
Pending Comments - dbaupp
https://news.ycombinator.com/pending
======
nanidin
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.

~~~
deftnerd
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.

~~~
RyanZAG
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.

~~~
hueving
>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.

~~~
ak39
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](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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> 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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies)

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

~~~
amputect
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".

~~~
thaumasiotes
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.

------
pg
Pending comments are now per thread, or more precisely per item tree, rather
than sitewide. That was the original plan, and it turned out to be only a
little more code. The moderator (who is not me) will turn pending comments on
as needed when conversations turn nasty.

That doesn't happen on most threads, but it does happen on some, and pending
comments may help fix the problem. I'm not sure it will. The moderator will
have to experiment to see what works. But since the code was slightly
complicated I wanted at least to get the initial version done before I left.

~~~
chunky1994
> _The moderator (who is not me) will turn pending comments on as needed when
> conversations turn nasty_

Does this mean that they are not enabled by default?

~~~
pg
Yes.

~~~
guiambros
This is great.

I was concerned with the idea of site-wide pending comments, as it could have
a chilling effect on controversial ideas, and water down discussions. Or,
worse, eliminate comments past the front page, as no one would want to risk
being blocked from further commenting.

You could alleviate the problem by allowing people to delete pending comments,
but it's like asking people to sacrifice their own creations. It would make me
think twice before spending time to comment next time.

Having this disabled by default, and enabling only on particularly
controversial threads (that tend to bring the majority of low-quality
comments) solves most of these problems.

I think this is the best approach. A good balance between negative flagging,
and positive endorsement.

------
RogerL
I am currently spending my life working on signal processing - constructing a
story of what is happening in the world from sensor data. And you know what -
noise is good. You would perhaps think that the thing to do is to turn on the
filters, crank 'em up, and don't ever let a noisy bit of data through.

But, of course, that does not work. Noise is helpful. It's still signal. I can
construct more information from a noisy signal than an overly filtered one.

Back to forums, I was a participant in several for a different niche area. One
was obsessed with post 'quality' \- a horde of moderators swarming around,
then after awhile they'd comb through every thread, deleting every comment
they found not worthy so they would have some kind of pristine archive, and so
on.

They utterly failed. Oh, they are still trundling along. But the sites with
the industry leaders posting? Those are the ones with far less concern with
'quality'. Why would an expert spend time crafting an answer to somebody when
it is likely or possible that it will either not get approved to show up, or
later deleted? It made no sense to them, they vocally complained, were again
and again told this was for the greater good, and so they all left. Now, if
you want to talk to an expert, you go to one of the other forums; if you want
to talk to a complete amateur, but with never a post off topic, well, you go
to the controlled one. You'll get terrible advice, or no advice at all, but
hey, it's civil and on topic.

I've concluded nothing about HN yet, but I don't forsee myself clicking away,
endorsing post after post. This is mostly a 'consume' site for me, and
occasionally, post. I don't want to spend my time endorsing and clicking away.
I'll upvote once in a while, and almost never downvote. I can't see that
changing much. I can't see posting anymore; I am giving you value (or trying
to), and you hold it hostage. Ya, okay, if that is how you feel, I'll go
elsewhere. I recognize that sounds petulant, but back to the site in the first
paragraph - a lot of people stopped posting because so much did not survive
the great purges that went on. Why go to this effort if others will silence
you?

Noise is not the enemy of quality. It is not the enemy of value. It's a
wonderful side effect of free thinking, innovative thinking, of creation, of
invention. It's messy, it's beautiful. I love noise for what it represents.
Long live noise.

~~~
grannyg00se
I really appreciate the sentiment here, but at the same time I don't want to
see a thread with five hundred comments that say

    
    
        This.
    

Or whatever trendy catch phrase is floating around the mindspace that month.
And this system differs from what you describe in that there will be no set
group of moderators. The community itself will decide what it wants to see and
encourage the type of contribution it deems valid.

~~~
RogerL
We don't have that problem here.

Notice my argument was not for anarchy. Back to signal processing for a
moment, I used 'noise' loosely. Signals of interest have noise and signal
interspersed. It is often trivial to filter out pure noise, such as white
noise. In forums, our white noise is 'this' comments, and we trivially filter
those out with downvoting, and I suspect it is not particularly hard to write
some lisp code to require endorsement for, say, one word or one sentence
replies, and prevent the 'post' button from working if the text is 'this' in
any variant.

But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is
not noise. It is signal. Sure, there may be snarkiness there, or not the most
civil tone, but we have doing a good job of handling that on a personal level
- in the form of replies such as "RogerL, your post, while interesting, is a
bit negative. We strive for better here". I see that all the time (well, not
addressed to me, but you know what I mean). That is wonderful. Regardless,
there is still a lot of signal there. I have my settings set so that I can see
hellbanned people. They are all posting things of value, even the one person
with the religious content occasionally posts something worth reading.

It is true that there will be no set group of moderators. I don't see how that
changes the fundamental equation, but it might. As I said, I haven't formed
any solid conclusion, but my gut reaction is that I don't think I feel like
participating in endorsement.

If we have a quality problem, it is one of submissions, of bad titles, not of
'this' comments.

~~~
mbesto
I read your original well-thought post, really insightful. My counterpoint is
that you perhaps failed to address if noise is even the problem. IMO noise is
_not_ the problem on HN, it's the dilution of signalling on HN.

There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote. In order
for this to work, you need a (1) mechanism for the an individual to tell the
community that a particular story or comment is worth it to the community (we
have this, but it's partially broken on stories since you can't downvote, only
flag) and (2) you need a community that is motivated to protect the community.

The problem I see is number 2. The community is now full of people who don't
want the community to succeed - they want themselves to succeed. Are there
people who want to see the community as a whole progress, sure. But as the
community grows it means more people trying to climb the ladder (karma) and
gain more influence. Influence is powerful here, we can't simply pretend it
doesn't exist.

> _But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that
> is not noise. It is signal._

It depends on what you're measuring. A paragraph of time doesn't mean the post
isn't any higher value to someone. If I'm at a rock festival and the stage
that Nickelback are on is louder than the one that Rolling stone is at, it
doesn't mean I necessarily want to hear Nickelback. IMO, without curators,
it's pretty much impossible for human beings to even discern their own signal-
to-noise ratios. Maybe I might hear that one Nickelback song and fall in love,
I don't know?

