.

After that, either nobody is posting anymore or the relative impact of a snide comment is quite low (in terms of viewership and also relative to body of the thread.) Usually after a day or two people are just ping-ponging in their own private threads and there isn't much need for the endorsement bottleneck.

The place where this seems crucial is in determining which comments end up being the upvoted root comments for the main thread. These comments are upvoted early on and ultimately end up forming the shape of discussion from that point forward, so it's a good idea to ensure they aren't flamebait.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

I tend to be awake at odd hours, and over a 24 period, it's quite interesting to watch.

I still think it's a net win though.

A few of us with very broken sleep patterns can put a little more effort into checking comment threads.

Whilst I am always intrigued with what hits the front-page, I rather more often than occasionally, find myself getting to page 10 or so on the weekends.

Just to see what has been going on that I missed.

Your change will basically mean that someone like me who might have something to add to an existing conversation might as well not bother.

It'll be years before I have enough karma on ycombinator's hackernews >1000, and that means I might as well seek another avenue. I guess I am back to post link on social media and comment on it.

Oh well, back to the 00's I guess.

That is already the case. Very few people read or participate in threads more than 24 hours old. You're already walking into an empty room and having a conversation with yourself; all this change does is lock the door.

[1] For example, not realizing that RC4 is now hopelessly broken, and asking for a couple of recent references.

I don't reread the thread, but I will pay attention to someone replying to my comments even after several days.

Also, (not unlike this comment) I'll find myself late to the party and add comments to posts because I believe my thoughts might be relevant.

I actually treat HN comments to be a ledger of sorts. Like other industry forums around the net, it is a collection of some very strong minds on tech-related subjects, and a decent resource to check for opinion or tangential information on all sorts of topics. If there is a discussion on something that I have unique insight to, I will post on long dead threads just to know it was posted.

I'm probably an outlier, and this use case is probably not all that prevalent, but pending comments being purged without endorsements would make this forum unarguably more temporal, for better or worse.

(well I have an inkling and it's spelled pretty clearly in the OP but I fear it may be considered "gratuitous nastiness", to speak my heart)

In my experience, page 2 is inaccessible after carefully scanning page 1 for a minute or two, and maybe clicking on or two links and reading the articles. Some generated link to page 2 expires during the time I'm scanning page 1.

Five years, I thought that was by intent and not some bug. Equally frustrating, but damn.

TLDR: Yes, Virginia, there is a Page 10 of HN. You'll just have to take someone else's word on that.

(they are perfectly fine most of the time, their light-greyness is in fact more of an annoyance than the actually quite rare racist slur)

Several sub-kilo-karma users may realize the same useful and valuable thing to comment (say, a reference link or clarification). They all post this before the first one gets endorsed.

All the others get penalized with a 24 hour no-posting timeout, for contributing a thoughtful/useful post.

(maybe a few of them will eventually get endorsed, so they may suffer a somewhat shorter penalty, at the cost of everybody else seeing duplicate content)

You have any idea how much time I spend sometimes on a comment?

(it can sometimes be quite a bit longer than the average person would on a similar comment, for reasons I don't really want to go into)

The first time one of those gets flushed down the toilet for no other reason than that nobody with >1k karma happened to notice it within 24 hours, I will know not to bother contributing any more.

Sometimes when I make a contribution to an older or less popular thread, I take the trouble anyway because I know there will at least be a few people that see it. Random passers-by, maybe in a few years arriving from some Google search. There's gems there. But I don't like to gamble on whether my post will even be kept around or not.

Downvote, bury, sure. But to delete without ever even being seen?? Well I guess it ties in with the joyful hellbanning theme here, or something.

Now, since we're great guys and girls (having reached 1k karma) we wouldn't do that of course.

I still think slashdot has the least bad large-scale, distributed moderating system I'm aware of -- I think maybe being able to thread and filter on votes/mods is a better approach. Still, it'll be interesting to see how this thing plays out.

For those of us in non-US timezones, it would be nice to be able to post a few comments before having to wait while the site isn't getting much traffic. I would say something like 500 karma = 1 extra comment you can make before getting the previous ones endorsed.

This could be some additional meta-info to add to the 'post stories on Mondays'-"rule"...

I don't think this idea has been thought through enough to deploy.

The above will allow people to submit comments even when the thread has lost its popularity.

