
Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments - pg
A surprisingly long time ago (2013 was a busy year) I
mentioned a new plan to improve the quality of comments on
Hacker News:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6009523" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6009523</a><p>Since I&#x27;m going to check out of HN at the end of this
YC cycle, this was my last chance to get this done.
I didn&#x27;t want the people who are going to inherit
HN from me to have to build it as their
first project, because it interacts with so many
different bits of the code in such subtle ways.<p>So I found time to implement pending comments this
past week, and with any luck it will launch tonight.
Since it&#x27;s a big change, I wanted to warn HN users in
advance.<p>Here&#x27;s how it currently works.  From now on, when
you post a comment, it won&#x27;t initially be live.
It will be in a new state called pending.  Comments
get from pending to live by being endorsed by multiple
HN users with over 1000 karma.  Those users will see
pending comments, and will be able to endorse them by
clicking on an &quot;endorse&quot; link next to the &quot;flag&quot; link.<p>Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till
it goes live to post another.  We&#x27;re hoping that good
comments will get endorsed so quickly that there won&#x27;t
be a noticeable delay.<p>You can currently beat the system by posting an innocuous
comment, waiting for it to be endorsed, and then after
it&#x27;s live, changing it to say something worse. We explicitly
ask people not to do this.  While we have no software
for catching it, humans will notice, and we&#x27;ll ban you.<p>Along with the change in software will come a change in
policy.  We&#x27;re going to ask users with the ability to
endorse comments only to endorse those that:<p>1. Say something substantial.  E.g. not just a throwaway remark,
or the kind of &quot;Yes you did, No I didn&#x27;t&quot; bickering
that races toward the right side of the page and no
one cares about except the participants.<p>2. Say it without gratuitous nastiness.  In particular,
a comment in reply to another comment should be written
in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith
to figure out the truth about something, not
politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent
the other side.<p>People who regularly endorse comments that fail one
or both of these tests will lose the ability to
endorse comments.  So if you&#x27;re not sure whether you
should endorse a comment, don&#x27;t.  There are a lot of
people on HN.  If a point is important, someone else
will probably come along and make it without gratuitous
nastiness.<p>I hope this will improve the quality of HN comments
significantly, but we&#x27;ll need your help to make it work,
and your forbearance if, as usually happens, some
things go wrong initially.
======
beloch
My may concern with this system: Sledgehammer meets tack.

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.

~~~
minimaxir
For note, HN isn't necessarily increasing in popularity.

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

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

~~~
jonnathanson
It's possible for HN to be increasing in popularity while decreasing in # of
submissions. For instance, if more users are coming to the site, the site is
growing in popularity. If the X percent of users who normally submit the most
frequently are decreasing their submission rates, submissions will go down
despite the user growth.

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.

~~~
minimaxir
Whoops, it should be noted that the spam algorithm changed at around the peak,
which also explains the decrease. (I made the chart)

~~~
mbesto
This data isn't relevant to the discussion.

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.

------
cperciva
_Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to post
another. We 're hoping that good comments will get endorsed so quickly that
there won't be a noticeable delay._

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.

~~~
pg
Hmm, trust cperciva to find the thing I'd overlooked.

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

~~~
cperciva
That might work... but only if people actually read that page. Given how few
people look at /newest (as estimated by the fraction of votes which are cast
before submissions hit the frontpage) I'm not optimistic.

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.

~~~
pg
Let's see how much of a problem there is first. I wanted to start with the
simplest possible thing. If it breaks in some cases I'll add stuff to fix
those.

~~~
waterlesscloud
An additional suggestion- don't show username on pending comments. Let the
comments get approved solely on their own merit.

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.

~~~
hrktb
The are discussions where user name matters, for instance when refering to the
nth parent in the same thread, or when trying to bring more context to a point
made previously or even retracting a comment (knowing it's the same user
posting is important).

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

~~~
ldng
Apply the on first participation to the thread then ?

~~~
n09n
Or just copy 4chan's system directly, since that's what you're iterating
towards, and they've already solved this problem.

------
tsycho
I fear this change will have some unintended consequences:

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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
2b is not really an issue. Endorsing only the best of similar comments is a
feature.

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.

~~~
tsycho
The problem is that people are being penalized for writing something
completely reasonable because someone wrote something slightly better or wrote
it first, even if they were unaware of the other comment existing at the time
of posting.

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.

~~~
e12e
Perhaps another feature is needed: mark redundant. So when you mark one of
several similar comments as good, you can mark a others as redundant -- so
that the owner can retract it.

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.

~~~
kaybe
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.

~~~
e12e
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).

------
chimeracoder
I fear that this is going to have the effect of drowning out minority or
contrary opinions, even those that are legitimate (non-trolling) and expressed
in a respectful manner.

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).

~~~
gruseom
_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)._

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.

~~~
ihuman
I'm a bit confused by the wording of your comment. Are you saying that
downvoting "is only supposed to be used for unproductive comments" or to show
agreement? You use "it," but I can't tell which statement you are referring
to.

~~~
gruseom
Sorry for being unclear. What I mean is that downvoting something because you
disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN. I'm too lazy to dig up the
many links where this was discussed, but the point is that if upvoting is a
legit way to agree, then downvoting is a legit way to disagree. This is a good
thing, because it provides a silent way to disagree when you don't have
anything substantive to add to the discussion.

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

~~~
jessriedel
There is very little value in knowing that some people disagree with a
comment, but there is tremendous value in learning other ideas. This is a bad
policy.

~~~
gruseom
That's a good point. But let me ask you: do you think HN actually has this
problem, i.e. of ideas being suppressed because people disagree? If so, I'd be
curious to see examples. Most of the downvoted stuff I see has some other
readily available explanation; usually some form of rudeness.

~~~
GhotiFish
I see it a lot. What's worse is up and down votes are a corrective mechanism.

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.

~~~
gruseom
> I see it a lot

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.

~~~
GhotiFish
I'm not going to go through my whole freaking history to highlight the 5 times
I've specifically marked where a downvote to disagree has happened on
otherwise civil text.

here:

this was 15 days ago.

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

------
booruguru
This is ridiculous. It's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian
opinions, but now our comments need to be vetted by the elite HN users before
they can be shown to the rest.

I don't get it. This site looks like something made in 1996 (with absolutely
no regard for readability), but the big new upgrade we're getting is a
draconian (and wholly unnecessary) comment moderation feature/policy?

A lot of HN users bitch about Reddit, but they would never implement something
this ridiculous since it would kill their community. But I guess that's the
whole point of this exercise...to cull the userbase.

Ironically, this comment is precisely the kind of thing that may never receive
an "endorsement."

~~~
thaumaturgy
Well, I wouldn't endorse it. But, since some of your points are often
raised...

> _It 's bad enough that people are downvoted for contrarian opinions_

That particular disease doesn't seem to have taken hold here yet. Comments
that are downvoted below 1 more often are angry, abusive, trollish, or devoid
of content.

> _...but now our comments need to be vetted by the elite HN users..._

An "elite" group of, by a rough estimate, 50% of the site's users. A _lot_ of
users, anyway.

> _This site looks like something made in 1996 (with absolutely no regard for
> readability)..._

This mistakes graphic design for community value. Reddit was also (and still
also, by most measures) one of the ugliest sites online.

> _...but the big new upgrade we 're getting is a draconian (and wholly
> unnecessary)..._

I think the most common complaint on HN, especially among its longtime users,
has been the diminishing quality of comment threads. So this is an update
that's dealing with the #1 problem on HN.

> _A lot of HN users bitch about Reddit, but they would never implement
> something this ridiculous since it would kill their community._

On the contrary, some of the Reddit communities with the most recognition for
high quality discussions are the ones with the heaviest moderation.
/r/askhistorians is consistently great; /r/askscience is another good one.

Some people _finally_ seem to be coming around to the realization that you
don't have to hear everybody's opinion on everything to have a worthwhile
community.

> _Ironically, this comment is precisely the kind of thing that may never
> receive an "endorsement."_

Well, and no offense intended, but hopefully not, since your comment is a good
example of the problem this is trying to solve. It's unnecessarily angry.

~~~
booruguru
> Well, and no offense intended, but hopefully not, since your comment is a
> good example of the problem this is trying to solve. It's unnecessarily
> angry.

Do you seriously not understand the point that I was making? You're basically
saying that my comment is unworthy of an audience...not because it was
nonsensical or rude or offtopic or abusive...but merely because I wrote in an
angry tone. My tone offended your delicate sensibilities, therefore my voice
does not deserve to be heard.

I'm sorry, but people like you are precisely the reason why this moderation
policy is a bad idea.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
I agree with thaumaturgy here; your comments are very emotionally charged for
something as insignificant as a change to the moderation policy of a link
aggregator's comment section. I hope that this new system will bring down the
emotions that tend to run high in the comments.

In your first comment, you've criticized change, ridiculed the site's look and
feel, and provided an opinion that was astutely refuted by thaumaturgy with a
reasonable amount of data. In your latest reply, you questioned the
grandparent commenter's intellect, created a strawman argument, and minimized
the validity of the commenter's emotional reaction. You then made an
inflammatory generalization about a group of people who shared the commenter's
point of view and created some sort of strawman faction out of them.

All the while, I have yet to see a well-formed argument come out of your two
comments; just, as thaumaturgy said, needless anger. Just because you can
write in complete sentences and can write passionately does not mean that your
comment is substantive.

~~~
yeukhon
If you think people can comment on each other's comment without a single
emotion that's a mistake.

People share stories about their past experience, anger and frustration with
one another. He cares about his ability to express here thoroughly and fully.
Clearly thaumaturgy is now the one getting upset and doesn't want to make
direct response anymore after offending OP.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
Well, I don't think I said without _a single emotion_. I _do_ think, however,
that you can express concerns without resorting to anger and negativity.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I don't think there's a useful distinction to draw between the community where
expressing any emotion is prohibited and the one where positive emotions, but
only positive emotions, are welcome.

------
AaronFriel
This is a poorly thought out, reactionary response to allegations of dreadful
comment quality.

1\. It doesn't solve any problems of group think, because if pg and the Y
Combinator folks think the system is already tilted toward a certain group and
set of beliefs - this now empowers them all as citizen moderators.

2\. It further empowers this group by giving them the ability to remove other
members of the group's ability to moderate comments.

3\. It increases the "cost" of commenting far more than most other moderating
proposals would. Not commenting on a popular post? Why bother. Continuing a
conversation in replies? Again, why bother.

4\. It had such a poor specification that cperciva found a critical flaw in
the implementation details in mere minutes. If pending comments is an answer
to a problem, then it was not the sort of answer that would have been approved
by this comment system.

~~~
hkphooey
This perhaps marks the beginning of the end for HackerNews.

Who wants to contribute to a "community" where there is active censorship of
posts critical of YCombinator companies (see Dr Chrono), or you get hell-
banned for no good reason, and now this poorly thought-out "rule"?

CPerciva pointed out an obvious flaw. Another is this: if you had to start a
brand new HackerNews tomorrow, would you implement the rule? Of course not,
because nobody would have any karma points to begin with, so they wouldn't be
able to approve or see pending comments, meaning no comments would ever get
posted! Duh!

Now you could argue that the HackerNews moderators and owners have karma
points and they could approve comments to seed the system... but then why not
just have a private forum for all your start-up friends, invite only, so you
can be sure they all speak right?!

~~~
adamors
Honestly, it's a shit idea and I will stop contributing entirely.

------
bsamuels
I think this change makes the mistake that people with lots of karma are good
contributors.

I think it should be based on weighted karma/comment in addition to total
karma. Imagine two users - one with 1500 karma & 1.1 karma/comment versus one
with 600 karma & 10 karma/comment, which one would you trust to be able to
judge what is a good comment and what isn't?

The total karma weight is to give at least some favor to frequent users, but
not too much.

In addition, if someone replies to your comment, you should be able to at
least see their comment regardless of your karma or whether it's been
greenlit.

~~~
dudus
Karma/Comment is not a very good metric as well. As someone that posted a big
post that stayed in the Front Page for long can amass a lot of karma in little
time. Giving them a very high Karma/Comment. You would have to remove the
outliers.

~~~
jamesaguilar
A perfect opportunity to use comment-karma H index!
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index)

------
eogas
This seems like a rather hostile change to an already hostile community. HN
has never felt like a welcoming place to me, and I don't think this will help.
Maybe PG prefers the community to be small, so he's trying to trim it down?
Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones
he wants to keep out.

Please noble 1000+ers, free my humble comment from the depths of the low-karma
peasants. For I have but 522 karma, thus I deserve to be spat on and excluded
from the flawless utopia which is the HN comments section...

~~~
vacri
I'm not fond of the idea, but at the same time, playing the victim like you
are here doesn't exactly do much for comment quality.

~~~
eogas
HN really loathes humour, doesn't it?

~~~
angersock
You have to be clever, topical, and insightful. Or just damned lucky.

Like comedy anywhere else, really.

~~~
vacri
eogas is referring to my profile commentary. What eogas isn't recognising is
that just because something has the trappings of humour doesn't also mean it's
not crap.

HN has thankfully opened up a little in regards to light humour; that part of
my profile was written quite a while ago.

------
mstrem
This seems quite drastic to me. Personally I don't have a lot of Karma (and I
don't really care to) but every known and again I post a comment and usually I
hope it provides a good contribution.

Like this the system is putting a lot of weight on the users with more
Karma... and I am guessing there are "many" more users with less than 1000
compared to those with more? Some people may never have a chance to state
their opinion like this.

Rather, the opposite approach might work? Users with more than X karma can
completely remove some comments, and say if your comment has been removed, you
are not allowed to comment again for a specific period of time. If you post x
rejected comments in a row then potentially you get banned.

EDIT - maybe a little off topic: another "comment" about comments - I notice
you can up vote and down vote comments. I see this functionality sometimes is
used to indicate agreement (or lack of) towards a comment. This as far as I
cant tell is not the intended functionality, I am unsure however how this can
be fixed easily.

~~~
skybrian
It's not that hard to get to 1000+ slowly. All you have to do is hang around
for years and make the occasional decent comment. If anything this is biased
towards old timers.

~~~
makomk
It's not _currently_ that hard to get to 1000+ slowly. By slowing down
commenting and making it harder to even get comments through, this is
presumably going to make it harder.

~~~
MAGZine
I browser HN daily, been around for coming up on a year, and I'm not even
_half_ way there.

Since commenting is such a huge aspect of these sites for me, I'll probably
frequent HN much less often since I won't be able to participate in
conversation. PARTICULARLY, I won't be able to get in the early comments that
are necessary for making high-karma. You can't have your comment show up an
hour or so later after "approval," you'll only net a handful of upvotes,
because you'll be buried under the high-scoring top comments by senior HN
users.

Perhaps make a mid tier, say 500 karma, where you can't endorse users, but
don't need endorsement?

------
fotbr
I don't comment often. I came here following the dice purchase of slashdot,
and found a quality tech oriented site without too much crap.

At the rate I (slowly) accumulate the imaginary internet points here, it will
be the better part of a decade before I end up with the ability to "endorse"
any other comments. I don't really care about that, except you're locking out
those of us that don't have a following here, or name recognition. We,
collectively, have seen how "voting" works -- here and elsewhere -- after a
very short time, people just upvote based on who the person is, not the
comment. Endorsements will work the same way.

Being limited to only one "pending" comment at a time, and the very high
probability that I'll see significant delays between being able to comment,
pretty much guarantees that I'll leave and find my tech news elsewhere.

Perhaps that's fine with you. But it's a shame to ruin a community to solve a
problem that, quite frankly, doesn't exist.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
I share your concerns. For me it "should" be ~4+ years. But that assumes that
I can post at the same rate, which I won't be able to.

I primarily follow HN for news, with the option of discussion and
clarification of said news. Many (most?) of my comments are buried deep in the
comment tree, as responses to specific comments, and tend to get one or two
responses.

And that sort of thing - responses back and forth, clarification and
additional questions - are the sort of thing that won't be able to be done.
There is no sense in posting a reply to someone with less than a thousand
karma if it's buried deep in the comment tree, even if it's something the
parent commenter is interested in, even if it is something that other people
would be likely to want to have answered. Because it is a niche conversation,
and there are so few people visiting it that it is unlikely that someone with
1000 karma will visit it.

If I cannot comment, why stay? Most, if not all, of the interesting articles
are crossposted elsewhere, places where I can comment.

------
User8712
This is the wrong approach, and it's going to help deteriorate an already
small community.

1\. HN doesn't have an issue with comment quality.

2\. HN should be concerned about growing the community, and increasing
comments. A lot of discussions already suffer due to a lack of activity. This
is going to do the opposite, it's going to decrease comments.

3\. We live in an instant world. Pending comments is a step backwards for user
experience.

4\. Occasionally I see a topic with 10 comments, the majority of which were
written back and forth within the first hour of the topic. You're going to
kill these discussions.

5\. Manually moderating topics doesn't work for communities like HN. It works
on a blog, where your article from last year gets another two or three
comments every month, half of which are spam.

6\. You're creating unnecessary work for members in the community. People come
here to enjoy the community, not to moderate.

7\. It's a poor method of moderation. You can have 99 users decide not to
endorse a comment, then one person decides to click the endorse button. 99%
against, and yet it's approved.

8\. I'll have to question every comment I write, and avoid spending time on
any detailed responses, because they might never leave the pending stage.