EDIT: grammar

~~~
300bps
_There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote._

There are actually three. Upvotes, downvotes and moderation. The moderators
seem to be very active on HN. Turn on the "Show Dead" option on your account
and you'll see a half dozen people every day that post comments, blissfully
unaware that nobody is ever seeing them. Many of them are actually insightful
comments, but because they posted something that rubbed someone the wrong way
at some point in the past, they're hellbanned for eternity.

This particular account of mine is about a year old, has almost 4,000 comment
karma and it seems to have been slowbanned a few months ago. I have no idea
what I might have done to get a slowban and honestly just suffer through the
10-12 second page loads when I'm logged in. If I'm not logged in, I get
subsecond page load times. If I'm logged in with an alternate account, I get
the same subsecond page load times. It's only when I'm logged in with this
particular ID that I get 10-12 second page load times.

From what I can see, moderation is the far bigger influence of identifying
signals on HN than up/down voting.

------
pg
I'm turning off pending comments for now, because I'm going to bed and I don't
like the idea of something this new running without me being able to watch it.

One thing I noticed while it was turned on was that the comments were actually
pretty good. It may be that bad comments tend to be concentrated on particular
threads, and that the right way to implement pending comments is per-thread
rather than site-wide. That was actually the original plan, but it was simpler
to implement site-wide, and I usually try to do the simplest thing first, in
case it works.

~~~
obituary_latte
What's "it"? What is the problem that you all are trying to solve? I have
showdead on, and maybe 2% of the comments I see are unreadable-grey.

Pending what? Approval? By whom? Sounds scary. Perhaps I missed the tps
report. If so, sorry. But as an outsider who spends a lot of time here (work;
analogue; fortuitous), I can't wait to have the comments here that I've come
to love be editorialized by some cabal of power users.

Simple indeed.

~~~
spiralganglion
There is a large discussion on the subject here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761)

~~~
whatevsbro
Summary: Censorship by group-think. Unharmonious comments will just never be
seen.

~~~
deveac
Meh. Site has up and down votes as well, along with flags. This is just
another effort to keep the crap level down and quality up. If you've got
something to say, you can say it in a way that isn't inflammatory or low
value. This is a privately held gathering place, and if the price for absolute
lack of censorship is comments and rhetoric that incite, inflame, go off
topic, or otherwise just make this gathering place worse, then they can be
shown the door. No virtue in that with respect to a private space with high
value conversation as one of its premier objectives IMHO.

~~~
wpietri
I think "inflammatory" is often situational, individual.

I'm not personally worried. I'm seen as an insider. As Louis CK says, "How
many advantages can one person have?" [1]

But people who aren't part of the HN tribe already think they're treated
unfairly here, and from what I read on Twitter, they're confident that this
change will only increase the level of groupthink by making sure their
comments never get even seen.

Personally, I think that comments that incite and inflame are often useful. I
agree that there's plenty of pure dickishness here, and I'd love to see that
go. But sometimes comments are upsetting because they contain uncomfortable
truth. Sometimes we skate on by the polite statement when a passionate
outburst will force to see things through someone else's eyes.

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4f9zR5yzY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4f9zR5yzY)

~~~
deveac
I understand your point, but for a long time the tougher nut to crack for
online forums has been quality, staying on topic, and not derailing the
discussion by being uncivil or hostile.

One of the nice things about HN is that users are rather blunt in their
critiques. I think the gatekeepers (>1k karma) will generaly do a good job
separating frankness from hostility.

At any rate, it's an interesting experiment and I'm truly curious to see how
it plays out.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Why do you need on-topic when you have threading. What you need is collapsible
threads; thread OT _for you_ then collapse and move on.

------
meursault334
I was driving back from meeting with my co-founder so came late to the party.
I posted then deleted this in the old thread.

As a long time lurker and reader of HN I really hope that you reconsider this
change. I made an account just to explain why I dread the impact of this
change on the quality, openness, and character of discourse at HN.

Put bluntly this change inspires a visceral feeling of loss and disappointment
in me. I have viewed HN as a community where anyone can participate fully if
they have something useful to say. This change feels like it will destroy this
character of HN and turn it into a system where elites will have all the
knowledge of a discussion and the rest of us will not. They will be able to
incorporate ideas into their own posts before others can and can choose which
ideas get general airtime. Particularly in low traffic stories this feels
unjust and noninclusive.

I really enjoy reading the comment threads at HN and some of the best comments
come as replies to comments that are unlikely to get endorsed in this system.
This is because this system contains powerful disincentives for approving
anything other than comments that will universally be viewed as high quality.
If you approve enough comments that are viewed as low quality by moderators
you will lose your ability to even view non approved comments and therefore
your ability as an elite to fully participate in discourse at HN.

When this goes live hopefully people will be very very liberal with approving
comments and people will do the public service of approving most comments in a
pending global queue quickly. For me it will be very sad that I cannot read
the lone, often very informative, comment to a story that will never make it
to the front page but that nonetheless I and other lurkers want to see any
response at all to the story. I am willing to read the trolls if I am allowed
to read those who will be neglected by +1000 karma users.

~~~
ronyeh
I agree that sometimes the best comments are replies to otherwise "bad"
comments, simply because the person replying is trying to correct/educate the
bad commenter.

It's similar to Cunningham's Law – "the best way to get the right answer on
the Internet is ... to post the wrong answer."

So by banishing all "bad" comments to the forever-pending state, perhaps this
won't encourage the "better" commenters to come out of the woodwork to correct
him/her.

------
Bud
I like pg constantly thinking of ways to improve the site.

But in my opinion, this is going to kill a lot of real-time commentary on
posts that are only moderately popular, and it will kill discussion on
scrolled-off posts almost completely, for obvious reasons.

I think pg is overestimating the number of >1000 karma users who are actively
available to moderate and interested in moderating at any given time. This
number needs to be fairly sizable for this system to work. I doubt it's very
sizable at all.

~~~
gk1
I could be wrong, but I think the karma threshold for endorsing has been
lowered. I'm at ~850 and I'm able to endorse comments.