On the other hand, I think it'll drop the number of really good comments -- those where commenters go out and lookup a few (possibly obscure, but very interesting) references. Doing that kind of work, just to have the text be deleted with hardly anyone seeing it doesn't seem worth it.

Which brings us back to the question of "What should HN be, for whom -- and how do we achieve that?".

If you really want to make sure that every post gets voted on you may need to do something like that to incentivize endorsements.

There were a handful of people who had multiple points per vote who could swing it drastically away from the 'consensus' if it was wrong, and doing so also penalized the people who voted for it.

We'll see how it goes, but it does sound like it'll likely work against HN being somewhat heterogeneous, and (even more) towards group-think.

I don't understand. The whole point of not being able to post until your previous post is endorsed--which is strictly separate and independent feature from invisible-until-endorsed--would be that people stop and reconsider "hm is this really the best I can do" because if it isn't they'll be muted ... indefinitely?

Or can you delete your own pending comment if it seems that no one is going to endorse it for you?

If not, that's going to become a huge chilling effect on unique thoughts and ideas that may either be controversial, or simply unpopular. Quite a stifling gamble. And even if you do get to remove that post from pending-limbo so you're at least not muted indefinitely, that still means the unique idea hasn't been shared, and in fact has been self-censored.

And will controversial ideas be endorsed? Because you said that endorsing the "wrong" kinds of comments will get your endorsing-rights revoked. I'm assuming, like all moderator-actions on HN, the user will get absolutely no notice or feedback about this.

Endorsing slightly controversial comments will be like feeling your way in the dark, err on the side of caution, better to just endorse comments that align with the perceived HN-groupthink (which may very soon become much realer, with this new system).

This is not a question of "but we have to be better than that", because these processes run on the aggregate of a very large group of people. Very large groups of people are vanishingly unlikely to "be better than that", no matter how clever, smart, talented or well-intentioned their individuals are.

So that will happen.

And that's just the collateral effects regarding content of posts (I say collateral because they are at best orthogonal to the quality of discussion on HN).

Like cperciva points out, if people are going to hesitate posting if they are unsure they'll be stuck in pending-limbo for how long or indefinitely, they are going to adjust their behaviour with regards to all factors that may influence how long it takes before a post gets sufficiently endorsed.

Which includes very irrelevant ones, like whether it's a quiet or new thread. Or, you know, making contact, silly stuff like "drop me a mail at <username>@gmail" between two sub-kilokarma users in a not-very-busy thread, risk locking their commenting privileges for quite a while.

Sorry if I dare to say so, but overlooking all these things, it seems like you just considered only the positive consequences of this big change, and none of the possible negative ones?

Then there's the final big negative one, which I think lacks a bit of self-reflection in order to overlook: HN already is quite the echo-chamber. These new rules are going to make that much worse. If, after a month or two of these new endorsing+feeling-in-the-dark+best-safest-to-conform rules do not make me feel like the quality of discussion turned into an ingrown toenail of monkey-discussion[0], then the most probable conclusion is: HN has turned into this echo-chamber (which seems quite inevitable), except it just so happens to be the kind of echoes I agree with. Which is probably worse than an echo-chamber you disagree with.

Hey, good luck. This community building is hard stuff.

Also watch out for the lure of power and control, it's also "hard stuff", of a different kind.

[0] your new rules are already making me doubt whether this is "gratuitous nastiness" or just a funny visual way of expressing a critique. this saddens me. it also makes me feel a couple of other things which I now don't even dare to express any more. that's bad.

And thank you for working on this!

What would help HN is a system for qualitative feedback to posters who make poor posts. Currently, users notice they are slow or hell banned, have no idea why, and register another account. Why not provide warnings with one or a few preweitten reasons? How about holding banners accountable for their bans, as some seem to ban contrarian viewpoints?

Anyway, good luck with this system. I'm unlikely to spend time writing a comment that may not be seen. I already care less about what I'm writing here, because I discount the chance that it may never go live.

Sometimes I ask a question in the comments, and it gets answered days later. I go through "comments" in my profile periodically to see if someone replied to those. In this process I also see if someone asked my something and reply there as well.

IMHO, HN should have a "private message" feature if comments get policed this hard.

The back and forth comments deep in threads no one reads are some of the most interesting I have had.