~~~
vacri
HN comment quality has decreased a bit as it's grown, as you would expect.
Some people don't have a problem with that, other find it bad enough to leave
(and, ironically, sometimes leave a particularly low-quality comment in doing
so).

I do have a problem with 'only one pending comment', which I think is a
particularly bad part of the upcoming change. It _effectively_ means that you
can't participate in two different conversations happening in the same post.
If you have karma 10k+ you are (currently planned to) 'auto-endorse', so those
people can have multiple conversations.

One clear example - there was a post recently where an immigration and tax
lawyer (can't remember the handle, sorry) did an AMA-style comment, which was
massively popular with the community, and he answered a lot of raised
questions.

If he could only make one pending comment at a time, it would not have worked:
1) Respond to a question. 2) Wait until enough people have _freshly loaded_
the page to have the new comment in it. 3) Wait until enough people have
scrolled to the right place to see his particular comment amongst all the
other pendings. 4) Wait until enough of those people were endorse-capable and
endorse-willing. 5) During all this waiting, keep on refreshing so you know
when you're good to post the next comment.

That lawyer's one posting spree provided many people with pertinent, site-
relevant, professional information... but the new system would have made it so
onerous that he probably would have decided that he deals with enough
boilerplate micromanagement in his day job.

Having only a single pending comment at a time will decrease the _sense_ of
community, simply by significantly reducing the number of conversations you
can have.

------
yeukhon
I think this is a horrible decision. I've never seen this work. My biggest
objection is based on the fact I have to wait for someone to endorse my
comment.

I post a lot of comments here, regularly. Some of them get hot and turn into a
linked-list O(n) depth tree... I also post during time when few people are
around. By the time I want to say something interesting and hope someone can
engage with me my comment would be so deep down. This is not really karma
whoring. But I want to be able to express myself instantly, right away so
anyone reading the article at that moment may check out my voice too.

I don't see why we need this restriction. This should be restricted to people
who have a history of getting downvoted and people who are new to HN. That
makes sense. But people who have been here long enough and with a good record
shouldn't be penalized.

Call me impatient but I read and write quickly. I can't wait an hour to get
one comment approved.

Note I am well above 1000 karma and I don't like this...

And if the whole point is to promote comments that can contribute to the
discussion, then downvote will work just fine. Any uncivil or harsh comment
usually get to the bottom of the page quickly. If I express similar or even
same opinion as someone else, should my comment be approved? If the answer is
yes, then almost every comment should be endorsed. Then what is the whole
point of this pending feature?

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I think one compromise could be to remove this restriction from users with >
_x_ karma. It's not ideal to me but it is something ...

~~~
pg
It is, actually. Comments by users with over 10k karma go live immediately.

~~~
tptacek
Really? Are you sure about that decision? If it were my site, I'd decide the
other way, if only because I'd worry about the interaction between high-karma
commenters that can rapid-fire respond and normal users who have to wait.

~~~
pg
I don't think people will have to wait so much they'll notice, but we'll see.

------
danso
Wow, this seems like a rather large change -- with a lot of dynamics and
moving parts -- for what seems like a relatively minor problem on HN. Not that
there _aren 't_ bad comments, but bad comments get a lukewarm response, and
insightful comments seem to do pretty well. Comments that get more airtime
than they might deserve will still get approved by _someone_ (and
upvoted/downvoted accordingly)

The bigger problem to me seems to be that great comments that come in a few
hours after the posting of a hot submission will almost never reach the top of
the comment stack, because older comments that are decent enough will
inevitably keep getting upvotes by every new reader of the thread. I'm not
sure what the best tweak for that is, but the proposed feature at hand would
seem to exacerbate the situation.

Note: OK, I've realized I made the archetypical dickish HN comment ("OK the OP
is interesting but on a tangent, why don't we all discuss this other thing _I_
care about?")...but I do think the proposed feature will have a direct impact
on the circulation of fresh, insightful comments. I'm a 1000+ Karma user, but
after I've read a thread a couple of times, I probably won't re-check it...I
can't be the only HN'er who has this lack of attention span...and so this
queue, even if perfectly implemented, would seem even more to suppress new
comments (unintentionally)

~~~
baddox
It sounds to me like an excuse to drastically slow down discussion under the
guise of improving the community. Imagine this scenario, which feels plausible
to me: "good" discussions on HN don't offer much value to HN stakeholders, but
"bad" ones (whether regarding employment discrimination, or bad press for YC
companies, etc.) pose a credible threat to HN stakeholders. Then, anything
that simply dampers discussions, even if it does so at a constant rate across
all types of discussions and comments, if good for HN stakeholders. Shutting
HN down altogether would do the same, but might itself result in bad press
throughout the community.

~~~
cinquemb
While I am willing to give pg and company the benefit of the doubt, I would
consider what you said to probably be the most noticeable difference that
would matter to the bottom line of the parties involved who have felt the
brunt of such situations.

With this new system, I can't imagine YC companies being called out on their
dirty closets like they have in the past (any maybe indirectly large swaths of
people who are employed by big co's who are power users on HN with those
stories, or in general up and coming companies people engage with in the
community).

I know some may feel I'm over exaggerating (because there are the passive bans
through blocking upvoting/downvoting effects for comments/posts/polls,
filters, hellbanning, etc.) , but I feel like until now, I have taken the
information access, discussion that goes on here and all the interesting
people this board attracts for granted. I just don't see it being the same
place to discus/mention ideas/concepts and ask questions if pg and co decide
to stick with it, and it just becoming more watered down onanism that it can
increasingly be and has been on track to becoming more of up until today. But
this is the internet, and moments like these may inspire someone to offer
other environments.

On another note: I'm finding it really fascinating to be able to experiment
with social systems like this. I'm excited to see the posts of people
analyzing the affect of a change like this via the search api or scraping.

------
habosa
I have ~1900 karma so I'll be one of the endorsers ... but I am not sure I
want to be. I think this is a very aggressive change and one that puts too
much power in the hands of people like me. Just because I have enough free
time to sit around and rack up HN Karma doesn't mean I should control the
speech of other, newer users.

Also I think the delay caused by waiting for endorsements on comments will
really kill a lot of fast-moving comment threads. it will make it harder for
people to have a discussion until the 1000+ karma gods take notice of the
thread and throw enough endorsements around to make the comments visible.

~~~
hkphooey
Disqus just turned off the ability to see how many people have downvoted a
comment.

So now every comment will look positive and be re-affirming instead of
challenging someone to think, "Hey, I agree with that comment, but hundreds of
others have disagreed, maybe I should read the thread to see why people
disagree, maybe there is something I should learn about."

There is too much gaming of comments. Let people speak freely, moderate for
illegal stuff, and be done with it.

------
8ig8
Please consider making pending comments anonymous. Let the comment stand on
its own.

~~~
cperciva
Whether that makes sense depends on the context. Particularly in the case of
someone submitting a link to their own (startup|open source code|blog
post|etc), people often ask questions along the lines of "what does the author
think about X" and the identity of the person replying matters a great deal to
whether a reply is meaningful.

~~~
thaumaturgy
It should be obvious whether such an answer sounds authoritative or not, and
it sounds like a comment could still be downvoted once endorsed. So I don't
think this is as big of a problem as users endorsing (or not endorsing) based
on username.

~~~
jiggy2011
There's also certain commentators who are more authoritative on certain
topics, because they are known to have positions at certain companies etc.

------
tensenki
Every few months I find HN starts to impede my productivity, and I kill my
account by removing the valid email address, and changing the password by
mashing keys. Having breached the 1000 on at least one of those, possibly
more, I kinda regret that. Especially since it obviously doesn't work, at
least not for more than a week or two at most.

I'm also concerned because of the hive mind effect. Just because something is
popular, doesn't mean it's quality. You attract more flies with honey than you
do with vinegar, but you get a LOT more with a steaming turd. And sure, the
turd is popular, but is it good eats?

And I find using the karma total is a poor choice. Reaching 1000 karma isn't
that difficult, nor is it an indication of quality, it can be an indication of
the age of an account, or the prolific nature of the commenter. Someones ratio
is a far better way to ensure that the individuals deciding are also quality
posters. A single troll with an account in the 1000+ can chose to use that to
green light his other accounts, and other trolls.

I look forward to being proven wrong though.

------
linuxhansl
Let me just say it straight out: I think this is a truly terrible idea.

I've been reading HN for over 3 years and I am more than happy to use my own
judgment to ignore comments that do not contribute to the discussion. I rather
have that than miss a comment that _others_ have not deemed important.

(technically this does not apply to me as I have karma > 1000, but I am
speaking from the viewpoint of somebody who hasn't)

We do not need rules like this. We need good judgment.

Good judgment cannot be enforced; it has to be cultivated. It'd be better to
post reminders about etiquette somewhere prominently and trust that people
tend to do the right thing (and most people do).

------
timo614
Since this will probably be the last time a comment of mine appears in HN due
to the new system I figured I'd give my take on it.

I'm someone who doesn't join in threads pretty often; I'll chime in if I find
the topic to be something I'm interested in but my ignorance to most other
matters leaves me from wanting to join into threads because of a fear of
people piling on negative responses or "schooling" me in terms of the topic at
hand.

I don't submit new articles because most things I'm interested in are
discovered by more well connected individuals so I'm usually late the party so
my score is relatively low despite how long I've lurked.

I'm fearful this new system discourages my participation further; if I don't
add some insightful comment or my ignorance of a topic causes others to
question whether my opinion is worth discussing I'll be kept from
participating because I haven't built up a score. I won't even have the chance
to join future conversations because my comments will be pending so until
someone decides my opinion has merit I'll be censored from joining into other
aspects of an article.

I may not be the most social of the HN folks here on the board but I do like
to join into conversations when the topic is of interest to me. I guess this
sort of system just makes me feel unwelcome because I'm being punished for not
joining in earlier.

Even the most negative comments incite conversation; a person who may have an
unwelcome opinion or whose ignorance prevents them from understanding a topic
can learn from discussions based off their response.

I understand the reasoning for this and I think, for the most part, it'll help
keep the comments section fairly civil. I'm just worried by solving this issue
you're throwing away a part of the community who haven't had a chance to prove
ourselves over time. I'm regretful I haven't spent time building up my karma
in retrospect.

~~~
gruseom
Why wouldn't your comments get endorsed and be seen as much as anyone else's?

Have you perhaps misunderstood the karma restriction to mean that people with
less karma will have their comments be less visible? That's not the idea.

~~~
timo614
The problem isn't that I think my comments won't be endorsed. It's more I'll
self censor my comments that I think would be less popular because I'd be
afraid if I'm censored I wouldn't have a chance to join in future
conversations until someone would agree with me.

If I release more popular opinions by the majority I'll be instantly accepted
and have a chance to further join in conversations. From a gaming perspective
the correct choice to better adapt to the system would be for me to always
speak to the majority to increase my odds of being accepted until I am part of
the elite caste of folks who can vote.

~~~
tptacek
You're missing two important facts: first, that your pending comment
eventually (after 24 hours) expires of its own accord, and second, that you
can always delete the comment if it's taking too long and holding you up on a
better comment you could have written.

~~~
prawn
In reading a thread (say, over the course of 5-15 minutes), I will often want
to post comments at various points. Because I am not in a popular HN timezone,
if I needed to wait for comments to be endorsed, I would find this seriously
frustrating. Waiting and checking to see if a comment had been approved would
be a huge time sink.

Edit: I think that limit has been lifted to five now.

------
orthecreedence
So, a "the rich get richer" commenting system. Great.

What exactly is wrong with just downvoting? Sure every thread has trolls and
useless comments, but a lot people bring up _really great points and ideas_
and having to go through and moderate all this shit _on every thread_ is going
to be a trainwreck.

This is a great forum for debates and discussions on technology but also the
issues affecting our world. Can we please choose not to limit everyone's voice
to the whim of the "karma wealthy" just to stave off a bit of bickering and
"lol kewl site" comments?

------
c23gooey
So only popular posters with popular opinions will be allowed to endorse
posts.

This feels like you are walling off HN for those who are already established
here.

I've been here for years, I like to feel like I have a chance to contribute to
discussions without hoping some karma overlord will approve.

I believe this change will cause HN to stagnate and become an echo chamber of
the thoughts of those who are already popular enough

~~~
Wistar
Same here. I have followed but rarely make any comments and those are usually
too late after the post's popularity has cooled.

------
michaelwww
_People who regularly endorse comments that fail one or both of these tests
will lose the ability to endorse comments._

Punishing people for endorsing comments that don't meet an arbitrary and vague
content standard will inhibit endorsements. Endorsements are necessary for
comments to show up. Seemingly weird comments that are brilliant only after
reflection will not get endorsed. Hacker News will trend towards mediocrity.
Another site killed by excessive moderation...

I run with dead comments showing. I hardly use my ability to down vote
comments, but I rarely see a dead comment that didn't deserve it. There's a
consensus on what should die here and I see no need to add more moderation.

~~~
ScottWhigham
_Punishing people for endorsing comments that don 't meet an arbitrary and
vague content standard will inhibit endorsements._

This happens already with flagging and downvoting. If you flag or downvote too
often/aggressively/whatever, you will have those privileges revoked. I used to
go to /newest daily and upvote/flag until I lost my flagging privileges. I
eventually got the ability to flag back but now I rarely go to /newest. It's
the tragedy of the commons - if I go to /newest and flag/upvote, this is a
better community because I'm active and participating. But if I am worried
about being punished from doing so, I won't do it and will just hope that
others will.

------
rdl
Some thoughts:

1) It would be fun to try this on only a subset of articles posted, so we
could get real A/B testing on how well it works. The same issues get posted
under multiple submissions, so we could see if the quantity and quality of
comments is improved by pending, independent of the topics.

2) "showpending" to allow <1000 karma people to view the pending comments,
much like "showdead" today.

3) These's now a huge incentive to farm a few 1001 karma point alt accounts.
You can do that with a few submissions.

~~~
ryandrake
+1 for showpending. At least allow people some way to choose read what's being
intentionally kept out. Might be interesting.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I keep showdead turned on for purposes of the hellbanned folks, some of whom
really don't deserve the ban.

I wouldn't turn on a showpending, though. If you can't get a few users to
endorse you, it probably wasn't worth saying.

I suspect anything remotely substantial will get the endorsements it needs.
The userbase here is more diverse than is readily apparent.

~~~
rdl
As someone with 24k karma, I'd like a way to turn showpending _off_ , too.
Like, whenever I read an article about certain topics, I'd like to not be
forced to see the pending comments. (I'll probably just use incognito-mode for
that)

------
nairteashop
I'm sure that this has been brought up before, but I've always wondered
whether it makes sense to split karma into comment karma and submission karma,
reddit-style, and grant this new endorsement power only to folks who cross a
certain _comment_ karma threshold.

Since now users with high karma will have a lot of power (than just
downvoting, which IMO was relatively innocuous), I think it makes sense to
ensure that this power goes to folks who have gained that power by
contributing meaningfully to the community over a long period of time, and not
by by a few - oftentimes lucky - submissions.

Am I totally off-base here? Or maybe this has been considered, but was too big
of a code change?

~~~
maxerickson
I'm more comfortable calling it hn-influence than I am calling it power.

If the idea is to take it away from people that are misusing it, I don't think
the occasional lucky submitter getting some undue hn-influence will be a big
problem.

------
tzs
1) Maybe the "cannot submit a comment if you have an pending comment" should
be a per thread thing, rather than for the whole site.

I suspect a lot of people read in batches. They take a break and read a dozen
new stories over the course of a few minutes. If the exclusion is site wide,
and the endorsement rate does not turn out as high as you hope, that would in
effect in many cases mean that they only get one comment per batch. If there
are more than one story they want to comment in on a batch, they will need to
remember to go back during another break and revisit the old story.