~~~
kafkaesque
Yup. I'm at 935 points and I can endorse comments. I feel like this is going
to be such a dilemma for me, and HN, as a community, will soon discuss what
really can be endorsed, even though PG already set some rules.

I feel bad that comments posted just to say they agree with someone/something
cannot/will not be seen. This type of 'noise', as long as it is sprinkled
lightly throughout, isn't so bad, in my opinion. I mean, I understand HN is
meant to reward thoughtful comments, but at what point does this concept go
into Less Wrong-type of ridiculousness? I'm totally not trolling, but we're
only human. To deconstruct all aspects of a community/forum to only allow
strict logical/cerebral behaviour seems like a community I would rather not be
a part of.

In the end, I'll probably not endorse any comments, or at least extremely
little, because I don't know if I agree with the concept and would rather not
get involved.

I'm probably in the minority here, though.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
> I feel bad that comments posted just to say they agree with
> someone/something cannot/will not be seen.

Unfortunately, most of my comments of this nature are replies to unpopular
comments. I feel no need to tell someone I like their work if everyone else is
already doing the same. However, this system may make comments designed to be
read by only one other person a thing of the past.

~~~
maxerickson
If you don't have a thought to go with your agreement, just push the up arrow.
I agree it isn't the same thing but I see the point of hiding relatively
superficial stuff on a site with so many comments.

If you have something to say, even something fairly light, I expect it will
still get unpended.

------
xmonkee
I'll be honest, this just makes me feel terrible. I like to think of HN as the
one online community where the comments are usually on point and there's no
"power user" bullshit going on.

Slashdot devolved into irrelevant memes by their moderation point system.
Every Subreddit eventually becomes an echo chamber. Only on hacker news can
you find very divergent opinions expressed side by side without banning,
censoring, downvoting or trolling. I'm not saying that pending comments will
destroy that, but I already while writing this comment I'm worried about being
liked by the big guys. New people with valid opinions who might not know how
to appeal to the site's group-think will have a bad time. People with poor
language skills will have a bad time. And of course, jokes will have a bad
time, and too much seriousness can just as surely dry up a forum as too much
frivolity.

~~~
vl
>there's no "power user" bullshit going on Sometimes it's possible to notice
that moderation is pretty heavy. For example, during recent "Satoshi identity
discovered" debacle after brief period it was conspicuously absent from HN.
I.e. I estimated that on any given day I would see one or two posts on the
topic on the front page, but it wasn't the case. So my theory is that this
topic was heavily moderated.

~~~
Houshalter
You may be correct, but I doubt it's due to moderators abusing their power. HN
has an automated moderation system that is pretty arbitrary. It applies pretty
heavy penalties to articles that have too many comments, or posts with certain
keywords (like "nsa" and possibly "bitcoin".) Plus there is a regular spam
filter that might be less than perfect, and I don't think the posts it filters
are shown '[dead]'.

------
ChrisGaudreau
I've been on HN for a long time, but I am using a different account now.

I think it's pretty bad that I have to prefix my argument with that. The
outcome of this change will be to alienate new users or get them to suck up to
older users long enough to boost their karma beyond noob-level. HN will become
much more of an echo chamber.

Beyond that, are HN comments really that bad? There may be a few people who
_just know_ that HN is turning into Reddit. If you believe that, go read a few
comments on Reddit and then read a few comments on HN.

------
omegaham
For now, things are going to be pretty silly, as everyone is paying attention
to it and probably just endorsing for the hell of it. My guess is that PG
started with the threshold being _really_ low, meaning that a single
endorsement will actually post the comment and that an endorser needs very
little karma to give a good comment. As the karma and endorsements required go
up, it will become harder and harder for bad posts to actually become
viewable.

I really like this way of doing it; it starts off with the default HN and then
makes the filter more and more selective.

~~~
pg
That is exactly the plan. To prevent the change from being too disruptive I
set all the parameters controlling pending comments very loose.

I know a lot of people are worried that this will break HN socially. I frankly
am relieved it didn't break HN literally. The new code touches so many things.
I'm amazed it works. But if it does seem to be breaking HN socially, we'll
tweak it till it doesn't, and if that's impossible, we'll turn it off. I'm not
wedded to having pending comments. I just wanted to try it to see if it can
eliminate the very worst comments.

~~~
alecsmart1
We already have upvoting/downvoting of comments. Why do we need to moderate
each and every comment? A non-popular post will have no comments at all as all
will be pending and no 1000+ karma users to endorse the comments. :(

~~~
dsrguru
Or, if the purpose is to have high karma users function as semi-moderators,
why not just keep the upvote/downvote system but make a comment's precedence a
function of weighted upvotes based on the karma of those voters? I guess that
still wouldn't prevent a very deep off-topic tangent off of an ancestor post
that's high up on the page, but it seems like a simpler and safer solution
with much less potential downside, and there are always specific solutions to
the above problem such as collapsable threads.

~~~
eslaught
You mean page rank for comments?

------
downandout
Are spam and irrelevant comments really a huge issue here? I have been on here
for over two years, and if it is a problem, it is one that I am blind to.

I don't see myself or many of the others with 1000+ karma as the kind of
people that would enjoy acting as HN police, and it seems like it will
introduce internet politics to a community that has managed to avoid it. The
net effect of this, IMO, will be that very few comments get endorsed and the
quality and breadth of discussion will diminish.

Finally, while we are talking about new ideas, I would love it if HN would
track and display not only the net points a comment receives, but also the
actual number of upvotes/downvotes. A controversial comment may have 1 net
point, but may also have had 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes. Being able to see if
a comment I posted was really interesting to people but opinion was divided,
or that no one voted and thus the comment simply wasn't that interesting to
others, would be be great.

~~~
Gormo
Likewise. HN seems already to have some of the highest-quality discussion on
the internet, and I attribute that to a lot of other factors besides the
gamified mechanics of voting/endorsements/etc.