On the other hand, if I'm having a useful discussion with someone in an old thread, I often give them an upvote for their troubles as well. It's not like it affects the sorting or anything.

I use http://hnnotify.com/ , and it works incredibly well for this case.

I don't entirely disagree with you guys, but I wonder why these discussions aren't being taken to email (or whatever you kids are using these days) anyhow.

Any time I learn about a new tech or shiny thing, I search for it on HN and read as much of the back and forth as I can. A number of times I've noticed those conversations didn't happen that long ago, even on old threads. Having it there is pretty invaluable to me to get perspective on stuff.

I actually think that coming up with a way of tying those old posts back into the new posts to continue growing those conversations would be nice. (take that as a total aside; I'm really shooting from the hip by even saying that, because any implementation I'd say would be an idea I had uh, well about ten seconds ago, when I suggested it, and it's not really relevant to the point at hand)

HN is primarily a news feed. There is some discussion, but it's topical and very short-lived.

I only mention this because the site seems a lot better once you give up on the notion of it being conversational.

I'm specifically thinking about topical conversations or discussions, where someone asks a question in a thread, or brings up a point and someone else finds it somehow and answers the question, which can lead to a series of enlightening posts/responses.

I like the HN comments because they have people who disagree, as long as the disagreement is civil, informative, and doesn't seem to have too much ego tied up in it. I like the reality check the comments offer.

But, it's not a good fit for the current format. Perhaps if when a thread got too deep, it could collapse and require a reader to actively expand it. That would help support the threads that start to push too far to the right.

But, it's probably better dealt with in a full redesign.

There really needs to be an entirely new kind of discussion forum, something that merges the various strengths of phpBB, IRC, newsgroups, and reddit. I have some ideas on that, but sadly not the time to code it. I hope someone beats me to it.

My ideal place would clearly define types of behavior that were to be discouraged. For instance, I like to err on the side of suppressing vitriol too much, rather than letting it run too much. I like environments where everyone feels like they can try to contribute, or participate, without wondering if it'll come back at them. I have pretty strong feelings about how far that should go, though, and it's usually further than a lot of folks would, or at least, further than a lot of vocal folks would go.

But I guess that's just it. I think generic karma/votes tend to promote a more general idea of what's popular, or fun, but don't necessarily promote a specific well-defined ideal.

Email isn't public discussion.

This is why HN dislikes humorous fluff-posts: they both easily rise to the top, and encourage humorous fluff-replies, which means the first few screenfuls of comments will be guaranteed to induce the kind of "scroll-pain" that makes people close the tab.

I've yet to see any discussion forum solve the problem of long threads with lots of useless fluff floating to the top.

They use a very simple system, collapsing posts after a certain depth, and hiding more comments after a certain number (10, I believe) at the level below the top comment (sorted by score obviously).

It works extremely well, and thanks to the fast JS collapsing, it's not at all a hassle to read a subthread that happened to get collapsed if it piques your interest.

It's so simple it may easily be overlooked in its obviousness, but really you don't need a very complex system that is strictly a lot better than no collapsing at all.

While I'm usually a kind of hard core html-first, ajax/js/webapps later kind of guy -- I'd love for the comments to be served up in a json-blob, with a couple of user-settable preferences ("Show only comments rated higher than N, hide threads with lower (median/mean) rating than N, show all direct replies to my comments -- and similar).

If uninteresting comment threads could start collapsed, that'd be great. But they won't, because humor-fluff and other such things are superstimuli for upvotes, so you can't use anything about the vote tally to determine collapsed-ness. (If there was a secondary voting system--like, say, if enough people collapsing a thread would make it start collapsed for others--this might work. But then you'd have to take into account the people who collapse everything as they read it, to mark their place...)

The problem is, your definitions of what is uninteresting, useless and fluff are subjective, and no more relevant than anyone else's, which leads to a conflict of interests within the community about the bounds of what Hacker News content should and shouldn't be.

I think the models which would satisfy the most people are opt-in, in this case, choosing to collapse threads and ignore users rather than expecting the hivemind to do it for you.

Perhaps if users had a custom set of filters which automatically collapsed threads for them based on their own criteria, that would solve part of the problem. But I don't think it's too much to ask of people to actually take the minor effort to form an opinion on what they read, or curate their own account, if they expect content they don't like to be hidden from themselves and potentially from others.

But for some reason or other pg won't do that.