2) Won't someone think of the children? Suppose X comments, and his comment is
endorsed, and goes live. Y sees it, and comments on X's comment. Y's comment
gets endorsed and goes live.

If X and Y's aforementioned comments have each received an endorsement from a
third party, count that as an endorsement of the conversation between X and Y,
and allow their future comments to go live without endorsement if they are
children of the X/Y conversation.

Take a look at the several long back and forth exchanges between tptacek and
cperciva in this discussion: [1]. It would be a shame to impede such things.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7439363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7439363)

~~~
pg
It's only an issue if it takes a long time for comments to get endorsed, which
we don't know yet. But if that is a problem it's easy to make the restriction
per thread. I just wrote the simplest thing first.

~~~
bertil
You expect 1000ers to endorse most decent comments they come across that
aren’t greyed out yet. Based on how many votes most comments currently have, I
doubt that would be the case. Unvalidated comments would appear greyed-out,
therefore suspicious, and most 1000ers would assume there is something wrong
about them that they haven’t figure out. Especially if they expect to be
punished for validated anything that isn’t exceptional… I’m not sure what
ratio of comments you expect to weed out, but I expect most will be gone.

~~~
pg
Pending comments aren't greyed out. They just have [pending] prepended to
them. So I don't think there will be a lot to figure out.

------
noarchy
This looks like a solution without a problem. If there a desire to reduce
participation in the site, then this change will likely work. Whether or not
that is a good thing will reflect a difference in philosophies amongst the
users here. As this site has grown in popularity, it is no longer small and
exclusive. This will never cease to bother some people.

For what it's worth, I think the quality of discussion on this site is still
solid. I'm skeptical of this incoming change, but am open to being wrong once
I see it in action.

------
donatj
I feel like this really discourages unpopular truths from the discussion. This
is one of the worst options I've ever heard for a comment system.

~~~
gruseom
As I understand the idea, endorsing a comment doesn't mean you agree with it.
It just means you think it deserves to be in the thread. That should leave
room for unpopular views as long as they're respectfully expressed.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
> As I understand the idea, endorsing a comment doesn't mean you agree with
> it.

Yeah, that's _exactly_ how it will be used.

Sarcasm aside, the word "endorse" has a very specific definition which
basically guarantees how this system will be used, intentions or not. I think
about every single grayed-out comment I've seen, downvoted simply because it
shared an opinion that made people feel uncomfortable but was nonetheless on-
point, and now realize that we'll never even see those comments.

Real bummer for those inheriting HN to get it after this bad decision has been
made. Will probably represent the end of useful dissent on HN.

~~~
tptacek
It will work better than you think it will. People will endorse comments they
disagree with just to get the opportunity to rebut them. Users don't debate
things on HN to right the wrongs of the universe; they debate because debating
is (or can be, when the comments aren't horrible) gratifying.

~~~
rantanplan
No it won't actually. What you described might be the 1/1000 of the cases.
Most of the times when someone tells an unpopular truth that is hard to
debate, it'll be more gratifying to just silence that unpopular truth. And
that is called human nature.

------
molecule
_> Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to
post another._

As currently stated, if a comment's never endorsed out of pending, the
commenter will never be able to post again?

~~~
pg
With the current settings, a comment has a day to make it out of pending. If
you delete a pending comment, it's no longer pending.

~~~
networked
If the comment doesn't make it out of pending in a day, what happens to it and
its poster then?

Edit: Deletion is currently possible for less than that (2 hours?). Will this
be different for pending comments?

~~~
pg
Yes, deletion is possible for a pending comment as long as it's pending.

~~~
networked
I see. You said above that a comment only has a day to make it out of pending.
Why not auto-delete it when it doesn't? Edit: Never mind that question. Based
on
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446005](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446005)
this seems to be the case (i.e., you won't have to delete a failed pending
comment manually).

On a related note, the new system may prevent people from posting in the
feature suggestion thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363)).
Since it's already a special thread that never closes for comments perhaps
comments posted there should not be made pending.

~~~
pg
Oops, yes, another thing I overlooked.

------
king_magic
Sorry, I hate this idea. Especially the gating if your pending comment never
gets approved. It honestly feels like a slap in the face to your users. There
are guys like me with 600-700 karma who have been here for years, but only
post from time to time, and you've immediately alienated me with this system.

I'd like to think that I've had useful things to say in my time here, but
maybe not, I suppose. Your loss if it turns out I have.

I just don't see it improving the quality of comments. I think you're going to
find that it drastically reduces the number of people who want to contribute
to the HN community (like myself, now).

------
yajoe
This is an interesting feature, and certainly not something I would have
expected as the "next" feature to add. When I read "pending comments" I
expected something similar to slashdot's old "preview" feature so one could
double-check spelling, formatting, etc. i.e. preview the post before
submitting to HN. I would not have expected "pending" to mean "pending
_moderation_ " given the successful voting feature here.

I would ask what the goals of the change are, but they seem obvious:

1) Limit nastiness and negativity

2) Encourage deeper and pensive comments

3) Cynically, it seems like a private goal would be to limit criticism of YC,
though I know this would never be a _stated_ goal. The criticism may simply
have increased the priority even though HN has seemed more civil in recent
months as an outside observer.

While the change may achieve these results, I would expect the following
effects:

1) Fewer comments overall (there is a new "tax" to post, so-to-speak) and as a
result there will be fewer visitors in the medium term (sites like HN, reddit,
slashdot, huff post, etc all thrive on both the quality _and_ quantity of
comments since that's what entertains people). Without controlling the number
of front-page stories, you will in effect decrease the available content for
viewers to consume. The demand will be filled elsewhere. I always assumed
there was a private, invite-only forum for YC and that you would leave HN
alone as a great PR platform... this move makes me wonder some more.

2) Comments will trend towards the quality of bane, tokenadult, ChuckMcM,
patio11, cperciva, etc (we all know them) at the risk of fewer "provocative"
posts. Often the greatest quality posts, however, are in response or to
contradict simple-minded or provocative posts.

3) I am concerned by this line: _People who regularly endorse comments that
fail one or both of these tests will lose the ability to endorse comments._ I
like meta-moderation and all, but I don't like being reminded that all actions
are recorded and tied back to my account. I would ask for some separation
between "endorsing" and "agreeing" \-- as a continual skeptic, I like reading
and promoting contrarian views since it helps us learn.

I look forward to watching the experiment, and as a parting request, would you
be able to record and measure the goals? There must be a YC company that can
help with that, and I imagine it would be a wonderful blog write-up!

~~~
pg
It wouldn't limit criticism of YC. A comment only needs a few people to
endorse it to become visible. To suppress comments on any specific topic would
require all the users with over 1000 karma to agree not to endorse them, which
is hard to imagine.

~~~
c23gooey
Correction: it would require all users with over 1000 karma to read the
comments of every post to HN. It seems like you are making the assumption that
every user reads every post

~~~
pg
If a comment isn't seen by many users with over 1000 karma then it isn't seen
by many users period, and thus doesn't have much influence anyway.

~~~
npizzolato
Does a comment need to be seen by many users to be worthwhile? If it
contributes to the discussion of a small group of users (who may not have over
1000 karma), is that not still valuable discussion that you would want to
continue? I understand the goals of trying to promote healthy discussion, but
I fear that this will have many unintended consequences.

------
tokenadult
It will be an act of service to the community (which will be amply rewarded by
the community being a community of higher-quality comments, methinks) for the
users with more than 1000 karma to regularly visit the new submissions page

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)

and the active threads page

[https://news.ycombinator.com/active](https://news.ycombinator.com/active)

to keep track of which threads are most likely to need comment review. It
looks like pg will also attempt to set up a pending comments page, from which
it might be necessary to trace back to the original fine article to know
whether or not a comment is good, but that doesn't sound like too much work to
help build a better community. (I used to look at the noobcomments and
noobstories view of the site from time to time, until automation pretty much
took over spam-filtering here.)

Best wishes to all of you who desire to post good comments here. I'll do my
best to use some of my recreational time to review those for general
visibility as early and as often as I am permitted.

~~~
michaelwww
Maybe users with over 1000 could get a point each day they review a new
submission on the new page and lose a point for each day that they don't do a
review.

------
cwiz
Clearly, this:

    
    
        1. Limits speed of information distribution
    
        2. Can be used to filter out specific information
    
        3. Promotes centralised points of view -> Fewer people decide what is information is valuable
    

But:

    
    
        1. May lead to better quality of information
    

\---

3 facts vs 1 possibility

------
eevee
I've had an HN account for over two years.

I have 328 karma.

That's a whole lot of comments I'd have to post to get to 1000 karma. I don't
feel _that_ invested in HN, so it's more likely I just won't comment again.

This seems like a pretty good way to freeze the current set of commenters in
stone.

edit: It also occurs to me that, while endorsing may be novel _now_ , there's
not really any incentive for people to keep doing a boring rote task into the
far future. Plus you're threatening bans for people who do it badly. So why
would anyone do it at all?

------
nicklovescode
"Since I'm going to check out of HN at the end of this YC cycle"

To be clear, you mean you are going to stop maintaining the codebase of HN,
not stop actively participating in the community, right?

~~~
pg
It's impossible to predict the future perfectly, but I hope to leave
completely. The only YC thing I'm going to do is office hours with the
startups.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Any idea what you'll be doing next?

~~~
pg
What I was doing before: writing essays and software.

~~~
ztratar
Would love to hear about the software :)

------
hibikir
When suggesting a major change like this, I think that it'd be a very good
idea to do some back of the envelope calculations using data that you could
probably get straight from the DB.

My starting assumption would be that all users with 1000 karma actually keep
reading all comments as they can do now. Some might visit a 'new comments'
page to make sure posts by new posters get promoted. Others will just filter
them out completely. So we might as well start by claiming both effects will
counteract each other.

So take, say, the last week of submissions, and see how many comments that
actually received an endorsement are made by noobs like me that have less than
1000 karma. Then, take a look at how many of those comments were endorsed by
members that have more than 1000 karma, then, check how many were endorsed
FIRST by someone that had 1000 karma.

Given the starting assumptions, this would give you a pretty good idea of how
many comments would just stop receiving karma altogether, how many would
receive less, because people would not be able to see them before a 1000+ user
promotes it, and how many would remain roughly the same.

Then, you can add your own bias on whether you think people will be more
active at promoting those new posts, or if they will be more easily forgotten.
But without some hard data, all you are doing is making a major change to the
site, with no idea of what it's really going to do.

I am sure this information would also be considered useful by anyone geeky
enough to visit Hacker News, and you could use it to defend your position, one
way or the other. It's harder to be outraged when a proposal like this comes
attached to some nice evidence.

------
petercooper
I think this is a very interesting development and I'm excited to see what
impact it has when it goes live. That said, I have one perennial bone to
pick.. ;-)

 _So if you 're not sure whether you should endorse a comment, don't. There
are a lot of people on HN._

This is true, but _so much_ good stuff flies by on /newest without picking up
an upvote (or just one or two) that I'm not entirely convinced enough people
_fully participate_ here (or maybe /newest just isn't quite the right way to
do _that_ job either, I admit I don't go there every day myself).

------
tantalor
This won't work on high volume threads. This one had 3-4 comments per minute.
You will need a horde of moderators to handle that load, otherwise a most
comments will never be read AND endorsed. Coupled with the rate articles drop
of the front page almost guarantees most comments on high-volume threads will
ignored.

If you lower the moderator karma threshold to try to handle the load, then
most readers will be moderators and what's the point? Moderation exists to
benefit non-mods. Personally I would rather not have that power.

I argue upvote solves "say something substantial" and downvote solves "be
civil". This form of moderation is easy and works.

------
npizzolato
There have been a lot of comments stating why this is a poor idea, but as
someone who is sub-1000 karma, I haven't seen this reason posted yet (although
I could only read the first half or so). In a typical day, I can't spend all
day sitting on Hacker News refreshing threads and seeing if anyone has
responded to me (or promoted my comment). But occasionally I'll read a thread,
find a couple of interesting places to comment, and then go about my day until
I can check in again later. Only being able to leave one comment in a single
reasonable-length session would absolutely kill that use case. And frankly, it
would make this site much less attractive to browse as an occasional
commenter. Maybe you're okay with that, but I think that would be a mistake.

~~~
ScottWhigham
_And frankly, it would make this site much less attractive to browse as an
occasional commenter._

I find myself wondering whether that's part of the unstated goal of this
action - getting fewer "occasional commenters". I have no clue on the reasons
but clearly that will be an effect of the change. I think we can all see how
rushed this rollout was so it's possible that is an unintended consequence.

~~~
Hawkee
Maybe they're after the comments that require several hours of research and
multiple drafts. Anybody who can make a couple comments over a short period of
time isn't putting in a whole lot of thought and effort into their comments. I
get the feeling they're looking for comments that resemble blog posts rather
than the conversational type of comments.

~~~
notahacker
Why would rendering your comment invisible to the majority of people reading
the thread make you _more_ likely to put effort into it

------
archon
I find this change frustrating. I've been reading and occasionally commenting
on HN for 4 years, and I'm still not able to fully participate. I haven't yet
reached the magical karma number needed to "earn" the downvote button, so I
can't help moderate except by flagging.

Now, with this change, it's extremely unlikely that I will ever achieve the
ability to truly participate. It seems that if you want comment quality to
improve, then maybe it's a bad idea to even more tightly lock out people like
me who would happily downvote bad comments or endorse good ones.

------
amuntner
As a long-time lurker but new user, I see little reason to ever even attempt
to participate on a forum with moderation rules like this. This may be
speculation but I'm guessing many others would make the same cost/benefit
analysis.

~~~
mkr-hn
1000 karma can't be a high bar if someone like me can have over 4000.

~~~
npizzolato
You've also been here for almost 4 years. So that would be nearly a year of
being treated like a second class citizen. I agree with the parent that this
would stifle participation by newer users.

~~~
mkr-hn
The majority of it was from a tiny number of comments and submissions in a
small amount of time.

~~~
ufo
This makes it even worse. You will never reach 1000 karma unless you are lucky
to hit the karma lottery with a big post.

------
sytelus
This is very un-hacker like. There has be better way to rank the comments
considering you have so much information, specifically, graph of people with
karma values upvoting/downvoting each other. Can't we just do simple variant
of PageRank to rank comments? You can even simplify thing by having child
comments inherit rank of parent (or may be adjusted rank). Individual users
can set the noise level that they find acceptable in their profile. I strongly
believe this is a ranking issue and shouldn't be left to humans with all of
their potential to bias things.

Proposed system might work ok on head posts but there are lot of tail posts
which have smaller audiences but interesting topics nonetheless. On those
posts, minority opinions or "ridiculous ideas" would have lower probability of
getting endorsed.

~~~
sytelus
Another way to tackle bad comments issue:

Add "Follow" feature and then you can see comment tree up the nodes that are
created or upvoted by users who you are following OR the users who are N-edges
away in the graph. You can set N in your profile.

------
hayksaakian
Will there be a 'show-dead' style option for those who choose to read HN
unfiltered?

Otherwise, new users are unable to judge for themselves whether they agree
with how the community endorses comments*.

Without such options any community eventually becomes a self-perputating
hivemind.

~~~
pg
I haven't implemented this yet but it would not be too hard.

~~~
Double_Cast
My first thought was also "show-dead"; my second thought was a "comment cost".

Klocs are silly because they represent cost rather than value, correct? So
perhaps comments should start out with (-1) karma rather than (0). That way,
people will think twice about posting snark.

------
jamesaguilar
Are you at all worried that the increased comment friction will cause us to
lose a lot of users? I guess the counter argument could be made that if we
lose people because they are upset they can't post angry/useless comments, we
might be better off without those users. And if it's so many that HN ceases to
be useful to everyone, it might be better for the world if HN didn't exist.
Which is a sobering thought.

The other failure mode I can think of is that there are plenty of high karma
users who make occasional intemperate comments. I myself have been guilty
betimes. Are you at all worried that such folks will just go back and forth
endorsing each others' bad comments?

Re: your plan to check out of HN. You will be missed.

~~~
thaumaturgy
> _Are you at all worried that the increased comment friction will cause us to
> lose a lot of users?_

Not speaking for pg, but he's stated in the past that growth was never a goal
for HN.

HN could lose a lot of users and still be no worse off than it was 4 years
ago, and it was pretty OK 4 years ago.

------
chch
Do we know what fraction of active users has over 1000 karma? As someone with
forty-two karma currently who only comments rarely, it's a bit scary to know
my comments will face moderation to be posted, although it will surely
increase the substance/message ratio, which has seemed to be decreasing some.