The sites that attempt to overstructure and gamify discussion to excess end up
suppressing the capacity for emergent conversation and undermining the
development of coherent community. I almost never visit StackExchange sites
anymore, because interacting with their convoluted discussion mechanics is too
much of a chore to be worth the constrained, limited payoff. I really hope HN
doesn't go that route, because there's really not much else like it on the
internet.

~~~
3rd3
I am curious what you think is so bad about SE? Are there people that
contribute only for Internet points and prevent healthy communities from
developing by doing so?

~~~
Gormo
SE sites are heavily straightjacketed. There's way too much procedural cruft
that makes it very hard to just have a straightforward discussion: arbitrary
standards of topicality, complex voting mechanics, distinct answer-acceptance
mechanics, distinctions between comments and answers, reputation badges,
multiple types of reputation scores, convoluted hierarchies of participation
privileges dependent on those scores, excessive moderation, etc.

By attempting to heavy-handedly shoehorn discussion into a very narrow Q&A
paradigm, SE drastically limits the kind of open-ended discourse that makes
online communities worth participating in.

And the reality is that I can find answers to specific, objective questions
just as easily on Reddit or the myriad topic-specific discussion forums across
the web, without having to jump through hoops to do it.

------
wildpeaks
Basically, that turns HN into politics ? Because 1000+ commenters get to
choose between:

\- upvote and take the risk that other cliques will tag that as not worthy of
an upvote, punishing both the commenter and yourself, possibly even pushing
you back into the powerless silent majority.

\- don't upvote: don't take risks, only grind up hoping others will take risks
for you.

Sounds like it kills most discussions and only radical threads between cliques
will remain :(

So given that will probably be my last comment here if that change remain,
what other sites would you guys suggest as HN alternatives?

~~~
clarry
lobste.rs

~~~
Pacabel
How is that an alternative that addresses the issues wildpeaks has raised,
though? If anything, the invitation scheme over there just amplifies the sort
of problems wildpeaks mentions.

------
KingJellybean
In the AskHN thread I made, only one person responded to it, but it was VERY
USEFUL.

Would Pending Comments have hidden that post from me? (I am assuming not many
other people saw or cared about my thread) If so, then this policy seems like
a big step towards focusing discussion to only what is on the front page.

------
oskarth
There's an interesting meta pattern here. pg has obviously thought a lot about
this change, he's the creator of HN and he's the one who knows the site the
best. All pg is saying is this: _let 's try it out and see if it works as
intended_. That is, it is an experiment, and reality is the ultimate judge.

If you look in this thread, the original thread, or the latest poll you see a
different attitude. It's not viewed as an experiment where reality will be the
judge at all. Instead the comments basically boils down to "This is good." or
"This is bad.", plus a few technical questions.

How come so few people think of it in terms of an experiment? Isn't this the
supposed standard m.o. for startups as well as for coding?

Is it just that people who have the wait-and-see attitude don't comment, so
all we hear about is from the vocal crowd? (This was the case for me before
writing this post.) Is it some form of domain dependence going on here? I find
this to be a very curious pattern.

~~~
ElDiablo666
It just doesn't make sense to test every bad idea and lament that fact as some
kind of opposition to scientific curiosity and inquiry.

------
georgemcbay
There is way too little context in most of the comments in pending comments
for me to decide if they should be endorsed, I really can't imagine scrolling
through that page and then clicking 'parent', etc to figure out the context;
particularly during rush hours when I'm already worried any click I make on
this site might result in seeing the "HN Status" twitter history page.

~~~
ma2rten
There is a bug on this comment. It says [pending], but there is no
endorsements button, it says endorsed instead.

~~~
mortenjorck
I'm attempting to endorse georgemcbay's reply to your comment, but it just
sends me to the reply page.

------
fuddle
1000 Karma points seems quite high. I've been here 3 years and I've only got
115 points!

~~~
vacri
I've been here three years and have 9000 points. We have a similar karma
average, so our comments are basically seen as the same quality. If you want
community privileges, then contribute to the community! :)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Shouldn't it be about quality of contribution far more than quantity? If your
quality is high then you should get equal privileges with those who merely
contribute a lot (like me, my av. is down to 1.6 because I can't help but have
my say ...).

~~~
vacri
It is. A commentor who only makes 10 comments worth 100 points each is valued
as much as a commentor that's made 100 comments valued at 10 points.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
A commenter that makes 3 comments valued at 300 points isn't valued as much as
commenter who makes 2002 posts at an average of 0.5 points each though.

~~~
vacri
Such examples would be in the extreme edges of the bell curve though, and
rules designed to suit those rarities are often not suitable for the people in
the main part of the curve.

And even so, a single commentor that only has 3 comments might make valuable
comments when they pipe up, but the 2000-commentor is more a part of the
community simply for having more frequent conversations.

You say you have a low average and therefore aren't as valuable a community
member, but I recognise your handle and have a general idea of the flavour of
your previous comments. In business parlance, you have 'brand recognition' :).
If some wunderkind blows in tomorrow and posts a couple of popular posts
(popular gets the votes, not insightfulness) and afterwards departs or lurks
forever, I'm not going to remember them or their 'flavour', despite the high
average. They might have made an interesting observation, but they wouldn't be
as strong a part of the community as yourself.

Besides, getting back to context, who would I trust more when it comes to this
'endorsement' process, silly as it is? Someone who breezes in and out and
mostly lurks, or someone for whom talking on the site is a frequent occurence
and who knows the ins-and-outs of it? A lurker is an unknown quantity, but for
someone to hit [number] karma, they generally have to have chatted or posted a
bit (a few exceptions, sure).

------
virtualwhys
Certainly runs of the risk of removing dissenting opinion from the mix, which
is unfortunate.

For example, if language X has had a new release with a bunch of features and
someone posts the announcement to HN, language X users will typically form the
majority of the comment pool.

Now, when someone comes along that feels differently about language X and the
direction it's going in, foundation, etc., naturally the dissenting opinion
will be suppressed as pro language X users will be incentivized to not promote
the comment, no matter how constructive the comment is, and the dissenter will
therefore need to rely on members of the minority (dissenters) to come to the
rescue, so to speak, in order for the comment to go live.

