What's more, since people with under 1000 karma can't fully participate because unlike high-karma users they can't see if their comment duplicates someone else's and will get stuck in limbo as a result, it's going to be rather difficult for them to reach the 1000 karma threshold - certainly more difficult than it is now.
I'm sure there are different types of HN users, but I would never have reached 1k karma by submitting stories. I go to HN to read news, not make news. Now, that might be good or bad, depending on your perspective.
I guess my point is that it will be much harder to reach 1,000 karma by commenting. Since it seems like this is board wide and not story based then you really need to think which of two or more interesting stories you are going to comment on.
> it's going to be rather difficult for them to reach the 1000 karma threshold - certainly more difficult than it is now.
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.
I don't have any numbers, but lets try to reason about this anyway.
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.
