That sounds like a waste of time for the non-winning comment writer (especially if they could have seen the situation comin from the beginning like now). People put time and effort in their comments; I suspect they don't want to play quality lottery with it.

I'm not convinced the idea (pending comments) is a good one -- partly because I think it may lead to wasting time, as you say (and at least one other commenter touched on, can't seem to find the comment right now) -- and so increasing the "risk" associated with writing especially good comments (I tend to spend a few minutes if I need to look up links references -- who's to say someone didn't start writing a similar comment, a few minutes ahead of me, but haven't published it (or gotten it approved) by the time I hit "reply"?

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).