I prefer to see the _whole_ picture, if something comes up on HN it's
important to see the pros and cons, not just the pros of the pro-X-posting
crowd (i.e. clique affect).

Gut reaction is thumbs down, comment quality on HN is generally quite good,
but PG must have seen a need (or had an itch) to implement pending comments.

We'll see how it plays out

p.s. seems a little heavy handed for the under 1000 karma crowd, which must
quite large...

------
sthatipamala
One problem I foresee: It is hard to judge some comments without context,
which the pending comments page does not provide.

------
teawithcarl
For a different perspective on "single truths" \- please read Ward
Cunningham's research on Federated Wiki's.

Ward invented the wiki itself, and years later invented the Federated Wiki to
allow unlimited truth forks, so that Wikipedia would not require expunging any
viewpoint. In other words, all "truth tree" branches remain valid. Branchs may
be sorted by up/down voting, but they may not be struck by editors.

To me a better HN would allow a multitude of HN's (think colors) ... where
anyone applying time/effort could edit an HN truth fork. Thereby, people might
say, which color of HN do you read? "My favorite is green", might be a typical
reply.

My sense is that PG thinks of HN as top down authority driven, and therefore
refuses to open HN to public editorship, even though there's a way to do it
and truly improve comment quality, rather than just adding this new layer of
winner take all.

More deeply, I believe PG has tired of building HN, and is looking for an
honest way out. To me, that means abandoning the 4th-5th most important
startup in YC history (up there with Airbnb in importance), and the all too
familiar slow degradation of startup quality as they get bigger.

I have always felt that YC is a dictatorship, and that "peak HN" and "peak YC"
have already occurred. Accordingly, an open approach to HN, where public
editors might flourish was never likely.

Two links on Ward Cunningham's ideas -

TED Talk:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdwLczSgvcc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdwLczSgvcc)

Wired article: [http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/wiki-
inventor/](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/wiki-inventor/)

------
maximgsaini
When the elites are allowed censor "bad" voices, it ends up hurting progress.
The elites of the middle ages did the same to the "bad" voices defying the
clergy. The elites in Afghanistan do the same to the "bad" and "immoral"
voices demanding freedom for women.

The brain plays tricks on you and makes you believe that your perception/ideas
are "good", while those opposing you are 'bad'. Letting humanity play into the
hands of this cognitive bias of the elites or the majority. Nothing worse for
progress. We could've come much further had it not been for this.

If no one in the 'elite' club thinks that my ideas are 'good', does that mean
my ideas are wrong?

It has been and will be bad science to suppress "bad"/"crazy"/"stupid" ideas.
"Bad" of today might be the status quo tomorrow. Interfering with this
evolution is "bad". No matter how smart you think you are.

------
EGreg
I will post another comment.

This is the problem with centralization. A service that is centralized in the
hands of the person or organization hosting it leaves all the power in their
hands to change the rules on a whim. We are lucky that pg is reasonable and
cares about feedback. Remember what happened with the facebok newsfeed? Also,
democracies don't mitigate all the problems of centralization. Facebook even
attempted to have a vote on the new privacy features, heavily promoted it, but
had a ridiculously low turnout. Most people don't spend their time on sites
trying to govern them, but simply use the tool.

Compare this to decentralized systems like git or the web. Any particular
publisher's decision is mitigated by the fact that the audience is small. Even
if this while site disappeared tomorrow, the web would continue to exist. Can
such a principle be implemented for communities in general?

Yes. But it requires open source software to be installed and published by
many people, and clients could interact with publicly signed versions of
servers (or their plugins). The key question here is who is trying to protect
whom and why.

When a small group forms (such as the discussion thread) the participants are
the most interested party, and if the host changes something from what they
expected they should be able to fork the discussion and easily continue it
somewhere else.

On the other hand, a publisher who is interested in trying out a new (version
of a) plugin can install it and see people's reactions. If they like it, they
may start more discussions hosted by this publisher.

But the key to a "free market" in improvements is the switching cost. People
should be able to easily move the entire discussion somewhere else in case the
particular installation has been sabotaged.

Ideally such distributed software could be a bitcoin agent.

------
jliechti1
The new system is live. Would it make sense to add a permanent "pending" link
to the top navigation bar?

HN users with > 1000 karma. Will you actively spend time to endorse new
comments?

~~~
icelancer
>HN users with > 1000 karma. Will you actively spend time to endorse new
comments?

Yes, while I regularly read HN. I'm not going to go out of my way or anything,
though.

~~~
ma2rten
Same here.

------
deftnerd
Doesn't this remove HN from being protected by Section 230 of the
Communications Decency Act if every comment is now screened by a human?

There could be serious liability issues to think about.

~~~
dfc
Are we reading the same thing:

[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230)

And if you are referring to case law what decision?

~~~
stefan_kendall3
Maybe he's confusing DMCA with Section 230.

~~~
deftnerd
I was confusing the two, my apologies.

------
minimaxir
The Pending Comments page is a secret test of character. Endorse the correct
comment, and endorse wisely.

Case in point:
[http://i.imgur.com/8Oa3z0H.png](http://i.imgur.com/8Oa3z0H.png)

~~~
imkevinxu
Testing ability to make second comment after being endorsed once. Hi Max!

Update: apparently this comment was still pending
[http://i.imgur.com/KBuY5fx.png](http://i.imgur.com/KBuY5fx.png)

Updatev2: I think I may have interpreted it wrong, PG wrote "Someone who has a
pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post another" so I
guess all comments will be pending but after being endorsed once can comment
again?

~~~
pg
I increased the limit to 5.

~~~
ajcarpy2005
^This makes a lot more sense to me than the one comment at a time idea. It
gives people some slack and if the community decides one of your previous
comments was unworthy to be in the official discussion thread, there's an
incentive to delete it but also not too much time pressure on the part of the
endorsers in the community...and thus on the commenter.

I predict this will reduce inane back and forth flamewars.

------
NamTaf
What thought process has been put in to how the throttling of
'discussion'-style comments affect the pagerank of a particular post? If a
bunch of moderate-quality comments have the effect of bolstering the pagerank
of a post until a highly insightful comment comes along that'll be upvoted to
the stratosphere, then will we risk losing those interesting discussions
simply because there isn't 'that one right person' there to seed the bigger
conversation with insight?