I know there's some extensions/bookmarklets and I use them, but they can't do the auto-collapsing based on score+amount, the very simple yet elegant algorithm Reddit employs, pretty much the one thing that is absolutely necessary to have a well-usable threaded commenting system.

Instead, pg "just wrote the simplest thing first", or something.

If the worry is that comment threads are too long, HN could implement something like reddit, where you click to read additional comments in a long thread.

eg:

Two commenters X,Y with sub-threshold karma (<1,000) could never have a dialogue (two-way, real-time) as a third party Z would need to endorse their each and every comment.

Two commenters X,Y (Karma 1,000+ each) in substantially different timezones with a-synchronous dialogue (eg, overnight replies) would need a third party z to endorse each and every comment (at least until the other wakes up).

Two commenters X,Y (Karma 1,000+ each) with opposing views, could never have a real-time dialogue without a third party z to endorse each and every comment (unless #)

Hopefully these are at least helpful to dilineate.

# "Thank you sir, can I have another".

When everyone knows that what's being discussed is public, it tends to keep the tone more conversational and clear -- I think. The "feel free to contact me, email in profile"-response seems to work well enough for those that do want a private (albeit not anonymous) conversation?

For example I recently gave a short comment on the PonoPlayer submission that never made it to the front page. For the rare soul that read that submission I indicated the electronics details that indicated how it was distinguished from your usual consumer electronics. That information would be lost from what I see here.

From my own experience, I often won't offer comments unless it seems to me that a contradiction to an existing comment or stream of comments is required, if I feel there is an error. While this system would require best argumentative practice in comments, for clarity and to avoid bias traps and so on, I do hope it doesn't lead to an excess self referentiality.

And keep in mind that an 'iffy' comment may not even be a bad one. It is pretty common on HN for more than one person to make the same basic point as someone else in a reply to a post (because they both started posting around the same time and didn't see the other replies before making their own) but due to either timing and/or karma boost pulling one person to the top, the rest are basically ignored for upvoting -- I can't imagine that situation would be any different for endorsing. Who wants to endorse a post that says the same thing as another post which is already endorsed (but just happened to be posted 30 seconds later, or by someone with less of a karma boost?).

This system seems to skew discussion toward already popular / active topics, though, since there is less risk of being stuck pending there. Perhaps allowing for multiple pending comments per user (with a limit based on karma, or length of time on the site) would make it less "risky" to post comments in unpopular discussions.

Edit: After some observation, it appears to be two hours. I don't want to be pissy about this, but this is what I was worried about in my other comment--you seem to be making this drastic change with no little thought to how it will interact with the systems and behaviors already in place.

1. In a Ask/Show HN post, (which is often similar to a reddit AMA), the OP will not be able to reply to clarifications questions until their previous one is 'endorsed'.

2. Multiple (<1000 karma) people will post very similar response to a question, or other objective comment, since they would not be aware of other pending comments on that thread. This would lead to...

2a. Either moderators endorsing multiple such comments, due to race conditions and stale views during moderation, or

2b. Moderators would endorse the first (or "best") of them, and many people with reasonable comments will be in limbo in the rest of HN, for the fault of writing a similar response to another endorsed poster.

3. (NEW) If a user has something meaningful to say to two different posts, he/she is now more likely to choose the one with more activity since he can't post on both anymore, and he/she wouldn't want to wait for the moderators to see the less active post. As a result, the power law distribution on post activity is going to become even more prominent than before.

I would recommend the following changes:

1. Apply this policy on a per-page basis, rather than on a global HN basis.

2. Allow 2 or 3 pending comments per person, rather than 1. Anyone who needs more than that, and is not getting endorsed at all, is probably trolling or spamming, and can be dealt with other means.

3. Auto-accept pending comments after 24hrs for users with >250 karma (or some other lowish number that filters out absolutely green accounts).

4. Add a "showpending" option. Even if people can't upvote/reply to them, it's democratic to be able to see them.

5. (UPDATE, adding tantalor's suggestion) #1 above can be solved by auto-accepting the OP's comments instantaneously. I would even go further and give endorser rights to the OP on a Ask/Show HN post.

Then again, if their comment does become approved, it will be more visible than under the current system (less noise) and therefore likely to receive more upvotes. Also, their bad comments won't be punished with downvotes.