It's not so much that I care about the karma, as I'd post more if I did, but
more that if someone asks a question that not many other users care about, but
I happen to have unique insight, I'd hope that my message can get through to
them. :)

~~~
greg5green
This is especially troublesome to me with regards to posts that quickly drop
off the first page. Will there be enough page views by users with karma > 1000
on posts like that to get any comments approved?

~~~
thaumaturgy
I can't speak for other longtime HN users, but I wrote my own news reader and
regularly browse threads that have disappeared off the front page. Anybody
with an RSS reader or other similar thingy would do the same.

------
WiseWeasel
I think this is a poor implementation. I'm here to have discussions with
people and read the good comments, so I have little incentive to spend my time
reading unendorsed comments, and anything that stops me from seeing a good
comment in a timely manner is taking away value for me. I assume similar
motives apply to people with less than 1000 karma, and the community will
cease to grow if they don't obtain value as well. But the worst part of this
is that for those with >1000 karma, we're being asked to pay attention to
posts with a high chance of being bad or mediocre. That's the opposite of what
I want to be doing.

Starting around the same time comment scores were hidden, people have been
voting less on comments, and it often seems like few people even read your
comments in threads not on the front page. What this effectively means,
especially in less active threads, is that I can only hold conversations with
people if they have >1000 karma. Others will simply fade into the ether.

A slightly less bad approach would be if the popularity of the thread
determines the threshold for posts needing endorsement. So as an example, non-
front-page threads get posts from people with >50% endorsement rate and >20
endorsements immediately live, threads on the bottom half of the front page
get posts from people with a >75% endorsement rate and >50 endorsements
immediately live, and threads in the top half of the front page have everyone
go through endorsement. Or maybe the number of posts already in the thread
determines those thresholds. The issue with that is that in a thread with 200
comments, I'm never going to look at all of them, or even a quarter, so any
that need endorsement will likely be missed.

Another possibly less bad approach would be to start posts at 0 points if the
poster is under a relatively high karma threshold.

Also, after 24 hours, all "non-endorsed" posts should go live with an
indicator, not disappear, so we can see if the system is even working as
intended, and have one last chance of finding those hidden gems.

That said, you will be missed, Paul! I hope we'll still see you post from time
to time.

------
temuze
This sounds promising. I'm worried about two things:

1) Will a minimum number of endorsements lead to groupthink? Will a
substantial, polite but unpopular comment still get endorsed?

2) If this works initially and improves comments immediately, could it have
negative long term affects? Will new users find it confusing or intimidating?
Will people comment less knowing that others are less likely to see it?

And one question:

Why not have comments with 0-3 upvotes only visible to people with 1000+
karma? Isn't that the same thing as the endorsement system?

Worthy experiment, regardless.

~~~
lunixbochs
There probably enough people with 1000+ karma to reduce potential groupthink.
You just need three people to say "this comment doesn't inspire rage", not
necessarily as far as "I really like this comment". That's still the upvote's
role.

0-3 upvote hiding would massively inflate karma, as you'd have a minimum of 3
karma for every "acceptable" comment. Not to say it couldn't work, as the
karma source is then at least slightly filtered, but it would change the fact
you can post a ton of average but not inappropriate comments and maintain
close to zero karma.

------
drakaal
The first big issue I see with this is in submission. When you submit
something often you need to leave the first comment to give it context. So
stories on the "new" page are likely to get a lot fewer upvotes.

The second big issue I see is when responding to comments on a post about
you/your company. I'm at 950-ish, and I suspect that is on the high side for a
founder at a 2 year old startup. When posts about us hit 3 months ago I didn't
have 500 points. I "hustled" to get to this level so that I would not look
like a noob, but if these rules had been in effect 3 months ago I wouldn't
have seen comments and questions about our product, and I wouldn't have been
able to reply.

I'm a "noob" as I have under 1000 points, but I have been a top 100
contributor in many other communities, it doesn't sound to me like this is a
good idea. I think it will limit discussion and feed back by Authors,
Founders, and others who find they are suddenly getting traffic from a site
called ycombinator that they have never heard of.

Basically I think this is a move away from community and towards elitism. If
that is the goal, then I think you should do it, but it feels like it is
counter to the stated goals of this change.

@PG if you want an automated system for determining the quality of a comment I
make one. We could probably work something out to leverage our technology at
HN to prevent all the negativity, and to do some sort of blend of the quality
score of the comment and the user karma to calculate if the comment "passes".

Edit:

I posted a history of Digg and how changing the way powerusers and noobs were
treated lead to its downfall.

[http://www.xyhd.tv/2014/03/industry-news/hackernews-
change-t...](http://www.xyhd.tv/2014/03/industry-news/hackernews-change-to-
comment-system-reminiscent-of-what-killed-digg/)

~~~
notahacker
One of the strengths of HN is that founders and creators of products can and
do have the ability the ability to engage with people posting about them. The
proposed rate limit and censorship-by-default largely eliminates this unless
the response happens to be on a sufficiently high traffic thread.

------
mcgwiz
Hmm, aside from the distaste of a "guilty until proven innocent" formula being
injected, this suffers from a critical flaw. The word "endorse" symbolizes
something different than "substantial and not nasty". It symbolizes subjective
support, agreement. Because of this association, the use of this system will
tend to signal that groupthink is valued, and a cycle of groupthink will
become entrenched.

The fix is simple: use a different symbol. Something that more precisely,
objectively signifies "not simple and not nasty". This will create a more
permissive gate that allows opinions of moderate substance and moderate tone
through (an "err on the side of allow" policy). Inevitably the symbol must
also consider the tendency of moderators, being active participants in a
discussion themselves, to favor their own views.

Taken all into account, I suggest the "endorse" link be renamed "tolerable".
(Rather than an action, it becomes a kind of flag.) This has the explicit
connotation of erring toward permissiveness of differing views, and contrasts
the two fears expressed in the post: comments that are boring or
unprofessional/spiteful/mean.

(And as it stands, upvoting already signifies "endorsement".)

------
simonsarris
Consider how many people disagree with you here. Well-respected users.

If we disagree with you here on what you may have thought a well-regarded
idea, who is to say how many well-regarded comments we are now going to miss?

How many excellent comments are headed for the dustbin because of a
misunderstanding?

This might _work_ , but it will turn HN into a community that is _very_
inward.

~~~
megablast
We can try it out, and if it doesn't work switch it back.

~~~
Too
How can we try it out? How can all non moderators know what they are missing?

------
Mindless2112
This type of feature is exactly the reason I don't participate in
StackOverflow. Granted, pending-comment is better than can't-comment.

That said, I expect this will save me hours of my life since I expect that I
won't bother to write comments once this is in effect (and as an added bonus,
there should be less comments to read). I tried noprocrast and couldn't handle
it, but this will do it.

~~~
yeukhon
SO has a lot of garbage posts which people expect two lines of description
will receive a programmatic solution. Sometimes some moderators and users with
high reputations do over-edit posts. But HN is not excluded.

------
rdl
Could you please move endorse and flag to be far apart (maybe on separate
sides of the line, or at least with a no-op like "link" or "parent" in the
middle)? I iPad or iPhone often, and accidentally hitting the wrong thing
would be annoying; I might not be watchful enough to unflag.

------
acjohnson55
I honestly think the overall quality of comments is quite good on HN. Besides
the quality of the articles (which is also top notch), it's a big reason why
HN is a thrice daily part of my routine.

The bigger issue is that nesting is a poor format for displaying comments,
once a discussion gets large enough. I've been a part of the team revamping
Huffington Post's discussion interface, and I think it's a great solution for
giving people the option to switch between breath-first and depth-first
exploration of the comment tree as they see fit. It's not a perfect solution,
but I do think it beats some of the worst problems of nesting.

~~~
camus2
I agree about the nesting issue. But i hate the new HuffPo discussion
interface because it breaks the reading flow.

I think it is horrible to use. What would have been better is use the same
system but without this horrible pop-up window.You can totally open/close a
comment tree without having the feeling you are going to a new page just to
see the comments.

I think the way disqus works is a good compromise.It's perfectly ok to limit
the depth of the comment tree to 2/3 sub comments no more.And even limit the
number of sub comments.

There are a lot of other stuffs I hate about the HuffPo ,the fact that HuffPo
tries to trick you into clicking the same link multiple times by changing the
title and the picture of an article I already visited makes me angry ,it's
just click bating ,and makes me feel HuffPo thinks i'm an idiot, i dont have
time to waste with these tricks,and I think it's borderline dishonest.

Anyway that was my little rant about Huffpo UX. I really wonder if your
userbase is growing thanks to these choices. People use to come to HuffPo for
its content, and there is a lot to say about its quality too today.

~~~
acjohnson55
Well, I should specify that I work for an agency that does work for HuffPost,
so I don't make strategic decisions and can't represent their point of view.
From a personal standpoint, I agree that there are definitely ways to improve
upon what we've built. My point is just that nesting is broken, and that I'm
all about alternatives.

I find Disqus great for content with only a small amount of commentary, but
extremely unpleasant to use on articles that have more than say 400 comments
(and CNN regularly has articles in the thousands of comments). At that point,
if you're viewing either the oldest or most liked comments, it's damn near
impossible to browse the comments that are directly on the article. I think
even HN's low tech interface is better.

------
EGreg
pg - I am going to reply to this (even though I fear it might cause me to
never be able to post another live comment again)

It seems to me that your aim is to trying to protect the people reading the
comments, but this will only protect the people whose Karma is less than 1000!
That is to say, it actually protects the people who use the site the least,
and in response to what, those people "diluting" the site? Presumably the
others who have 1000 Karma earned it by making enough good posts and comments.
So you are protecting the wrong group!

Reddit allows people to see highly nested comments by explicitly clicking a
link. Here you would be completely hiding them from anyone except the HN
"regulars". It seems this will only decrease value for those people. Why not
give them the OPTION to see those comments by clicking a link to expand, like
on Reddit?

And what if I delete a pending comment after a couple days, does it reset this
status - which is like a hellban but only with regard to visibility to lower-
karma users? Also what happens to replies to a pending comment?

Requiring too many people to vote and participate in site governance (and
given the number of comments, this will require a lot of HNers with high karma
to keep being active) often doesn't work. Consider when facebook asked its
members to vote - it didn't receive enough "turnout":

[https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-site-
governance/resu...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-site-
governance/results-of-the-facebook-site-governance-vote/10151840534290301)

Thus until you get this system to a point where it's good enough, I strongly
suggest you give everyone the OPTION of seeing "pending" comments. Or at the
very least, make the pending comments grayed out so that high-karma HNers
would be psychologically conditioned to click on them to endorse them (and
subsequently click again to un-endorse them).

------
diziet
This might be a terrible execution of this idea that will cut the amount of
discussion on HN by a large amount. Maybe even by 90%.

This puts the onus on the older members of the community to do even more work
administrating the site -- for every comment posted there need to be a couple
of users with karma > 1000 to endorse it, and they will need to literally work
to allow comments through.

~~~
codr
> cut the amount of discussion on HN by a large amount. Maybe even by 90%.

Indeed, this seems to be the point.. which is kind of ridiculous.

What problem is this solving again? If it's bickering sub-threads, just add UI
to collapse threads.

------
allendoerfer
This might cause duplicate comments, which were previously not written,
because commenters were able to read comments posted before them.

~~~
lunixbochs
That could pose a dilemma to the endorser too. Two comments with similar text:
do you only endorse one?

I like it when social problems can relate to computer science:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_check_to_time_of_use](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_check_to_time_of_use)

------
pdonis
There are many good suggestions in the comments here (which I've been
upvoting, on the assumption that that's going to focus attention on them); but
I have one that I haven't seen made yet: collect data on pending comments to
see which, if any, of the potential issues being raised in this thread
actually are issues. For example:

(1) Measure the distribution of comment endorsement for >1000 HN users: how
many they endorse, how often they endorse, and how that varies with things
like hour of the day, time logged on, etc.

(2) Measure the distribution of "time to endorse" for comments (how long it
takes from posting to endorsement), and how _that_ varies with things like
hour of the day, etc.

(3) Measure how many comments get lost in limbo because they are never
endorsed.

My initial sense is that this is going to significantly raise the cost of
participating in HN, which will make me less likely to participate. (By "cost"
I mean both the added cost of having to endorse comments, and the added cost
of having to wait for my own comments to be endorsed before I can post another
one.) But I may be overestimating what the effect will be.

------
OedipusRex
I worry about timezones, what percentage of users with 1000+ karma are in low-
population timezones?

------
mschuster91
No. Just no. Reasons:

a) it WILL kill off those who want to remain (pseudo/ano)nymous and create
throwaway accounts for discussing sensitive stuff (like the multiple "my
startup is failing" posts in the last months)

b) Sorry, but I (and many others) have actually lives to live and jobs to do.
1000+ karma users are not moderators, and many simply will be too lazy / too
occupied to click "endorse" all the time.

c) Discussions live on the "live" part - and <1000 karma users will have to
endure MASSIVE waiting times, effectively killing discussions.

~~~
mehwoot
_Sorry, but I (and many others) have actually lives to live and jobs to do.
1000+ karma users are not moderators, and many simply will be too lazy / too
occupied to click "endorse" all the time._

Well any site with community based content is going to fail if users don't
interact with it. "Endorse" will just be the equivalent of upvoting something
if it hasn't already been endorsed. It's not an onerous burden.

~~~
mschuster91
Endorse and upvote is one click too much. Especially if its done like the
"flag" link which will redirect you and make you lose your focus.

------
xingjianp
> People who regularly endorse comments that fail one or both of these tests
> will lose the ability to endorse comments. So if you're not sure whether you
> should endorse a comment, don't. There are a lot of people on HN. If a point
> is important, someone else will probably come along and make it without
> gratuitous nastiness.

So there will be a group of people (group B) who are going to check the
quality of HN users with 1000 karma (group A)?

and, will there be another group of people(group C) who are going to check the
quality of the work of group B?

------
spitfire
The concern to me is this might cause a chilling effect on people's comments.

This sort silence by default will stop a lot of good contributors from taking
their first few steps to joining the conversation.

It may make people who might take opposite views to the general consensus
think twice about posting, even if they might have more information than most
on the subject.

------
networked
Will users with 1000 or more karma be able to reply to unendorsed comments?

Will there be a "show pending" setting (for users with under 1000 karma and/or
those with >= 1000 karma)?

~~~
pg
No one can reply to a pending comment, or vote on it, or see it in most cases.

------
dinkumthinkum
This will prevent comments from people that disagree with the standard view on
HN. I think that is very unfortunate. :(

But then, I didn't think the comment situation on HN was that dire.

------
waterlesscloud
Perhaps the strongest value of this will be to slow down the threads that
involve a dozen replies from someone in a short period of time. Rarely are
those comments substantial enough to be meaningful, often they're just someone
reacting in a reflexively emotional way to a discussion.

------
noarchy
I really like the idea of making pending comments anonymous (proposed by
8ig8). I strongly suspect that many current upvotes are based on who is making
the comment, rather than the merits of the comment itself.

------
forgottenpaswrd
It seems bureaucracy has come to HN.

I personally won't follow the new rules. I prefer not to comment anymore.

I was one of the early users of HN, this alone made me have enormous karma and
influence out of nothing.

I forgot the password several times and created new accounts. Now my comments
were worth nothing just because I was new.

One of the reasons I write anonymous is that I don't want to carry my real
life reputation with everything I say, call it the Feyman effect: when he got
the Nobel price everybody started considering everything he said like God
words, even if he wanted to just do a funny stupid remark.

I don't want my comments to be judged by gatekeepers, or to be the gatekeeper
myself.

Probably, given the size of HN this is necessary, like Reddit we just have to
find a smaller community that cares about science and start over again.

------
jfoster
It's unusual how intolerant of experimentation entrepreneurs can be.

This may or may not work. PG even acknowledges that it's likely to go wrong
initially. Implicit in that is that they will work on fixing it until it's
working better than the current system. In the end, it's guaranteed to either
completely fail as an experiment (they'd probably roll it all back) or yield
something working better. Yet there's so much angst about the changes here.