------
cheeze
I wonder if taking the age of an account into consideration could help. I feel
that there are probably quite a few lurkers who have been here for quite some
time, but haven't massed much karma since they very rarely comment, although
are here all the time. Thoughts?

~~~
halter73
I understand the viewpoint that greater moderation power should go those who
contribute more.

But as a fellow long-time lurker, I think accounts like ours make up for the
long tail of HN contributions particularly in the form of comments.

I also think that long-time lurkers account for most of HN's readership.

The goal of HN isn't to please the majority, and pg seems to think that giving
more moderation power to those with more karma will foster better discourse.

I urge pg to reconsider this. While it doesn't take any real effort to have an
old account. And while it often feels that power, even moderation power, ought
to be earned. I think giving long-time users the ability to endorse comments,
even if they have little karma, won't degrade HN's discourse but instead
improve it.

Lurkers post less, and therefore have less karma. Lurkers understand that when
they don't have anything worthwhile to contribute, they aren't obligated to
add to the noise in order to score internet points. I don't think that lurkers
who have enjoyed HN for years without much individual activity are going to go
out of their way to endorse pending comments that are low quality.

I hope that most would respect the higher standard HN holds comments to
compared to some other sites. I suspect that those higher standards might be
what has kept them coming back.

Oh. And since I'm posting this past 11 PM PDT on a Friday night, I doubt this
comment will earn me much in the way of karma even though this is the type of
constructive commenting that pg wants on HN, or so I hope. I think this goes
to show that karma isn't a perfect stat for determining who can endorse
comments. And while account age might not be perfect for this either, I think
some combination of both would be better.

------
pearjuice
Well, here comes the common denominator. The upvoting circles and shilling was
pretty bad already but this makes it worse. You enable mutual backpatting and
group thinking. Sliding out all people who have "odd" or uncommon opinion. It
is like rogue censorship.

~~~
quomopete
Also not terribly excited about this. But i should also probably just move on
from posting here. Not a big contributor and have found that overall there's a
huge echo chamber dynamic to this community that's generally hard to break
through. Really hard to have a dissenting opinion unless you're just doing it
for academic reasons or devil's advocacy. I imagine with this, myself and many
other new or not high participating members that don't go full heartedly with
the general belief system here will find themselves wedged out of the
conversation. Oh well.

------
avalaunch
It would be nice if the page didn't reload when you click endo rse. I lost my
place on the page and my first thought was, "Well I won't be doing that
again."

------
imkevinxu
Interesting, I wonder if this page will give rise to unofficial "moderators"
who decide to spend 5 minutes endorsing various comments.

I'm also interesting in seeing where / how pending comments look on a specific
thread, I guess posting this will show that

------
akerl_
I do like that we're tweaking the system as we go in response to feedback /
observation, but blocking comments based on endorsements from existing users
seems like it's just going to increase the echo-chamber-ness of the site.

~~~
jedicoffee
In before endorsement sales and Hacker News "gold".

------
edtechdev
I'm a fan of post-publication review. Let people post, and then if it really
is something bad, unhelpful, or spam, just let it be down voted and hidden
after it receives a certain number of down votes (such as 5, like on reddit).
And I like that people can still click on a down voted comment to see it,
since sometimes comments are down voted because they are saying something
unpopular, not necessarily "bad."

------
noir_lord
If it becomes more difficult to participate in conversations because I have to
wait for moderation on a previous comment then I lose engagement.

The end result is I'll probably just stop visiting hacker news so frequently
(if at all).

As without the ability to have conversations with people better than me at
interesting stuff what does this place offer that reddit doesn't.

~~~
FedRegister
I predict a cottage industry of sites that provide unmoderated discussion
around the HN frontpage articles in the wake of this decision. It might be
interesting to provide a site to do incline, anonymous annotation of/replies
to existing, approved comments. Sort of a meta-HN meets Statler and Waldorf.

~~~
noir_lord
[http://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/](http://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/)

They already do that (and ironically that was one of the suggestions made on
the Pending Comments Post).

------
hindsightbias
Logic will never, ever, defeat Eternal September.

This is absolutely the single greatest and subtly brilliant motivator for
anyone interested in doing a startup to leap right now.

All of your competition is going to be wasting hours of their day upvoting
pending comments.

Their time sink is your opportunity!

Here's a free startup idea: autobot commenter to turk task the producers of
the valley.

------
ztratar
I already dislike this. :[

Not to mention this won't get seen by anybody.

~~~
tim333
Seen it

edit: just for research I noted how long this took to go from [pending] to
not. It took 10 minutes for what it's worth

------
rkuykendall-com
I just realized that now only 10k+ users appear at the top of /newcomments,
since they will be the only ones with approval at "0 minutes."

------
pandemicsyn
Just curious but, whats the reasoning behind not having a "Show Pending
Comments" option along with the existing "Show Dead"?

~~~
pg
Mostly that I haven't implemented it yet.

~~~
Crito
Out of curiousity, how do/will dead posts interact with the endorsement
system?

Will dead posts that are not endorsed still be visible to users below 1k
karma? Is endorsing a dead post _(perhaps a good comment by a usually poor
poster)_ a no-op, or will endorsement allow the dead post to be seen by users
who are below 1k karma but have showdead turned on?

------
sturmeh
I don't see the real need to have every single comment a user makes moderated.

Surely just adding a button that says "report" to comments that sends the
message to a pending queue and sees how 1000's respond to it?

I also assume that >1000ers go unmoderated?

------
enscr
It is probably a good thought but the implementation sounds too strict. The
power users have ruined stackoverflow to an extent. I'd suggest relaxing the
endorsement policy to a lower karma score. And perhaps a way of penalizing
those who aren't doing a good job of letting positive comments in. So if you
want power, it comes at a cost.

Lastly, you should also consider the intelligent but quiet guys in the
classroom. Those who are uber conscious about speaking up despite having good
suggestions. The fear of not being able to speak, if they don't say anything
good enough will silence them.