Today, if you post a comment, someone sees it, and thinks is interesting, they'll upvote it. It seems reasonable that a comment on a fresh story (eg: on the home page) is more likely to be seen, and it might be more likely that a comment will be upvoted while it is still "young".

With the new system, you will get no karma until after some 1k karma curator notices your comment. Being approved (as I understand it) grants you no karma in and off itself, while (as someone else mentioned) normally that approval would've been equal to an upvote before. So if that's the case (easy fix: make upvote=approve) new comments on average earn one less point (so I might end up at .61 average, not 1.61 -- possibly fair indication that I talk too much).

At any rate -- anyone below 1k won't be able to upvote the comment until after approval, I don't know what kind of impact that'll have -- but it certainly means new users come to a substantially different playing field than old ones.

You can remove your pending comment after some time.

It may also have a second order "unintended" consequence over time- People would stop posting shallowly obvious responses, due to the negative feedback of never having them endorsed.

As a penalty, they will have to go back and delete their pending comment from whatever thread they were on, if they came back to HN after a break. cperciva's auto-purge or my auto-accept suggestion partly solves this issue.

I suppose preferably you'd link it somehow, so that the author of a "redundant" comment would get a "deemed redundant due to: <list of> comment<s>.

Why list: maybe 1kkarma-user #1 found commend x to be best, #2 found y to be best, and both found your comment, z, to not be best.

My idea of having a "mark reduntant" feature, is simply to aid an author in checking if he or she agrees that the (entire) comment is indeed redundant -- and to provide somewhat constructive feedback (no, your comment wasn't bad, you were just too slow, and in the interest of conciseness, it is considered redundant).

It does feel a bit strange keeping to defend the slashdot moderation system -- but it already has a "redundant" moderation -- and fwiw afaik it is the least bad community moderating system for discussions.

As I've alluded to elsewhere, I think there might be a bit of a disconnect between parts of the users (including ycombinator as curator) as to what hn is and/or should be. On the one hand there is some strong leanings towards not being a discussion forum at all, "just" a news-site -- on the other hand I think there's tacit agreement that the only thing that sets hn apart is it's community. I'm not sure how we can expect to have community without free, many-way, constructive communication.

And I'm not sure how pending comments would help strengthen the news part, or the discussion part of what hn is today.

Again, I'd very much like to see a problem statement, before a fix is proposed (or even worse, introduced).

On one hand, it doesn't subtract from your karma, but on the other it may discourage you from posting in the future.

Threads are cluttered enough as it is, and the idea isn't to encourage good faith efforts, but to improve comment quality.

I see this new feature as being a reason I stop participating altogether. I get not wanting reddit like comments and threads, but I fear this swings too much towards a "good old boys" club.

But, I mean, it's your button, use it how you want.

That alone reduces the positive impact of this change, and keeps the negative. Eh. Less interested in this than I was.

Since vote count of posts was hidden, there hasn't really been a way to tell how many people agree with a viewpoint other than similar comments.

Maybe even only for articles on the front page.

Currently, the downvote button is only supposed to be used for unproductive comments - drivel, and the like. Of course, people use it to show their disagreement (even though that's not how it's meant to be used).

As a result, people that post controversial or minority opinions often get downvoted, even if their comments are well-thought out. This effect is less noticeable on Hacker News than on some subreddits (/r/politics is one of the worst), but it's noticeable to someone who reads Hacker News regularly.

I fear that this is going to exacerbate this effect. We can establish rules for which comments should be endorsed, just like we establish rules for which should be downvoted, but in other forums, the way that these tools are used in practice oftentimes do not match the stated guidelines.

EDIT: Also, I'm not entirely sure why this is preferable to simply allowing users to automatically hide comments below a certain score. Unless there really is a significant difference between the views of users with > 1000 karma and the rest, the "endorse" button is not fundamentally different from an upvote, is it? (In principle, not in implementation).

No, that's wrong. Downvoting for disagreement is how downvoting is meant to be used, as pg has made clear on HN many times over the years.

[I edited the previous sentence to make it less ambiguous.]

The confusion persists because Reddit's rules are different, and people remember those and mistakenly assume they apply to HN.

The idea that downvoting for disagreement is not legitimate is a classic instance of the canonical invasive species on HN, the Redditism.

If you get downvoted, that kinda feels bad, if you get upvoted, that kinda feels good. It shapes your discussion and teaches you the rules of what the community finds acceptable/unacceptable.