It's not always irrational to get concerned about changes. For example, laws
are typically written and then there are substantial barriers to revisiting
them. In the case of a website, though, why worry? If this isn't working
better, it's extremely unlikely that YC would leave it in that state.

~~~
notahacker
This whole proposal is intolerant of experimentation; it's censorship-by-
default of community members whose attempts to contribute aren't guaranteed to
be viewed and endorsed by the top 5% of users within a short time frame.

It's entirely rational for entrepreneurs to oppose something which appears to
be a dreadful idea, and especially to oppose initial implemention of it on a
grand scale (a proposal to experiment with pre-moderating only brand-new
users, low average karma users or threads which are flagged up as possible
flamewars would, I suspect, be considerably less unpopular as the solution
might actually be less harmful than the problem. Edit: looks like this now
_is_ the proposal.).

------
thenmar
I'm excited to see how this works, and how the process changes after some
testing. If reddit is any example, stricter moderation almost always results
in a better user experience and a tighter, more respectful community. Look at
r/askhistorians as a prime example.

------
kruipen
While I still can get a word in: I predict this is going to be a clusterfuck.

Social systems are fragile. PG hasn't even thought about users loosing ability
to comment by having a pending comment on an old post nobody will ever see.
There are likely countless more subtle problems...

------
mariusz79
This is nothing but a censorship and will make HN useless.

~~~
jmtame
As an early HN member who has seen comments decline since the early days, I
like this change. This comment you've written falls in line as one I would not
endorse. Would you say that Amazon is censoring their products because not all
reviews show up on a given page? The community decides what shows up, that's
not up to Amazon. Same thing going on here; the earliest and most active
members are the ones who decide what comments are worthwhile. I welcome this
change and think this is a great idea/experiment.

~~~
mariusz79
It doesn't change that fact that this is censorship. If it wasn't any comment
would have a chance to be shown. If the comment is bad it can be flagged or
voted down, but still anyone can see it.

------
eob
> 2\. Say it without gratuitous nastiness.

I really hope this change addresses this! Maybe I'm just becoming an old
curmudgeon, but there really seems to be mean, argumentative tones to a lot of
the conversation I read on HN these days.

I hope we can address it because HN really is a community of smart, earnest,
helpful minds that can be a wonderful crowd to eavesdrop on when at their
best.

------
InclinedPlane
As much as I'd like to see the quality of discussion on HN improve I think
this is a terrible change that will do the opposite as well as driving people
elsewhere.

------
bertil
If you want to improve comments, you need to have less carrot-and-stick (that
will drive comments into parroting types) and more specific criticisms, or
offer the possibility of re-writes. Children, no matter what age they are, do
not learn faster by being slapped on their fingers but guided; I believe that
kind of mentoring is the exact reason why YCombinator improves naked
capitalism.

I had enough of my comments voted down for “not respecting community
standards” because a handful of people can’t imagine my questions are not
rhetorical. If they had to re-phrase them, they would have realised negativity
was only in their knee-jerk.

------
mbreese
I think this is an interesting solution to a common problem. The problem isn't
poor comments, it's how to deal with a community site when it's in the post-
early adopter phase. In the past, when sites like this hit a certain maturity
level, you have a few problems: people complain about all the new users and
the loss of character. It's all part of what happens when network effects take
hold and your site has an increasing number of users. Once you've hit a
certain inflection point, each site evolves whether they want it to or not...

I think Slashdot ignored it and lost a lot of relevance to Digg. Digg tried to
pivot to be more marketable and drove people to Reddit. Reddit hit that point
and decided to fracture into lots of sub-reddits (which I think was the most
successful way to evolve so far). [1]

The pg/HN approach is basically to leave it to the users who've been around
longest to cultivate the community. It's a lot of trust to put into those 1K+
users, but probably not overly so. It remains to be seen if this can be a
successful way to keep HN relevant to more than just the YC-set, but we'll
just have to wait and see. Hopefully this works out better than Slashdot meta-
moderation (which was just odd).

[1] This is my take on the histories of these sites... they all went through
the growth, plateau, and loss phases to some extent. I'm sure others can tell
me if earlier communities had the same patterns.

------
metermaid
There are probably less than 100 HN users who are openly female with over 1000
karma-- food for thought.

------
touristtam
I think that your comment and submission system is imperfect to begin with.

Submission:

How many time do you see a new submission that is basically a repost from
another one. This is quite high in fact, specially with topic that some user
feel really strongly about. It is diluting the potential for meaningful
discussion.

But you have as well the issue of submission that don't match PST timezone
which means in turn that the submission, although it would match the interest
of the HN population and the type of topics that one would expect to find on
HN, take a huge dive in the list of upvoted topics, and once again no
meaningful discussion comes out of it.

Comments:

The current upvote system shows very little information. And more than often,
user can comments to just thank the author, instead of just upvoting. It might
be because there isn't any visual cues of what the current points a comment
has gathered or who has upvoted that. One could argue more transparency could
lead to a clan issue where some user might want to consciously upvote a
sumbission / comment as a group for their own visibility as a group.

There is also the issue of duplication of opinions in the comments, and
discussion that take a tangent from the original topic. Both that are
mentioned and addressed through the pending comments, but a simple collapsing
of child node in the comment tree would have more welcome than this highly
debatable feature.

Thanks,

Tam

------
ufmace
I'm a bit torn on this idea.

On the one hand, I think it would be great for some of the bigger threads,
that often go to hundreds of comments, many of which say the same thing over
and over again. It could do a lot of keep those shorter, more insightful, and
more on-topic.

On the other hand, what about the smaller threads, that tend to get one or two
dozen comments, if that, and probably not many page views? Would discussion
there become essentially impossible unless a >1k-er deigns to drop in and
bless a few of the posts with some endorsements? Has anybody actually checked
what proportion of users are >1k and how willing they are to drop in on every
thread on the site and endorse comments? Or constantly reload bigger threads
and scroll all around to see new comments for that matter?

If it were up to me, I'd do a sliding scale. Something like no
endorsement/auto-endorse all for under 20 total comments in the thread. At >50
comments in the thread, users with under, say, 100 karma need endorsement. At
>100, you need maybe 250 karma, 200 posts 500 karma, etc. Maybe users under 5
or 10 karma always need endorsement. Maybe some formula to compute it that you
can tweak the factors on as needed if there is too little discussion or too
much fluff.

Another point - say I make a comment that sucks. Oops, happens to all of us
sometimes. What happens then? Does it stay unendorsed and stuck forever? Can I
just delete it, or will it auto-delete or something? Does it get downvoted
without ever being endorsed?

Hey wait a second, I think we're just getting closer to slashcode here...

------
stringham
This would prevent users from commenting on multiple articles in a short
period of time, and for articles that don't hit the main page the op may never
see someone's thoughtful remarks.

For users with over 1k karma, do their comments go through the pending phase
too?

------
rabino
> Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to
> post another.

This is kinda crazy. You can't expect 100% of our comments to be brilliant.
There needs to be some timeout or something, if not, people will start
creating new accounts every day.

~~~
pg
Comments don't have to be brilliant. All they have to be is not stupid or
mean.

~~~
dangrossman
"Don't say something mean" is a lower bar than "say something substantial",
which is what your post said the standard of endorsement should be. There's
going to be a mental tax involved, asking "would PG be OK with me endorsing
this? is my threshold for 'substantial' higher or lower than his?" to each
comment, weighing the risk of losing the privilege for guessing wrong. I've
apparently already mis-judged what you think warrants endorsement. The meta-
moderation aspect of someone subjectively reviewing my endorsements is a
disincentive to participating in that moderation.

The number of people that can upvote is very high, yet most comments probably
sit at 1 point despite not being mean or stupid. Now restrict that pool to
1000+ karma users, add a mental tax to the task, how many of those same
comments are going to get two people to click "endorse" if they couldn't get
one person to click "up"? I wouldn't put money on the rapid-fire sub-second
moderation materializing, especially outside the top 10 stories or at odd
hours.

------
corin_
Love the idea, think and hope it will improve comments greatly - a few
questions:

Will you be able to tell whether a comment you posted has been endorsed enough
to become visible (or even how many endorsements)?

Would it be a good idea (and if so, would it be doable or too complicated) to
automatically figure out users who deserve to get auto-approved, at least
until they are flagged enough to undo it? Maybe if x% (95? 100?) of your last
y comments (100? 500?) have been approved it could give you the benefit of the
doubt?

Would it be worth offering users with 1000+ karma the ability to disable their
abilities so they could enjoy the filtered version others see? Or would too
many people chose the option making it not work at all?

Finally, I lost my flagging rights ages ago, presumably for using it too
liberally - is there any system in place whereby that might reverse? Will that
mean I don't see new comments, or can I see but not flag/endorse, or can I see
and endorse but still not flag?

Anyway, excited to see the change :)

Edit: a related, slightly, question: Does HN "shadowban" users from
downvoting, i.e. do some users think they can downvote (or indeed upvote) but
their votes aren't counted? Not sure why, but I've felt that might be the case
for my downvote for a little while.

------
UK-AL
A major problem is that this makes it very difficult for someone to get
established on HN.

Imagine how many pending comments will have to be accepted for someone to
reach the 1000+ mark?

------
lunixbochs
The limit on one pending comment has the potential to slow or completely block
a one-to-many discussion.

Say I post "I made the linked project. [Some cool facts about it]." and four
people ask me questions. I start answering, and can't submit my second answer.
I'm probably annoyed at this point. Repeat for the remaining questions.

Maybe the system could have a provision for submitting multiple pending
comments on your own link or sub-thread to solve this.

------
tedsanders
PG, instead of adding an endorse button, why not just use the upvote button
and display the pending comment after it's been upvoted by a few 1000+ karma
users?

Do you want the standards for endorsement to be different than the standards
for upvotes?

~~~
pg
Yes. It should be possible to endorse something without agreeing with it.

~~~
tedsanders
Isn't that already the (desired) standard for upvotes, though? To promote high
quality content, regardless of whether we agree with it nor not? I'm still not
quite sure of the intended difference between them.

~~~
tptacek
No, that's not the HN standard. HN overtly endorses downvoting disagreements
(I don't like that, but it is what it is).

------
belleruches
Hey PG,

I think you're doing the right thing. I've watched HN start to turn into a
place full of snark and very useless comments. This is a great measure, but is
the 1000 points karma a high threshold for the endorsers? Why not 500 or 750?

~~~
lunixbochs
pg says 1000+ is arbitrary. It probably stands to be tuned. I wonder if this
will have any effect on interesting comment sub-threads on links that don't
hit the first couple of pages.

~~~
belleruches
It's probably going to be for the better. My biggest concern though is that HN
may become to clique-ish... Those with low karma that have interesting
thoughts may now be discouraged from sharing...

~~~
lunixbochs
I don't think that will universally be the case. Low karma might also indicate
you don't post much, so you're less likely to be annoyed.

------
doesnt_know
Sounds good in theory, the best communities are almost always those that are
strictly moderated or have their rules heavily enforced.

It will probably make HN worse though. HN already suffers from being too much
of a "rich, startup boys club". This will only get worse as those that have
been around longer and made comments that "fit" within that viewpoint get
karma and get to decide what comments are shown.

~~~
krapp
I would suggest that this is a fine time for those of us with unfinished HN
clones and visions of disrupting the whatever to try and see if we can do
better, although the network effect around HN would seem to suggest that most
people will simply put up with it or leave for reddit or another larger site.

~~~
mnl
I'm in. An unbiased HN for scientists/engineers/old-time hackers would be just
great. This site's format is perfect, but the scope is too narrow.

------
hysan
Is the endorsement requirement a set threshold throughout the entire day?

As an international user, it is already fairly difficult to participate in
discussions because of the lack of activity here at certain times. So I would
imagine that there will also be far fewer 1000 karma users here as well. I
fear that this change might cause the activity level on HN to have higher and
lower peak activity periods throughout the day.

------
dleskov
I am afraid that the bias of the "1000+ club" will silence many comment
authors whose views and opinions are substantially different. The result is
you will have a smaller community, the member of which are in agreement with
each other, so there will be less interesting discussions, and the disagreed
ones will flock away, having no chance to be heard here.

I certainly would read the comments less frequently.

------
joeblau
Wow, this sounds great. My only question is if you're sure you want to put the
"endorse" button so close to the "flag" button? I don't want to accidentally
flag something incorrectly.

~~~
gus_massa
It's not a very big problem, because it's possible to unflag a comment.

~~~
lunixbochs
Is it possible to unendorse a comment?

------
camus2
Just my 2 cents : often the top comment becomes the root of the discussion for
all the "thread". Would be great if top comments were shuffled so all the
discussion is not concentrated on the first comment of the "thread". Bad
comments can still be pushed at the bottom of the page.But the top comments
with the most karma should not stick at the top of the page.

------
TerraHertz
Hmmm, in this thread the dead comments are some of the best. Or at least, the
ones with which I best agree.

Only a few more days to go before April 1st. Did PG accidentally post a little
early? If he's indeed serious, then his idea strikes me as similar to the
person tossing a grenade back into the room they are just leaving. Either
that, or an attempt to permanently cement in place the discourse control
privileges of the Ancien Régime before their figurehead steps down.

Another problem I have with HN's structure, is that the control/censorship
details don't seem to be laid out clearly anywhere. The post order sorting
algorithm still mystifies me, and I only learned of 'dead/showdead' recently,
when it was discussed in a thread. After that I leave showdead permanently on,
and notice a distinct ideological bias in the killing of posts.

Seems likely the details of the 'pending' system won't be documented clearly
for new users either. How do you think new arrivals will feel, when their
posts are segregated and they don't even fully understand why?

Are there other existing regulatory schemes in HN I'm not aware of? For
instance after I first started participating my karma count was going up
sensibly. Then I made one comment mentioning the J and Z words, and got almost
instantly smashed to negative karma. (Maybe that was before hell banning was
implemented?) Since then I still seem to have random posts voted down, that
seem reasonable and positive to me. My tiny karma grows very very slowly, and
doesn't appear likely to ever reach 1000. So effectively, HN with the 'pending
post' scheme implemented would be closed to me.

If the objective is to restrict forum participation to actual startup
principles and their invited friends, why not just say so, and enforce that
directly?

------
harrystone
That sounds like a system designed to produce another forum hive-mind, and the
internet really doesn't need any more of those.

------
ParadisoShlee
Please offer an opt-in to see pending comments (without the ability to vote).

Maybe they'll remove the ability to reply cleanly - but it's a better option
than filtering based on the whim of others.

------
kanamekun
This system of empowering community members to endorse comments from newer
users has worked really well on Gawker!

<< The editors are the only ones who can give you a star, and we'll be giving
them out to the commenters we trust the most. ... [Y]our comments will
automatically appear in the featured comments, and you will have the ability
to promote non-star comments up to the top level. In fact, just replying to a
comment will bump up to the front page. You'll also see all of the unapproved
comments left by new users and can approve the ones that you think are up to
snuff. But use your powers wisely. We're going to be taking a closer look at
who's doing what. Use your star powers to make mischief, and we'll take them
away. >>

[http://gawker.com/5311027/gawker-comments-are-made-of-
stars](http://gawker.com/5311027/gawker-comments-are-made-of-stars)

------
janesvilleseo
I don't have a Facebook page, gave up on twitter, only lurk on Reddit, but
here is where I occasionally comment. I sit at only 102, not nearly enough to
past the pending comment threshold. Not sure if I'm going to participate much
anymore :(

I'll hangout for awhile and give this experiment a shot, but I don't expect
much.

------
batoure
So I would like to have someone explain to me why I am wrong But I feel like
this will penalize discussions that are happening off the front page. I spent
a decent amount of time reading things that don't make it to the front page. I
comment and am involved in discussing posts that rarely get much altitude. So
now comments that are made on articles that are interesting only to a minority
require the ok of a member of the majority. This seems more exclusionary than
worth while.

Perhaps an option would be to add filtering on any post that is up-voted above
a certain score. This would allow early movers to help generate conversation
and then trigger moderation when the conversation is going to go wide.

This type of a tactic would encourage better behavior in the big leagues while
giving room for smaller voices that may not be fully part of the community.

------
tdicola
If I want to make a Show HN post that links to a project, and immediately
comment to introduce it and fill in details will it have to wait for a 1000+
karma person to endorse it? Any way to make that kind of scenario work a
little better? I have a feeling a lot of Show HN stuff will just get buried.

------
evanmoran
I love the experiment of it! My concern is that the scale of the discussion
changes the discussion itself. Hear me out:

1) If a post is unpopular less people will be there to endorse.

2) With less people endorsing, replies will appear slower to people with low
karma (lots of us), so we are disinclined to reply because we can't see the
discussion. Less replies mean, less discussion.

3) The system also creates a strong disincentive to comment on unpopular posts
because if no one reads it you can't comment on anything else. This will slow
the comments of unpopular posts further.

One solution would be to weight the number of endorsements needed by the
popularity of the post. The more people seeing it the more endorsements
needed. For new posts (not popular yet) I would say comments shouldn't require
any endorsement and let the existing down/up system rule.

------
twic
How about instead of only allowing a single pending comment, allowing some
number, where that number is managed in a similar way to the TCP sliding
window. Start by allowing a single pending comment, allow an additional
pending comment if that is endorsed, and so on, up to some maximum number of
pending comments. However, if a comment is rejected, reduce the window size.
You could employ all sorts of heuristics here - reduce the window by one per
rejection, halve the window if there are two consecutive rejections, reset the
window to its initial size if there are three, whatever.

One obvious problem here is that we are not getting a way to positively reject
comments; rejection is simply not being endorsed after 24 hours. That is
probably too noisy a signal to base a mechanism like this on. Oh well.

------
nkuttler
Um, how will this work out with timezones? Should I even bother writing
comments outside of US office hours?

------
malisper
Just throwing out an idea, but why not allow the user who posts the article to
select whether or not they want to use pending comments? This way one user
doing a simple Ask HN can get immediate feedback while another posting a
controversial article can have an intelligent conversation.

------
TerraHertz
It seems to me you're forgetting an important aspect of human psychology with
this system. People generally don't like submitting to 'supervision', in what
they feel should be free discussion. If you create an environment in which
people feel they need 'permission' to post, then they simply won't. Or at
least, your average post will become more likely to be from an insensitive
person, who doesn't care about such things as freedom of speech.

I think this change is a bad, bad idea, and will have subtle unintended but
quite harmful consequences.

But of course, if the intent is to create a clique-controlled forum, in which
only thoughts consistent with the majority views of long-established members
can be seen, then this will probably achieve what you want.

------
robinh
I'm not yet sure how to feel about this, but I have one question that remains
unanswered: Will this apply to submissions (possibly in the future) as well?