------
firebones
Given the power law distribution of participation in online forums (say, 1%
produce comments or moderate, 3% vote, 96% only consume), I wouldn't be
surprised to see the threshold have to drop quite a bit (especially based on
time of day) in order to keep the wheels turning and to overcome the drop off
after the honeymoon period is over and the novelty of dealing with pending
comments wears off.

Because of this power law distribution, it may not necessarily turn out to be
that bad, since at any given time there may only be 3-4 comments pending for
every eligible reviewer.

------
jasonlotito
The UX is very bad on that page. You click endorse, and then you have to wait
for the page to load (which takes some time, I might add). So, I get to
endorse one comment at a time on that page.

~~~
reitzensteinm
You know, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. If there's a bit of
work involved, you'll be unlikely to endorse marginal comments.

Of course, you can just middle click, so maybe that's not so effective.

~~~
mschuster91
Middle click doesnt really work on mobile and not at all on the various HN
interface apps which people use due to HNs layout being 1990-era style and not
usable at all even for reading on mobile.

Also, for the fuck of it, if I see ten good but un-endorsed comments, I have
potentially ten tabs to load (hello latencies on UMTS links) and ten tabs to
close! My netbook doesnt have enough pixels for the tabs, let alone RAM. Text-
based browsers dont even have tabs.

The HN community may be great and all, but the technological part of it Just.
Plain. Sucks.

YC is hunting for startups, and every single one of all the YC-backed
companies has a better website UX than HN/YC itself. What a shame.

------
andrewmunsell
Is this system current implemented so that users with greater than 1000 karma
are now "moderators", or is the limit lower than that?

I have 910 at the moment, but after clicking "Endorse" on a comment it seemed
to disappear from the page. It could be entirely coincidental, or was the
limit lowered?

Also, I can't see an "Pending" link in the top menu unless I'm on the
"Pending" page already. Not sure if this a part of having less than 1000 karma
or just a caching issue/bug.

~~~
6thSigma
There is no 'pending' link on the top menu. If I click on 'comments' I see
some pending posts that I can endorse. That would probably be a good test.

~~~
saulrh
Agree, I see the same. I see posts prefixed with "[pending]" and with an
Endorse button in the grey at the top; I hit Endorse and the "[pending]" goes
away. So I'm pretty sure the system is live.

------
arfliw
Not sure if this is a bug or not but I was able to endorse a bunch of comments
and my karma is only 11.

Question: if a comment is never endorsed does that mean that user is
effectively banned?

------
hrjet
What I think would be ideal: Comments ranked by the network of users I have
upvoted / downvoted in the past, by computing a centrality:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvector_centrality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvector_centrality)

(I don't understand the mathematics of this entirely, just have an intuitive
understanding of it)

------
3rd3
My only complaint is that the verb 'to endorse' might be a little bit too
strong. A button that says 'appropriate' might be better, because it's more
clear then what exactly the intended criteria for an endorsement are and the
user does not need to identify with clicking the button as much.

------
se85
What a terrible idea. Please reconsider.

------
bmurphy1976
This is going to be an interesting experiment.

I hope it addresses something I've noticed lately, something I refer to as
"Poisoning the Well".

What I've seen again and again and again is that the first (highest rated?)
comment on the thread is either negative or off topic. Discussion ensues. Lots
of discussion. Screens of discussion.

Most of which is entirely irrelevant to the primary topic.

By the time I wade through that mess to get to the real discussion, I'm burnt.
I can't imagine I'm the only one, it seems like the comments further below,
while typically of much higher quality are fewer and farther between.

I wonder how often we collectively read the first thread, get frustrated, and
move on. For me, it happens all too often.

------
alecsmart1
This completely breaks the commenting feature in both ios & android mobile
apps.

------
jedicoffee
Sweet, I can make comments that people can't see unless they're users who have
X karma and agree with X opinion. So now I should just agree with everyone so
I get X karma so I can make honest comments.

Great idea!

------
xedarius
It's interesting that this seems to be a move away from the world of realtime.
Some of the articles on HN only appear in the top 30 for a few hours. This
seems to grate against the idea of pending comments.

Also it exposes HN to something that irritates about Stack Overflow, this idea
that there are a bunch of people who somehow know what I want to read. The
amount of questions on SO that are 'closed as deemed none relevant' is
ridiculous.

Also remember, the bad comments are the exact benchmark on which you judge a
good comment. Without bitter there is no sweet.

------
rlu
I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Particularly this part: "Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait
till it goes live to post another".

Am I seriously expected to keep a "queue" of posts I want to make in Notepad
or something?

Seems pretty stupid to me. The way I use HN is to spend 30ish minutes on it by
opening a bunch of tabs...reading the articles...and then either posting a
root comment or responding to something interesting. I do this for every tab.

Sounds like this breaks my work flow, and I don't understand what the purpose
of this part is.

------
tmsh
I think curiously what this would encourage is a slower way of thinking. I.e.,
not quick comments, but longer, more thoughtful ones.

I don't comment much, but when I do think back on the comments I have made
that have been somewhat popular, they are of this longer type. Maybe there's
something to this.

But just be aware you're positioning yourself as kind of a catalyst in the
opposite direction of most small, quick messaging fora.

Maybe that's good for us. Maybe it will come to be appreciated. Maybe people
will abandon it for something easier.

------
telvda
RIP in peace Hacker News

~~~
frik
Slashdot has the best and most advanced moderation system. Reddit/HN style
moderation system is very simple but seem to work in most cases just fine too.
But why change a working system? Maybe HN should add Sub-Topics (like reddit)?

------
RRRA
So now we should rate up everyone so they reach 1k karma?

------
cpeterso
If comment endorsing is going to scale, it needs to be very fast and easy.
However, when I click an endorse link, the whole page reloads and I lose my
scroll position! Clicking the up and down vote arrows does not reload the
page, so the endorse links ought to be changed be changed to do the same. This
frustrating behavior discourages me from endorsing comments.

~~~
pg
Hrm, yes, I should fix that.

------
whyme
Have you considered using some avg. rank threshold instead of karma for both
this and down voting? or rather some blend of profile age, minimum karma, and
avg. rank?