What is the honest to god pragmatic result of this policy?

You're training people not to say something others disagree with.

Even if you don't agree with that, downvote to disagree causes pragmatic problems outside of training! Consider a discussion where someone starts off with an unpopular view, and then an interesting discussion happens back and forth between two parties discussing that position. Downvote to disagree hides that discussion.

If so, you should be able to find three examples. Can I please see them? Specifically, three comments that aren't in any way rude, downvoted for expressing an unpopular view?

The reason I'm curious is that I try to watch out for that, yet have only seen one comment recently which seemed to me downvoted purely for expressing an unpopular opinion, and even it was somewhat borderline.

> You're training people not to say something others disagree with.

That's not true if most such comments get more upvotes than downvotes.

here:

this was 15 days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7381397

> That's not true if most such comments get more upvotes than downvotes.

so it's not true were training people to keep unpopular opinions to themselves, because if those opinions will also be upvoted... because why? Because people don't agree with them? What?

Remember, HN doesn't even show the vote counts on posts, so you can't extract hardly any agreement-disagreement info from a post (other than it's not so bad as to be downvoted to oblivion). The true and important function of the votes is to control visibility.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691

http://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

However, if you want to use reason, it is clearly the case that under this view then the voting and karma is a misnomer and little more than a way to stifle dissent. It's good thing, I think, that most don't hold this view.

It makes it true that it's the site policy, yes.

Um, no. You downvote when a comment doesn't contribute. If you disagree then you can state it and if that contributes it can get upvoted too.

What's interesting is how the opposite gets repeated far more often, usually in an authoritative tone, as if the speaker had just consulted a rulebook.

Despite your relative long-standing I'll bow to your claim of factuality and request citation of that fact?

I wouldn't say it's ever been agreed on; I'm pretty sure people disagreed about this from day one. And downvoted each other about it :)

Indeed the first link says in part:

>"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement."

Which reads to me as having an implicit "also to express agreement" especially in the context of the thread. The thread consensus appears to favour not downvoting for mere disagreement (but I would say that !).

In the past when we had votes visible we'd have been able to tell better the general consensus from that information.

So, I upvoted you for making your point well; presumably you downvoted me as you disagreed.

My memory is simply that PG always said downvoting for disagreement was fine and many users have always thought he made the wrong call. Still, it's his site, so his call to make.

The interesting thing to me is how confident these users are that they're quoting the site rules, when really they're contradicting them, de facto if not de jure. Just like a lot of us Canadians think that famous U.S. laws (e.g. Miranda rights) apply here, because we've seen them many times on TV, so a lot of HNers assume that this Reddit rule exists on HN.

> presumably you downvoted me as you disagreed

Couldn't! Also wouldn'tve.

It's not his. He certainly has a lot of control over it though. Debate/Culture isn't owned by those who facilitate it. I find the idea that this is solely pg's plaything to be damaging.

>quoting the site rules //

De facto standards don't necessarily have documented support. Down-voting for disagreement seems fundamentally wrong [to me] on any site intended to be more than an echo chamber - unless there is a parallel means to promote quality - combined with the established [it seems amongst many long term users] and upheld viewpoint of voting for quality causes me to promulgate that position.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589#up_1006808

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683#up_658691

My takeaway has been that HN does not have Reddit's "don't downvote people just because you think that they are wrong" rule. Interestingly, PG's observation that people do not tend to downvote people who's comments are already gray does not seem to be true at all on reddit.

So downvoting "1TB of data can easily be uploaded over a 20Mbps connection" (Takes 4.8 days, versus a 20 MegaBytes ps connection, which takes ~14 hours and while not easy, is at least more feasible) -- should be ok. But a comment with correction would normally be better...

Downvoting someone for saying that they prefer working in Eclipse (just because I prefer vim) doesn't seem very useful?

If I state that "chocolate is better than vanilla", and you disagree with me, it's not really that you think I am incorrect; you simply just disagree with me.

However if I state that I think "[country] will do [something] in Crimea", then you might disagree with me because you do think that I am incorrect. However in that case, because my statement was speculative, there isn't a strong sense of "objectively correct or incorrect".

I think that most 'disagreements' in online conversations are closer to the second than the first.

Downvoting the incorrect post is valid but as you say it would be more useful to provide a correction post.