~~~
pg
Not currently.

------
bsder
Has anybody actually _done the math_?

Is the ratio of superK users to subK users sufficient such that they won't
spend all of their time approving comments?

Back of the envelope calculations from where I sit suggest that this has no
choice but to slice the number of comments by at least an order of magnitude
(and I actually think it is closer to 2 orders of magnitude).

If that's really the goal, why not just implement a comment killer that every
now and then just randomly stomps on a posted comment and blocks someone from
posting for 15min/30min/hour/whatever when it fires.

If you tie the probability to karma and karma ratio, it would do almost as
good a job and not inconvenience the superK folks. And you could tune it to
get the comment posting rate that you want.

------
mratzloff
Three things.

First, I'm not sure this solution is actually necessary at all.

Second, endorsing sounds like a lot of tedious work.

Third, the system as described has a number of issues. I would modify it in
the following ways:

1\. Number of endorsements is proportional to story rank, and changes as the
story rank changes. After story rank 60, no endorsement is required.

2\. Number of pending comments allowed for a given user is proportional to his
or her karma. Users with karma of 1 should have 1, users with karma 1000
should have more, perhaps 5-10.

3\. Unendorsed comments appear visually distinct from hidden posts and down-
voted posts. Perhaps a shaded background?

4\. If a user has exhausted his or her unendorsed comments pool in this
24-hour period, they should be informed of this fact where the new comment
text area normally is.

------
ElComradio
In my opinion this is a fix in search of a problem. In reading all comments on
a post I see very few "worthless" comments and many of those are grey.
Skimming over tit for tat threads happens on an almost subconscious level.
Maybe it's just me.

------
trentmb
"<Insert Minority Group Here> in tech" submissions will probably be
interesting to see once this is implemented.

------
foob
_Comments get from pending to live by being endorsed by multiple HN users with
over 1000 karma. Those users will see pending comments, and will be able to
endorse them by clicking on an "endorse" link next to the "flag" link._

I have over 1000 karma but I don't have a flag link for comments and I'm
fairly sure that I never have. Is the threshold for flagging comments also
supposed to be 1000?

Also, I really like this idea. There will likely be some issues to iron out
but it should almost immediately eliminate a lot of noise and give new users a
more clear idea of what sort of comments are appropriate.

------
xenophanes
censor-by-default is such a bad approach. if people are passive (very common)
then HN censors. defaults matter, like with mailing list opt-ins, etc, b/c ppl
frequently don't want to bother changing the default.

------
eslaught
How many 1000 karma users are there on HN exactly, and how actively do they
visit and interact with the site? This will have an enormous effect on what
the endorsement latency actually is. I assume the karma threshold of 1000 was
chosen so that there would be a reasonable number of users to do this, but I
still want to check.

Edit: I notice that my comment is marked as pending in this thread... so the
system is already active?

Edit2: Yes:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/pending](https://news.ycombinator.com/pending)

------
whiddershins
I don't know if this has been discussed, but why doesn't hacker news support
folding comment threads? You (Paul Graham) have written about your observation
that the quality of comments are inversely proportional with the depth of
replies.

If this is true, why not just let users fold threads? Or provide a way to jump
through threads at a particular comment level? I find it frustrating that if
the highest voted comment on a post has many replies, it is difficult for me
to navigate and bypass that thread to find out what other lines of thought
might be on a topic.

------
asdg236v
I was actually thinking about joining the hacker news community. I'll see if I
can find another place that better fits my needs.

Elitism and some pseudo-plutocracy among a "hacker" community is laughable.

------
matt_heimer
This is obviously an attempt to increase the quality of quality of comments,
is there some type of guideline you can give about the type of
comments/commenter HN is looking for? I worry that there is a karma feedback
loop in action where users with higher karma are better known and naturally
get more upvotes than an unknown poster making the same comment.

1000 just seems like a really high threshold that would take a very long time
to reach. I'm not sure if this is desired and HN just really wants people to
work for it or I just don't provide much value. Obviously _I_ think I provide
value but I haven't even reached the threshold to downvote yet and after over
a year HN is putting my comments on probation? It just really seems to devalue
new members, it makes me wonder if I should be posting comments at all. Now
I'm going to be scared to comment since I might get stuck is approval hell. So
now it'll probably take an even longer timeframe to reach 1k since I'll be
posting less. I know that in some way this what HN wants, fewer fluff comments
but honestly sometimes I don't know what HN is going to upvote.

Is there some guideline to how long it should take to reach 1K? I know it
depends on how active you but maybe some idea of how the karma average looks
for _quality_ commenters at 100 comment intervals from 0-1k. Obviously I'll
reach it at some point but that doesn't mean I provide the value HN is looking
for.

~~~
comex
I have 4663 karma after 958 comments and 21 submissions in a bit under 4
years. Out of that:

\- 2908 is comment karma; 1804 is post karma. (The total adds up to a bit too
much; I'm probably miscalculating.)

Out of the post karma, _1634_ was gained by 5 submissions which made it onto
the front page and acquired hundreds of karma. None of the posts I submitted,
including those, were written by me. (I'd like to start a blog, but I'm too
lazy and shy for now.) And in my opinion, the value I contributed to the
community simply by submitting them is rather low; considering that I've
frequently tried to submit a story I found especially likely to generate
interesting HN discussion only to find it already submitted, it's more likely
that I won a race. On the other end, it's well accepted that whether a post
manages to get a few points to bring it out of /new before it gets buried is
somewhat random - IMHO some of my other submissions were just as good, but
they didn't bite for whatever reason - making the correlation between value
and post karma even more skewed.

\- The comment karma histogram is a bit less lopsided: my top 100 comments
(i.e. the top 3%) are responsible for about half of it (1469). But on the
other end, 48% of my comments ended up with 1 or 2 points; while many of my
comments are bad, I suspect that the difference is more about being seen than
the top rated comments being that much better than the 1 pointers.

Also, if you sort by _comment length_ , which is to some extent a reasonable
proxy for quality, only 537 karma was earned by the top 100. Many of my top
rated comments are relatively simple rebuttals to (in my opinion) bad
comments; in my opinion, these can be valuable (since articulating why a
comment is wrong is much more useful than simply downvoting it, and most
comments never get responded to), but aren't as valuable as the long ones.

It probably doesn't help that (I think) I'm much more likely to respond to
other comments (and try to have a discussion, the very thing that this change
makes difficult :() than to comment on the post itself.

In my not-so-humble opinion, if you have the time and volubility to constantly
make long, good comments on popular posts, you'll be rewarded. But if you
don't, because the vast majority of comments will net you nothing, you'll get
more by optimizing for quantity and being first to the scene, hoping for a
small number of posts and comments to semi-randomly get a large fraction of
the karma, than pre-selecting for quality.

Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like how Y Combinator makes its
money.

Oh, and submit a lot of posts.

~~~
matt_heimer
Thank you.

------
tomgruner
Why not implement a simple algorithm:

If your past 5 comments have not gotten more than 3 cumulative upvotes from
ranking users then your commenting is throttled to 1 comment per day

If your past 5 comments have a cumulative negative score your commenting is
limited to 1 comment per week

There is no pending comments list, only a message telling you: sorry, try to
post higher quality content to be able to comment more often. You will be able
to post another comment tomorrow / next week

New users are limited to one comment per day until they get at least 3
cumulative upvotes in the last 5 comments

------
japhyr
When I endorse a comment, does that also upvote the comment? Or is voting
completely separate from endorsing?

~~~
pg
Separate. Endorsing just means you think a comment is substantial, not that
you agree with it.

~~~
rdl
So one might endorse a substantial comment which is incorrect just so one can
downvote it for being wrong.

~~~
6thSigma
I can't wait for the first "I endorsed this just so I can tell you how stupid
you are" comment.

~~~
rdl
You can tell someone they're wrong about something without 1) thinking that
person is generally stupid 2) being mean, of course.

(e.g. if someone says "I think bitcoin is the first digital currency system
which has attracted VC interest", I'd love it if someone from Flooz/Beanz
(late-90s), or DigiCash (1980s-1990s) or various stored value systems would
comment and say "Actually, ...")

~~~
6thSigma
Oh I know, but inevitably someone is going to use this endorse thing as a way
to be incredibly condescending. Hopefully this system will then prevent that
post to show, but I doubt it.

------
amjd
Although I understand the reasons behind the change, to me it largely seems
overkill. No matter how much we try to convince ourselves that good comments
will still be discovered, that would just be wishful thinking. On top of that
it also places a certain responsibility on the shoulders of users with karma
above the threshold. They may simply not have the time or motivation to screen
the large number of incoming comments.

Instead of a default blacklist, a default whitelist might make more sense,
while at the same time not sacrificing some of the useful comments. To be
clear, it would not be much different from how it is presently. The flag
option could get an overhaul so that when a user flags a post they should be
given a choice to select the appropriate reason in a dropdown such as,
'negative comment', 'off-topic', etc. and based on the reason the comment
could either be deleted, hidden or collapsed.

However, this could also be acheived without making any changes to the
commenting system. If the objective is to bring down the number of negative
comments, the flag option would probably help achieve that, and if it is to
decrease the frequency of off-topic comments, a private messaging system might
serve well as HN is not just a place for reading tech news, for many people
it's also a place to network and connect with like-minded people.

If you do go ahead with this change (which seems likely), at the very least
add an option for users to see pending comments if they choose to, as that
only seems fair.

------
buttsex
The posting delay sounds like a terrible idea. Say I spend some time writing a
very long comment to a not so popular thread and hit submit. Then I notice
that someone replied to another comment of mine and had a question or
something. I can't reply to him in a timely matter since I used my one comment
already. So do I need to go and delete my newest comment, reply to the person
who responded to me, then go back and re-comment the one I initially did? This
sounds very silly.

------
tremols
A configurable/optional karma filter which defaults to enabled could be the
solution since there are genuine concerns for and against this feature.

Unregistered users may have karma filter enabled by default so that hackernews
doesn't give a bad impression to the general public due to low quality
comments; and registered users can switch it on/off at their preferences
panel, then it could be interesting to analize the stats and see how many and
who use it.

------
adamzerner
What about something like this:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/wisoy2og4rb4zps/rationalmedium.pdf](https://www.dropbox.com/s/wisoy2og4rb4zps/rationalmedium.pdf)
[mockup]

Key features:

\- Different claims are made, and you can discuss them individually (ie. in a
separate thread). This thread would have a summary of the key points at the
top, so new users can more easily join the conversation.

\- There's an open thread.

\- There's a thread to discuss tangents.

------
gruseom
Is this the biggest change ever made to HN? The last major change I can think
of was not showing comment scores, and this is at least an order of magnitude
bigger.

------
Shank
If I had a suggestion, I would modify the display setting of pending comments
to permit the submitter of the comment to see the pending replies, and
interact. Only the two parties would be able to see the thread, until endorsed
at the root node.

This would help prevent the staunching of discussion in long running threads,
as well as offer a means to communicate directly with a person in a faster
amount of time than endorsements would provide.

------
jedanbik
While I certainly understand your goal here, wouldn't you have a better
moderation regime if you hired people to do this as their jobs? Metafilter is
my example of a hired-mods-done-right setup. I fear that a 1000 karma policing
setup will make this place more like slashdot. Not that I'm taking a strong
stance against slashdot, but is that the culture we want from this website?
Just my two cents.

------
joshuaellinger
Given that you seem to be viewing this as a first level screening, I think you
need to make the 1000+ karma people review 10-20 pending comments before
reading any article based on what's in the queue.

This would insures that the queue doesn't pile up. It would actually encourage
good comments in the same ways that knowing a blog reads everything does. It
would insure that if the system doesn't work or has problem, you'd hear about
it immediately from long-term users.

I would implement it as "( ) endorse ( ) favorite" side-by-side so that the
net effect is that great comments pop out of pending with better velocity.

Finally, the 1000+ karma rule for reviewers while convenient is probably a bad
framing.

Instead, I'd say that 1000+ karma users are required to review and 100-1000
karma can volunteer to review. If you volunteer, your endorsements have to
correlate with 1000+ over 95% of the time or they don't count. Obviously, you
can randomly test that to whatever statistical significance you like.

Good luck with the new system -- this is the only site where comments are any
good in my experience.

------
slunk
Even if this system worked flawlessly as intended, doesn't it disincentivize
getting to 1000+ karma? Unless I'm misunderstanding, your most active users
don't seem to get any benefit (they see all the comments, good and bad, like
everyone did before). Maybe if there was also an "unendorse" option... but
then you've just implemented meta-(up|down)voting.

------
dnc
Sorry, if I'm asking stupid question or if I'm suggesting something already
implemented, but why not do opposite: endorse all comments at start and give
'delete comment' right to HN users with karma > 1000? This way the number of
false positives (published comments w/o value) will certainly increase, but
you loose none of valuable/significant ones.

------
volitek
I find this very ironic given this:
[http://paulgraham.com/say.html](http://paulgraham.com/say.html)

------
oneeyedpigeon
_Comments get from pending to live by being endorsed by multiple HN users with
over 1000 karma._

By "multiple", does this literally mean 'by at least two', or by a fixed
number that you may or may not want to divulge, or by some other more
complicated factor? I think the answer to this will heavily impact the
'unpopular (but not bad) comment' concerns.

~~~
pg
Right now it almost always means two, because I'm starting with the simplest
possible implementation, but there might be optimizations in the future. E.g.
the threshold could vary with how active a thread was, or based on the results
of applying some classifier to the text.

------
haeberli
As to the second: "without gratuitous nastiness", I would encourage you to go
further towards the postitive and think about building on a FIRST robotics
meme, "gracious professionalism" -[http://www.usfirst.org/aboutus/gracious-
professionalism](http://www.usfirst.org/aboutus/gracious-professionalism)

------
throwaway5752
Hm. I was on the fence after reading this thread a few hours ago, but coming
back to and seeing some of the responses I have come firmly down on the side
of this being a good idea.

Apparently a number of commenters are under the misapprehension that Hacker
News' raison d'etre is to provide an egalitarian community some (very loose)
definition of hacker. This is first and foremost a forum and recruiting venue
for an elite tech incubator. Some people have gotten relatively comfortable
using it as their personal soapbox, but it exists to benefit Y Combinator.

As a long time user, it has been disappointing to see the decay in community
quality in roughly three waves: Bitcoin, the women in tech controversies, and
Snowden/NSA. There used to be more substantive tech/science/math discussions
here. For whatever reason, a lot of the newcomers have poorer writing skills,
present less coherent thoughts, have less domain knowledge, and are less well
adjusted socially.

I hope that this works.

------
chunky1994
FYI: Pending comments will not be enabled by default as pg just clarified
here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449857)

So, this isn't going to be a drastic change, rather it'll be more like a tool
for the moderator to improve the quality of conversations that are becoming
nasty.

------
ja30278
" And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth,
so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to
misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put
to the worse in a free and open encounter?"