I look at 1000 karma and wonder why you would empower people who could simply
be post happy.

~~~
whyme
LOL. It just dawned on me that post happy people are probably the most active
people, thus best suited to do a job requiring quite a lot of work. I never
seem to give pg enough credit.

------
projectileboy
Pending comments may not be the ultimate solution, but it's a good idea and
worth a try. The comment threads used to be the best part of the site; maybe
they will be again.

------
waterlesscloud
I'm seeing no comments that remain as pending for very long.

This is only going to affect the very bottom of the barrel as it stands now.

So I think everyone can safely relax and let it work its course.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Doesn't that mean this system performs [only] as well as the "flag" system for
moderation but with many times more effort being applied?

------
willtheperson
So have I lost the ability to comment or is this for new users?

~~~
rkuykendall-com
Your comments will need to be approved by a few users with ~1000+ karma before
others on the site can see it. You can read more here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761)

~~~
tsm
As of right now it's 500 karma:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447701)

I'm curious about how many endorsements are needed. My endorsement caused your
comment to go live, but I don't know if you'd been previously endorsed by
someone else or not.

------
renang
Does a person get karma when his comment is endorsed?

That would be a good way to promote good commentators to the "next level",
whatever it brings with karma.

------
lukaseder
That sounds like the inbox in reddit...

------
Oculus
It just hit me the reason the page is blank is my karma is lower than 1000.

~~~
maxden
I think it's blank now because PG switched off pending status.

I saw it before and could see comments in the queue, although my score was/is
too low to do anything about them.

------
lukehorvat
Orwellian.

------
azth
I take it this won't affect submissions by those users?

------
robk
Weird I'm over 1000 karma and pending is blank

------
dmunoz
I missed the large discussion thread earlier, and I imagine someone there
brought up something similar already, but I doubt it precisely what I am about
to post. I'll make my more nuanced comment first.

What about older threads? Sometimes I don't visit HN actively throughout the
day, but partake in the discussion at night or the next morning if I have
spare time. Many times my comments are slight clarifications of a point being
made, or providing some citations or links to resources that I happen to know
about on the subject. They almost always go unnoticed with 1 karma, but I
continue to do so because they provide helpful resources for someone who comes
along later, perhaps by search, or through the discussion view on their user
page. If no users with the ability to approve the comment browse the old
threads, and my comment is quickly pushed off the earlier pages of the pending
comments section, they'll be lost.

More generally, I get why this is being done, and it's even a touch exciting.
I would love to see general comment quality improve if for the only reason
that the general quality forms expectations in the community, and this can
help raise the bar a little. However, it's also pretty concerning. It's a big
surprise to see human activity be what is reached for.

Edit: Woah, so it turns out my main concern was discussed in the thread by
cperciva [0], and it was an oversight by pg which resulted in the page of
pending comments being added. This certainly has the potential to raise
comment quality dramatically, but is fraught with danger.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445916)

Edit 2: I don't want to flood this comment thread with another post, so I'll
make it here. Close to 40 minutes after making the above, I find even my
lingering doubt has close to disappeared and been replaced by excitement. My
initial horror disappeared surprisingly quickly, even before I made the above
comment, as I realized quickly how much this could improve comment quality.
Yet, after some reading in the announcement thread, I find myself feeling like
a slightly modified system would require much less activity from users, but be
nearly as effective.

Why not have, after a certain threshold of endorsed comments, comments by the
user be automatically endorsed. Then, instead of requiring active endorsement
for every comment, give high karma users the ability to require further
comments by a bad commenter to require endorsement before appearing. This
ensures that they can only make a handful of low quality comments before being
pushed to active moderation, and presumably the event would happen rarely so
that abuse of the ability can be more accurately monitored. I imagine that the
opposite idea, having bad comments being endorsed by a user resulting in the
removal their ability to endorse, would be more work.

Another 20 minutes later, and one last edit just for posterity: I still remain
fairly bullish about the potential, but reading the discussion threads leaves
me bouncing back and forth between excitement and concern. It'll be
interesting to see how it plays out, in either case.

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JacksonGariety
test

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NextUserName
Silence those with opinions that are not popular. Even if their points are
valid, censor them. how many innocuous comments (ones that may not be quite
worth an up-vote, yet add a sprinkle of thought) will be lost forever? In this
scenario, all those comments who were left at 1 point now are never heard.
Casual users (which must make up quite a large percentage of HN) will not be
readily heard.

Those comments with even an air of controversy will not be approved because if
it ends up with down-votes, that will go toward the approving member's record
and may end up getting them banned eventually.

Controversial points and less popular opinions and facts will never be seen to
counter. PG, you are building a Censorship wall so that controversial or
unpopular comments now don't even exist to refute/debate. There is a reason
that anytime you take away people's free speech or expression, they eventually
revolt.

Why do comments that are not mainstream have to go away (as in never be seen).
Why not engage in debate about them. I never understood this. Sure I can see
censoring comments containing personal threats or vulgar content, but this is
ridiculous. Keeping information from someone's eyes just because one group
does not agree with it is censorship.

Honestly, the way that disagreeable comments are handled now are quite
refreshing and are one of the reasons that HN is so popular. Anyone can post
their opinion. If people don't agree with it, they can engage in civil
opposition. If it is inappropriate, they can down-vote.

Perhaps the biggest reason for not pending comments is that you are going to
dramatically change what shows up here. You have members of one group (or
classification if you will) who are very active and will all have 1000 points,
this group now is the voice of HN. Those who post more occasionally, post
late, or don't pad their numbers by replying to the hot thread (rather they
create their own which drops 3/4 down the page) now have a limited voice.
Other groups likely have many differing opinions than the over 1000 class,
they now have no voice. You see, your over 1000 (certainly the minority of
your members) mostly all have common opinions, ideologies and viewpoints about
things. This group now has the power to silence those others (though perhaps
even larger in numbers) groups.

I would have liked it if you ran a poll before coding something like this. A
last minute pseudo-courtesy notification shows just how much HN is really all
about you and does not really belong to the people who actually own it (the
public). Without us, you've got and idle server. No stories posted, no
comments, nothing. Your totalitarianism attitude put a bad taste in my mouth.