"..and we in the haste of a precipitant zeal shall make no distinction, but
resolve to stop their mouths, because we fear they come with new and dangerous
opinions, as we commonly forejudge them ere we understand them; no less than
woe to us, while thinking thus to defend the Gospel, we are found the
persecutors."

"For if they fell upon one kind of strictness, unless their care were equal to
regulate all other things of like aptness to corrupt the mind, that single
endeavour they knew would be but a fond labour: to shut and fortify one gate
against corruption, and be necessitated to leave others round about wide open.
If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate
all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be
heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must be
licensing of dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our
youth, but what by their allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato was
provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers to examine all
the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every house; they must not be
suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed what they may say. And
who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whisper softness in
chambers? The windows also, and the balconies, must be thought on; there are
shrewd books, with dangerous frontispieces, set to sale: who shall prohibit
them, shall twenty licensers? The villages also must have their visitors to
inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebec reads, even to the balladry
and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for these are the countryman's
Arcadias and his Monte Mayors."

------
alecsmart1
I use HN regularly and post comments once in a while. I have asked a few
questions which never reached the front page but have 1-2 answers which helped
me immensely. The posts have 1-2 upvotes only. But it still works for me. Now
with this pending review feature, those comment will never show rendering it
useless for a small time guy like me.

------
grey-area
You use karma as a measure of quality (here as a way to indicate someone
should have rights to endorse). One other change which I think would help
comment quality is to separate or cap points for submissions (which can be
disproportionate), so that users do not gain karma from posting popular
stories. One person posting some flamebait article can easily get over 1000
points just by posting a link, and they are encouraged to post sensational or
gossipy articles by the current system in order to get around karma
limitations.

Popularity is not the same as quality, and the divergence will only grow as
more users join the site.

It will be interesting to see how this change plays out, but you definitely
need a solution to the problem cperciva points out - at present anything not
on home simply doesn't recieve sufficient attention for this scheme to work.
The new page is regularly full of articles with less than 3 votes.

------
analog31
An interesting, and perhaps time saving option would be an "endorse entire
thread" or "endorse entire sub thread" button, for threads that are
interesting but really so tame that the likelihood of bad posts is small.

Also, it would be interesting to know what problem this solves, and how you
will know if it works.

------
adam419
I find these changes to be very degrading of what I love about HN. Regardless
of objective truth or upmost importance being the defining characteristics of
comments, I happen to enjoy the quirky humor and general remarks of fellow
HNer's. Very disappointing, PG.

------
Fizzadar
I love this idea, and welcome any attempts to improve the quality of comments
on HN (despite already being one of the more sensible discussion sites).

My problem is with the not being able to post more comments while one is
pending. I'm mostly a reader/lurker and only really comment on posts which
really get me fired up. Now what happens when I'm taking 30 minutes in the
morning to read HN and want to make 2/3 comments on a couple of different
posts? Would I now only be able to comment on one and hope the others remained
suitably visible for me to find them later? I really think blocking further
comments while a user has a pending one is a terrible idea, and will only harm
HN in the long run.

------
presty
I wonder if this will this lead to more karma whoring?

------
molbioguy
I think I understand the motivation, but this smacks of elitism to me. Unless
the 1K users constitute the majority, then by definition a minority of HN
users will effectively moderate (and can potentially censor) the discussions.
That seems very unfair.

------
Hawkee
After reading a lot of the discussion about Facebook's Hack I can see why this
is necessary. I agree with a lot of the concerns here though. Particularly,
commenting on older posts will never elicit an endorsement. I'm also concerned
about how many qualified folks will actively endorse comments. This can be
quite a job endorsing every good comment on the site. It might require
following a comment feed covering the entire site, but who would want to do
that? Will there be any sort of reward for endorsing comments? I'd be afraid
to endorse the wrong comments and lose my ability to endorse. In any event,
I'm very curious to see how this pans out.

------
S4M
Will this take effect in the "Ask HN" section as well? I would argue to leave
it as it is (or at lower the threshold of number of endorsers) because it will
be harder to get endorsers for a non popular thread. Let's say somebody asks
"What are the good places to meet hackers in Barcelona?" and I post an answer
helpful for the OP, it will not get many endorsers since this question will
not be viewed by many here. Also, I have my doubts for the "Who is hiring?"
thread as the people who are looking for jobs will _not_ have the incentive to
endorse posts since it will increase the number of competitive applicants for
the jobs.

------
Glyptodon
I'm kind of skeptical. The biggest problem as I see it is that a lot of the
more interesting comments get voted to zero because 'controversy' or not
'mainstreamed thought,' while frequently a lot of the heavily upvoted comments
are platitudes/acceptingly normative/self-reinforcing meh kind, while many of
the more interesting ones are often in the middle. Now I may be wrong about
this, but I don't think high karma is indicative of the quality comments so
much as it is indicative of a comments' closeness to the communities
normalized colloquially accepted wisdom, since the crowd is self-reinforcing.

------
kapowaz
I think I can see the intent behind requiring comments be endorsed by ‘users
with over 1000’ karma: this is a somewhat arbitrary way of saying ‘users who
themselves are good contributors to the community’, but I think that specific
way of measuring is naïve.

Using an incrementing value to represent karma means that you can slowly
accrue and work your way towards achieving that state of being a good
community contributor in principle, whilst in fact still behaving in all the
negative ways you are hoping to minimise.

There are quite a few metrics that could be of relevance when looking at
people who comment on HN. How often do they reply? Do they post the first
comment, or only replies? Do they only reply to controversial subjects? Do
they upvote often?

I'd propose that the solution be more subtle. As others have pointed out, you
shouldn't implement a system that acts as a positive feedback loop for the
most popular topics; that will simply filter out things that aren't in the
zeitgeist (and god knows HN doesn't need any more of that).

My suggestion would instead be that all comments are visible immediately, but
will be automatically hidden after a period of time, unless they become
sufficiently popular. The length of time before they become hidden will depend
on the another value, associated with the poster, which would be something
akin to the ELO rating system; all users start with the same score, and then
that score is modified based on how many people approve of / disapprove of
their comments.

Obviously just using these things ignores context, so I'd encourage some more
clever introspection of the other things I mentioned above to determine
whether they're just posting on a controversial subject (maybe the first reply
gets a bonus to the length of time it's visible, or controversial subjects —
measured by the frequency of up vs downvotes — don't reduce your personal ELO
rating as much).

Of course, these ideas could be equally terrible but I think thought should be
given to testing them before committing, and using something more subtle than
just slamming the door in the face of people who aren't able to get their
comments into the eye line of the HN elite.

------
wudf

      If a point is important, someone else will probably come along and make it ...
    

I definitely do not perceive this to be the current situation. The new rules
will have to effect a change in behavior or much will be lost.

------
kabdib
It's hard to tell how much friction HN needs. Some more, probably. A lot more?
I'm guessing not. A little moderation goes a long way.

Metrics for comment approval might include opening up a thread complete, or
for folks with a karma threshold, or who have made posts in the past without
being downvoted much. (The _Making Light_ site has some interesting ideas
here).

You might include who voted on an article, and how. If someone's gonna
moderate, they may as well be listed as having moderated (so they can get the
credit or blame). Meta-moderation might be one of the things that killed
Slashdot, though.

------
xenophanes
RIP HN.

gg :( was fun while it lasted.

------
yblu
Oh no, does this mean I can't add "first!" w/o knowing for sure it's actually
first (or one of the first)?

Serious question: can I delete a pending comment? And does that allow me to
comment again?

~~~
namenotrequired
Yes.

------
ForFreedom
I don't understand your system. So someone with over 1000 Karma would have to
decide if my comment is worthwhile to be live. But at times my comment could
be a good single line comment.

This is not a good system.

------
jtoeman
and thus, like every other forum online, "those who came before" are massively
rewarded, and new users are basically treated like crap.

coming soon to HN - AOL keywords, blinking text, and animated ASCII art!

------
japhyr
So if you have over 1000 karma the site will look exactly the same, except for
a bunch of "endorse" links?

Are the endorse links far enough from the flag links to avoid fat-fingering
issues on mobile devices?

~~~
computer
As I understand it, it would lack responses to pending comments, since nobody
can respond to a comment before it's endorsed.

------
mpg33
not a fan of attempting to police speech no matter how "dumb" or "bad" it is
perceived to be...compared to the internet average comments on hacker news are
already far better.

------
chaitanya
Maybe this will strike a better balance between comment quality and
participation?

* A comment by a person with karma < 1000 stays pending until endorsed

* Once 5 or so successive comments by this user have been endorsed, he/she can comment freely

* Now, if a new comment by this user gets flagged, every subsequent comment goes into pending state until 5 or so comments have been endorsed again

Of course, the numbers and the algorithm can be tweaked. But the basic idea
is: reward users once a certain threshold of their comments are endorsed, and
punish them if a comment gets flagged.

------
elorant
This will kill any kind of spontaneity in the conversation. Now you’ll have to
wait an indeterminable amount of time before your comment becomes live and by
then it may be irrelevant. So instead of a conversation we’ll end up with a
series of statements. From an academic point of view it would be brilliant but
that’s not why we’re here. If we wanted only educated opinions we could just
read blog posts or technical books. Speaking for myself, I’m here for the
community.

The more complicated a system gets the less usable it becomes.

------
jader201
Is the only difference between _pending_ and _live_ that _pending_ will lock
them out of posting again (within the timeout period)?

Or, will they eventually drop out of visibility from others?

~~~
pg
Pending comments won't be visible, except to the submitter and to potential
endorsers. That's the whole point of pending comments.

------
aruggirello
Why not add a user setting - like Google does for censored results? You'd tick
a box "Show less relevant / unmoderated comments" \- provided directly on the
discussion pages. You would tick that box at your own risk, knowing you may
find offending comments. And if you find too much spam, and can't seem to
enjoy moderated comments enough, just untick it and the spam goes away. This
way you ensure moderation can't be abused for censorship purposes.

------
laichzeit0
Here's an idea: Give users the option of seeing all pending posts.

I personally want to see everything and don't really care what a small subset
of HN deems "worthy" of seeing.

------
deletes
I apologize if I have missed the answer, but the thread is very long.

Will clicking endorse automatically upvote the answer? It would only make
sense to, and you wouldn't have to click twice.

~~~
icebraining
No, they're separate:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446344)

------
mandeepj
> You can currently beat the system by posting an innocuous comment, waiting
> for it to be endorsed, and then after it's live, changing it to say
> something worse. We explicitly ask people not to do this. While we have no
> software for catching it, humans will notice, and we'll ban you.

Why can't you make the edited comment go through same cycle \process\flow as
the original comment went through? that way you don't have to assume - no one
will try to hack\fool the system

------
dmfdmf
Can we grandfather in people with at least 5.6 years of HN participation?
Okay, I happen to have only 593 karma point but I've been around for a while,
5.6 years actually.

------
senthilnayagam
for negative voting you needed 500 karma's, I have been on hacker news for
1900+ days, currently have 438 karma's .

though I read lot of posts and checks top and new posts every couple of hours.
I don't submit many posts, or ask questions. I only comment where I see a
value or I can contribute to the discussion in some form.

but if for my comment to be endorsement needs someone with 1000karma, I will
take anywhere between 5-10 years to get to 1000+karma and be able to endorse
other comments

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Presumably I could work through your comment history and just give you 62
upvotes ... wonder if there's a system in place to stop that?

------
JoeAltmaier
Reminds me of the 'one last time' syndrome. My boys would always ask to sled
the hill, or ride their bikes around the park 'one last time'. This was when
the injuries happened. The urge to make your best effort, when the time has
almost run out, often results in disaster.

If you value this community please don't fire this mortar round into the midst
of this thriving market of ideas, then ride off into the sunset. It has bad
idea written all over it.

------
Mz
As a woman who has long struggled to find a way to fit in on HN, I worry this
will just make it harder for anyone who isn't already part of the "in crowd"
and will just magnify problems for women, minorities, newbs, whomever.

I hope it works well but it does concern me. I don't know what else to suggest
though since HN is a larger scale than I know how to moderate.

Edit: So count me as feeling kind of threatened and wondering if I will ever
be allowed to comment again.

------
j8hn
After reading the headline, I had to check if it was April 1st.

------
kosei
It really feels like this is solving a problem that doesn't exist, and as a
result will hurt discussion. Additionally it assumes that people with 1,000
karma will sift through all of the comments to approve. Based on how few
things get upvoted in the "new" section, I sincerely doubt that your members
will sit on the "pending" tab waiting to approve.

We'll see how this plays out, but I'm probably done trying to comment here for
now.

------
Alex3917
This is great. HN used to be a real community, but lately there has been no
incentive to post anything intelligent because every comment gets buried in a
sea of crap, and there are so many throwaway comments that it's impossible to
find the ones by regular contributors. The amount of noise also just brings
out the worst in everyone. I know you can't step on the same stream twice, but
hopefully this at least makes it readable for a while.

------
chippy
Would adding pending comments encourage a more diverse and inclusive user
base, or a less diverse and exclusive one? Not only diversity of opinions, but
of gender and background? Is anyone talking about this?

In ecology and nature conservation a diverse ecosystem is encouraged as this
ensures the overall health of the system.

Edits: I wonder what percentage of the 1000 Karma users are women? How about
less controversial attributes: What are their backgrounds, Where do they
reside?

------
pjzedalis
A checkbox that says 'Hide comments from noobs' would suffice.

I have 41 karma (rarely comment) but have been here 2546 days. Would
appreciate being grandfathered in, thanks.

------
bzalasky
Apologies if anyone has already made a similar suggestion... but, 1000 seems
like an arbitrary amount of karma. What do you guys think of a fluid amount of
karma required to post a non-pending comment. Popular stories on the front
page can play by PG's rules. However, to encourage discussion on new
submissions, scale back the karma requirements. The kinds of people who post
obnoxious comments are looking for a crowd anyways.

------
6thSigma
This will fix a lot of the random bickering back and forth, but I'm not sure
it will fix the issue of snide remarks always being the number one comment.

I think the comment I received the most karma on was when I misunderstood an
article and bashed it due to my misunderstanding. I was wrong, but apparently
others shared in my misunderstanding because it had a lot of upvotes.

I think this will probably be a net positive though in terms of comment
quality here.

------
maxden
I can see how any system can be abused, but why not treat the user as positive
contributor initially, and then if they accrue negative/downvotes; similar to
what happens now.

It seems the new pending way involves more effort from the 1k karma people to
actively click posts to make them visible. Could this also stop them coming
here as if they don't do any work, the site could stagnate?

------
weaksauce
I am curious what percentage of users (active with upvotes/downvotes and
passive interaction by reading mostly and dormant users) are past that
threshold of karma? any insights to this pg?

I am all for better dialog on HN though as it has been on a downward trend but
not terrible yet. I think this is a change for the better. Not certain that
the vote hiding had a huge effect though.

------
jayvanguard
I wonder how this will affect users is sparse timezones. The conversation
could slow down or get buried to the point of being unusable.

------
Myrmornis
This sounds like a very rash idea, and an unwarranted imposition of the view
point of a small number on a majority. I've been using th site for 3 yrs only,
not since the good old days when all the commenting was pure and holy. And
yet, I find the standard of commenting here wonderful. It doesn't need this
sort of illiberal policing by the 1k elite.

------
protomyth
What happens if the story you commented in gets killed before your comment is
endorsed? Are you done commenting on HN for how long?

------
apierre
How long until we see a new ShowHN post : "Alternative to Hacker News" or "Why
I coded my own HN alternative"

~~~
eitland
lamernews monocle etc etc

Most interesting concept was the one where you needed an invite and everybody
could see who had vouched for who. Can't remember the name and also found no
one to ask for an invite ;-)

~~~
apierre
Someone was talking about lobste.rs

------
userbinator
Does anyone else find it rather coincidental that this article also happens to
be currently on the front page?

[http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443420)
)

------
mnl
This looks a lot like a way to implement group-think by effective censoring
and burdening exchange. I'm not interested in reading a sort of Hacker News
Reader's Digest. Being unable to figure out the reasons of your own greatness
is a popular road to demise. It was a lot of fun, though, thank you for the
ride.

------
chacham15
A few questions:

> Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till it goes live to
> post another.

Does this mean that if you write 1 bad comment which no one wants to endorse,
you can effectively never comment on any thread again?

> Since I'm going to check out of HN at the end of this YC cycle

What do you mean by "check out"? Are you going to stop commenting?

------
keypusher
Please don't push this live. It will significantly cut down on contribution,
and create a lot of busy work and bureaucracy which gets in the way of people
having a good discussion. If you want to improve the quality of comments then
address the core algorithm or find a better way to harness user power.

------
diskerror
I don't like the idea of curated comments. People aren't perfect and have
biases. You may have set guidelines for what to endorse, but I guarantee
endorsements are not going to be completely objective. Filtering comments and
karma systems often become a popularity contest and not a discussion.

------
visualR
Great. Yet another "Pending Review" to wait through. HN is now the App Store
of internet discussion.

------
timtamboy63
Seems like something that would increase the quality of comments, but also
prevent any meaningful discussion.

------
farseer
pg you founded HN, please don't destroy it before you leave. Whatever your
paternalistic instinct led you to this, please swallow it and leave HN alone.
You did humanity a great service by founding YC/HN, but its time to leave such
drastic decisions to your successor. I implore you!

------
lilsunnybee
184 karma user here, who often posts late to discussions but until now still
felt like part of the community. Guess I'm not going to be able to post
anymore. :-( If this policy goes forward, I hope PG and the rest of the
wealthy elitist clique on here enjoy their circlejerk.

------
raghus
I'm curious: how many 1000+ karma users are there on HN now i.e. how big is
the pool of endorsers?

------
jcurbo
Interesting system, it kind of reminds me of the way I used to read Slashdot.
There is a setting where you can filter comments below a certain threshold so
you don't see them. I used to have mine set to +2. This was a great filter and
made reading comments much nicer.

------
sylvinus
Seems great! I'm wondering what the incentive is for users to endorse
comments, beyond improving HN's quality?

There is a malus for endorsing bad comments, shouldn't there be a built-in
bonus for well-behaving endorsers, to compensate and make the system self-
sufficient?

------
chippy
Karma is going to be even harder to get now for < 1000 karma users. This
includes occasional casual users. You do not want to constrain the power to
just the hardcore users

For example: I pop on once or twice a day. I have been doing so for 1044 days.
I have 478 karma points.

------
robbles
As a user with only ~200 karma who is still interested in contributing to the
discussion, what's the best way to tell when this feature takes effect?

Make a dummy comment? I won't be able to see the pending comments of others,
since I'm not one of the HN elite.

~~~
robbles
As an aside - is it going to be prohibitively difficult for casual users like
myself to become part of the elite now? If all but the most useful/insightful
comments are stuck in pending until deletion, it'll be difficult to slowly
gain karma through the odd up vote here and there. Even comments that start
huge discussions (see my history for a recent example) seldom get more than a
couple votes here, so it seems reasonable to assume it'll be harder to
advance.

------
TrevorJ
Does this create the potential for essentially becoming perma-banned from
commenting once you have a single comment that doesn't make it out of
'pending'? Won't most commenters eventually be unable to comment, or am I
missing something?

------
protomyth
It's seems like this would severally tip the balance towards people getting
karma via story submissions and not comments.

It also seems like it will kill questions and dissenting opinion. I cannot
help but feel endorsements will be few and fit in group beliefs.

------
brianmcdonough
Being purveyors of good taste, leaders have to take action. Despite my karma
score (73) I support implementation of a solution to a known problem, despite
the risks.

It provides a motive to achieve a higher score, whereas before there was
little to no reason.

------
drivingmenuts
Just one more reason to not comment at all.

If your intent is to turn this site into something more like Designer News or
Echo JS, then doing this is the right start.

Both of those sites have great links and almost no commenting whatsoever,
despite having the functionality.

------
SethMurphy
pg seems to have more of a problem with the "quality" of comments than many
users who actually enjoy the use of deep threads for conversation. I
understand pg's point of view that that is just noise to him, but to those
speaking constructively it is the conversation they want. If this was a move
to cut down on trolls I would understand. The question to ask is what is HN
really for? Is it for the users to converse/think freely or for the site
creator to wrangle/curate smart comments. It seems the later is more in tune
with HN's mission as a business, and alas the direction it's heading.

------
pnathan
An issue with this design is that it ensures that the current high-karma
commentators maintain what they like on HN. If a really good idea shows up
that they don't like and don't want to see, that is not going to survive.

------
NicoJuicy
Actually, [http://www.tweakers.net](http://www.tweakers.net) (a popular dutch
techsite) has a good system for downvoting.

Just hide the box that shows the comment and only show the authorname and the
downvotes...

------
adrianwaj
Would be interesting to have a new url:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/endorsablecomments](https://news.ycombinator.com/endorsablecomments)

and a way for 1000+ users to view comments scores as reward for good
endorsements

------
snowwrestler
Sounds like an interesting experiment, but also the type of thing that will
require quite a bit of adjustment and tuning. So I hope the complexity will
not prohibit the new site runners from making these adjustments.

------
pbhjpbhj
So now, if I post a comment that an "endorser" disagrees with they can
effectively delete that comment independently? Or do flagged comments remain
open to be allowed ["endorsed"] by others?

------
bhousel
> _Since I 'm going to check out of HN at the end of this YC cycle... _

Wait, what?

------
ivankirigin
Can you reflect the false positive / false negative rates for mods? I'd love
it in the header.

That is the second most interesting aspect of reviewing YC applications, the
first being the applications themselves.

------
casual_slacker
If you're not polite you don't deserve to have an opinion. Fact.

------
darreld
I joined HN in Feb 2008 and I despite reading the site multiple times daily, I
have a karma score of 71. So it looks like I'll need to ingratiate myself to
elites to be able to vote.

------
noahl
Would you consider allowing users to have one pending comment per thread, as
opposed to only one at a time? I am afraid that this will impact the way I
read HN, which is in batch mode.

------
ChristianMarks
This system should be rolled out, but not before the karma of all users is
reset to zero. This would provide a level playing field. (ok, no comments
could be endorsed either.)

------
fab13n
I fear that giving such a significant power based on karma score might create
karma whoring behaviors.

Then again it can be turned off if experience shows that it has such nasty
side effects.

------
KerrickStaley
I think it'd be better not to hide anything at all. Just move comments without
"endorsement" to the bottom (isn't this basically how it works already?).

------
megablast
I think is very timely, I have noticed an increase in number of comments with
a corresponding decrease in quality, and I am not just talking about my own
comments.

------
chunky1994
I'm curious about the karma threshold numbers, is there any data available for
the number of users that have a karma > 1000? Does HN have a data API?

------
melindajb
PG, Is 1000 Karma a major threshold? How many people does this mean? like 100
people, 10,000 people? Just curious about the sample size if you can reveal
it.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders).
Way more than 100, almost certainly more than 1,000, and very likely more than
10,000 if my guesswork based on those figures is correct.

~~~
owenversteeg
I used [http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/](http://hn-karma-
tracker.herokuapp.com/) to find the number of users with a karma over 927, and
there are 5k. There are probably about 4-4.5k that have a karma over 1000, and
that includes users that are no longer a part of the community for whatever
reason (like aaronsw.)

------
moo
Wake me up when someone forks the old hacker news site.

------
damm
I don't think I will ever hit 1000 karma on HN which is fine.

However what is the current standing of users with this karma that are
actively? I hope there are enough.

Thanks!

~~~
owenversteeg
As I said here
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446808)),
there are about 4.6k that have >1000 karma.

------
camus2
> So if you're not sure whether you should endorse a comment, don't.

hi!

So will there still be a karma system and how does this new comment system
will affect karma?

thanks.

~~~
pg
It's orthogonal.

------
njharman
Make up voting also mark comment endorsed. I actually don't see point of
separate endorse action. An up vote is an endorsement.

------
lmm
So what are the alternatives? Is there another site even remotely as good as
this one has been? (Anyone spare me a lobste.rs invite?)

------
antonius
I guess karma will mean something after all. Any ideas as to when this this
change will begin to roll-out?

Edit: Re-read the post, launches tonight.

------
spingsprong
This could potentially censor minority opinions.

------
mehwoot
I can very easily see this going either way. It's so hard to tell what the
effect is going to be before it is tried out.

------
uptown
I never really understood "comments" as a top-menu item. What's the point of
that list without context?

------
jedanbik
What if we could flag comments, and then the professional moderators could
make their decisions accordingly.

~~~
namenotrequired
This already exists, but you have to click "link" on the comment first to see
the "flag" link.

------
Angostura
This feels like a less refined version of the Slashdot moderation and
metamoderation system to me.

------
chaosmonkey
Why not have this feature turned on only for threads in the front page instead
of all threads.

------
yaelwrites
Great, once I get 991 more karma points I'll be welcome into the conversation.

------
RivieraKid
You should rather try to make the comments sound less robotic and more human.

------
aquarin
Do I have to be a member of the Communist Party to get the comment approved?

------
asimjalis
I am concerned this will lead to groupthink and predictability.

------
Myrmornis
Will the UI show me my pending/not-pending state somehow?

------
chhhris
Has this pending comment policy has been implemented yet...?

~~~
nkurz
It's implemented, but off by default:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475834)

------
bane
Will everybody be pending or just users <1000 points?

------
neil_s
Well then we better get it out of people's systems now.

Mac rulez, Windoze sux. Android is greater than iOS any day. OP is stoopid.

Let the flamewars commence.

------
graycat
Sounds like a system very slow to change, nearly self-perpetuating, like more
of an echo chamber, like stew without garlic or pepper, like ignoring that a
stream bed is cold and uncomfortable, full of mud and gravel, but also one of
the best places to look for gold.

Fundamentally the high karma people pleased the masses at HN and/or have been
commenting at HN for a long time and maybe have made the better comments but
still are in the middle of the road. So, content that is new and takes some
effort and reflection, is challenging to the status quo, is radical and
provocative will have less of a chance to be seen at all.

With some irony, the Silicon Valley world of startups is heavily about being
_disruptive_ , not self-perpetuating.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
The thing about losing your ability to endorse supports your claim. Even
endorsers that are not holding to the right echo chamber can be worked out of
the system. So it does seem "self-regulating" in that sense.

~~~
graycat
People who don't sing along with the right echo chamber will have a tougher
time getting karma enough to be in "the system".

------
thenmar
The obvious big concern here is comments about minority groups and social
justice. Are the 1000+ karma users going to shut down those voices?

~~~
pg
A comment only needs a handful of people to endorse it, out of the large
number who could, so that doesn't seem a big danger.

------
futurist
Can you say groupthink? What a terrible idea. HN is going to suck even more
now.

The best way to protest this idea is to ignore the site. Just ignore it and
get some work done for a change.

~~~
briantakita
The great thing about ignoring the site is it will just increase the
groupthink.

------
quizbiz
pg: thank you

------
staticelf
I think this is a great idea if you want to end peoples ability to comment
that disagrees with a large number of individuals. I think this is a horrible
"feature" and endorsing this feature is endorsing censorship.

What made HN great was that anyone could post both stories and comments. Now I
can just think, will this comment ever be visible or will it disappear into
the abyss and my time writing it was totally meaningless?

To really test this feature, I want to say what I really feel:

Fuck this feature and go shove pending comments in somebody else's ass.

------
Tohhou
This kills the Hacker News.

------
jpeg_hero
"There are four lights!!!!"

------
abimaelmartell
What about a redesign?, or a password reminder?, or all the basic features in
website?

------
aspensmonster
I know I'll get downvoted to hell for this reddit-like behaviour, but...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umDr0mPuyQc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umDr0mPuyQc)

Others have already stated the specific reasons why this isn't a good idea
very clearly and concisely.

~~~
jfoster
What do you think will happen? When it happens, what will happen next?

Something will break. HN will tweak, fix, and iterate until nothing
substantial is broken.

It will be okay.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Or, HN will tweak and tweak, thrashing and going in circles trying to whack
all the moles, while frustrated contributors fall away daily.

------
pdq
Here's a simple solution to this whole moderation hammer: add a downvote for
poor comments (ala Reddit). The spam and garble comments will automatically be
moderated by the community as a whole.

Turning HN into Wikipedia Moderation Politics is not a smart idea.

~~~
elithrar
> Here's a simple solution to this whole moderation hammer: add a downvote for
> poor comments (ala Reddit).

There are down-votes. You just don't get the ability to down-vote until > ~500
karma (it may be a bit higher now).

------
sillysaurus3
I think this is a great change. It's great that you're still iterating on HN
and changing the fundamentals.

Can someone with over 1,000 karma start replying to a fresh comment before
it's endorsed? Or will the reply link not be there until it's endorsed? If
it's the latter, I'm worried that this might stifle the (admittedly rare)
back-and-forth discussion between two experts, such as tptacek and cperciva.
People who want to reply probably won't sit and wait until the reply link is
active, and since replying to a different comment than intended is taboo,
they're likely to say nothing instead.

That's a minor concern though.

EDIT: Also,

 _Since I 'm going to check out of HN at the end of this YC cycle,_

If I'm reading this right, does this mean you're going to leave HN entirely?
I'm sorry to see that happen, but I understand why you'd need to.

~~~
djcapelis
> If it's the latter, I'm worried that this might stifle the (admittedly rare)
> back-and-forth discussion between two experts, such as tptacek and cperciva

Why wouldn't they just endorse each other's comments and continue a meaningful
dialog?

~~~
sillysaurus3
It sounds like each comment requires multiple endoresements.

~~~
djcapelis
Somehow I doubt a meaningful and substantial discussion between two experts is
going to have a lack of people endorsing it. But I guess we're going to find
out soon!

------
sciorpsycho
What will happen is 'comment piggybacking'. To get endorsed, just 1)
enthusiastically support the claim of a 1000+ user and then 2) append your own
opinion, making sure it harmonizes with the majority of commentors.

That, coincidentally, is the recipe for groupthink.

~~~
dsrguru
That, coincidentally, works quite well in the current system too. You don't
even need to agree. Just post your comment as a reply to the top comment or,
since your karma might be a bit too low for that, as a reply to the first
comment deep enough to have no siblings. I'm not advocating that you do this,
but I _am_ asserting that this comment of yours would have been seen by many
more people had you done that!

------
ps4fanboy
I am calling it, this will be the deathknell of hackernews, you can already
see huge bias in the stories that get flagged on this site now you will see it
in every comment.

~~~
pg
If it is it's pretty reversible as deathknells go.

    
    
      (= pend-on* nil)

~~~
EarthLaunch
Reputation is not as easily reversed.

------
demoncore
Hey Paul, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The removal of visible comment
score and now this? HN was awesome in its original form. Why break that even
further?

------
sciorpsycho
The best strategy for those who disagree with the change is to ignore HN. Get
some work done for a change!

------
pikachu_is_cool
I am also going to add my two cents and say that I think this is not a good
idea. HN has in no way reached Eternal September, and if it has, then this
isn't the way to fix it.

I think it would make much more sense to add moderators (if there already
aren't any, I'm not sure). A dozen or so moderators could definitely mitigate
any threat that post quality is going down. There are only a dozen new posts
per hour, they could definitely handle it.

------
NextUserName
This seems pretty unpopular PG , and it seems to have a lot of pitfalls and
things that you have overlooked. How about making it so that people can opt
into seeing the pending comments (so to them everything is as it was before).
Let people decide for themselves.

This really would be the right thing to do. If it seems that most people not
opt into the (old way) or opt out and stay out after a while, then maybe
switch over.

The people of the internet are what make HN. Let them decide. Don't take the
freedoms on hundreds of thousands of people away overnight.

There are only 5,500 people with 1000 karma or more. Most of them live in
California. Now letting them agree with and approve the opinions and
viewpoints of the other hundreds of thousands of members is going to shut down
most opinions before they are even heard, some of which are more generally
popular than theirs. The minority will silence the majority.

------
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.

~~~
teaneedz
I promised not to comment on HN again due to this policy but I logged in one
last time just to upvote this comment from NextUserName. I don't care how much
karma he/she has or doesn't have, the words hit the nail right on the head. I
hope that the HN folks realize that this decision to pend comments has left a
bad taste in many visitors mouths. The path goes against the social
expectations of today. Whether other platforms do it or not, is not and should
not be the issue. I can see that user experience is not high on the task list
with this decision, but please listen and care about us who are now leaving
but still wish to return when a more social policy is in place.

------
serge2k
Doesn't this just add a huge barrier to the most basic type of participation
on the site?

------
stefantalpalaru
I don't know if this will improve the quality of HN comments but it will
surely reduce the time I spend on this site.

I already have to be careful not to upset any moderators and get hell-banned.
With comments that won't get published if they don't please the crowd there's
no reason to comment any more. And if I can't comment, why spend the time
reading in the first place?

------
nirnira
>That feel when Hacker News became an echo-chamber for the YC schmoozerati.

------
slow_worm
I'm commenting here because of the restrictions on reddit. It has nothing to
do with this news post.

V

