
Pending Comments Update - pg
Since some people were alarmed about pending comments, I thought I
should explain what&#x27;s going on with them.  Sorry for the delay, but
between implementing them and now I&#x27;ve had to help get the current
batch of startups through Demo Day.<p>To recap, pending comments are a feature we hope might mitigate or
eliminate the nasty comment threads that sometimes occur on HN.  It
essentially turns HN into the sort of hard-moderated forum where
comments have to be approved by moderators before being seen, except
to make it more democratic (and less work for us), any user over
some karma threshold can approve comments.<p>Since the implementation touches many parts of the code, and I am
at this stage still the one who understands the HN code best, I was
encouraged to write it before I left.<p>The plan from the beginning was to make it possible to turn pending
comments on or off per thread.  Since the simplest v1 was to have
pending comments sitewide, I released it in that form first. That
code didn&#x27;t break, fortunately.  The next day I finished making it
work per thread.  Or more precisely per item tree; a moderator can
turn on pending comments for anything from the whole site to an
individual comment.<p>When I announced pending comments I said the threshold for endorsing
comments would be 1000 karma.  Some people have been alarmed by
that. But 1000 was nothing more than a plausible initial value of
a variable meant to be tuned by the moderator.  In fact, the threshold
never was 1000 even at first; I set it to 500 in the first release.
Maybe it will end up being 50.  The only way to figure out what
works is empirically.<p>Indeed, the only way to figure out if pending comments will work
at all is empirically.  The plan is for the moderator to experiment
with turning pending comments on for individual threads.  If that
works, maybe after tuning the parameters he&#x27;ll gradually expand to
more and maybe eventually just turn on the feature sitewide.  Or
maybe that will never be necessary.  Or maybe software will decide
when to turn on pending comments.<p>Nor does the threshold for endorsing comments have to be karma.
That was the obvious choice for a v1, but it would be easy to
incorporate or substitute other things like account age or average
comment score, or even introduce randomness.<p>It&#x27;s impossible to predict exactly how pending comments will end
up working, but one thing you can safely predict is that whatever
happens with them won&#x27;t ruin HN.  The main moderator is extremely
sensitive to the state of HN, and if something he did was making
the site worse, he&#x27;d be quick to notice.
======
britta
I'm concerned that giving comment-approval power to people with x amount of
karma will reinforce many of the existing problematic aspects of HN instead of
opening it up to better discussion. It means that people with currently-
underrepresented voices will have to "play nice" with the current mainstream
of HN in order to be represented on the site.

For example, discussions here already have a pattern of being mostly men, and
most people with significant amounts of karma are men - I don't know the data
here, but I don't think that's a controversial observation. If you're a woman
who is new to HN and trying to explain your work experience as a woman in a
relevant thread, right now you can give commenting an honest effort and know
that everyone can at least read your words and consider them. But under
pending comments, instead women will have to write comments that men approve
before those women's comments are even visible.

The pending comments system seems worryingly likely to reinforce HN's existing
systemic biases in silent/hidden ways that will be hard to analyze and improve
after implementation.

Edit to suggest an improvement instead of just criticism: I've been moderating
forums and IRC professionally for six years (for del.icio.us and now for
Cydia), and to change the culture here, I'd first try expanding the community
guidelines with much more detail and several specific examples of unacceptable
comments. It clearly has not been enough to only say "be civil", no name
calling, and "no classic flamewar topics" \- it's a good start, but vague and
incomplete. Expanded guidelines would go along with clearly-indicated removals
of unacceptable comments to show that the new guidelines are serious and not
just suggestions. I would also try implementing a Metafilter-style flagging
system: make the "flag" button consistently visible, with a "pick a reason to
flag" menu that has one option per rule category
([http://i.imgur.com/Aw03Tl2.png](http://i.imgur.com/Aw03Tl2.png)). This
serves as an integrated (and "just in time") reminder of the rules, with the
bonus of flag counts helping moderators find problem spots.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I don't think it will be a problem in practice, both because women will be
able to endorse comments and because during the test period people endorsed
most comments. The only comments that weren't endorsed were troll comments.

The most recent test period was brief (just a couple hours) so it isn't
representative of how it will work out in practice, but that's why I think we
should turn it on for 24 hours and see what happens.

EDIT: On reflection, I apologize for how dismissive my comment must've
sounded. It wasn't my intention.

~~~
saurik
> The only comments that weren't endorsed were troll comments.

I have always browsed HN with showdead on; I occasionally see dead "troll
comments" and I hardly ever see not-dead "troll comments" that are not at
least slightly downvoted. It would seem to me that the downvote and flag
mechanisms are already sufficient, therefore, against this class of "troll
comments".

The real question is whether serious comments--maybe even ones some users
would consider "highly informative"\--that also happen to have "negative
affect" (or, even more difficultly, which are subtly dismissive) will actually
have a difficult time getting the endorsements required to be posted on the
site.

(Separately, there is then the issue as to whether one's own biases alter what
they even consider "negative affect". There are some other comments on this
thread that talk about "tone policing" which point out some subtle issues in
how people perceive the tone of others when they are in disagreements.)

I also will note that even if getting endorsements is not a problem, it seems
important to not discount the emotional complexity of forcing people to submit
themselves for "endorsement" to the group of people they may already feel are
being dismissive of their viewpoint. I wrote more on this here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484727)

~~~
sillysaurus3
I just wanted to thank you for the comment. You make some good points.

------
mcgwiz
I feel my previous comment [1] on the design of this feature is still valid.
The word "endorse" carries the wrong connotations and increases the risk of
subjectivity and groupthink. A better link label might be "tolerable".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449597)

~~~
chacham15
could it just be that if the 'privileged user' upvoted or downvoted it, it
would be considered an endorsement whereas not touching it would leave it
pending?

~~~
mcgwiz
But that's the problem. Upvoting and approving/moderating are different
things. Upvoting is a subjective exercise, whereby you signal substantive
agreement. Approving/moderating is an objective exercise, whereby you signal
that a comment meets minimal community standards of tone and non-triviality.
Conflating those will inhibit dissenting opinion.

That said, the direction you're implying might be an improvement. Rather than
a separate Pending Comments list, mod-level users would be able to see pending
comments in the context of the parent item/tree, but with some kind of
adornment or different color. Pending comments will also have a
'tolerable'/'civil'/'endorse' link next to it, but no up/down vote buttons.
Only after it's been deemed tolerable enough, will a pending comment become
live/approved and have up/down buttons.

------
sedev
Prior restraint solutions sit very badly with me: there's a reason that "prior
restraint on speech" is near or at the top of the list of First Amendment no-
nos (yes, the First Amendment applies to US government entities rather than
private entities; the lesson is still valuable). It's a gratuitously bad idea
to enable the prior restraint feature sitewide and by default. Besides the
principle of prior restraint, that has all the hallmarks of being a feature
that scales very poorly because it requires human involvement. Requiring human
involvement and discretion is the point, so I'm not sure how one could
eliminate that. Further, the part of it that say "if a user has a comment in
the pending-approval status, they may not post new comments at all," seems
very, very likely to have adverse consequences of large scope. People
participate in multiple discussions over time and change their minds about
them and behave differently in different contexts in response to different
prompts. Holding all of their participation hostage to something they've said
in the most contentious available context, seems like a great way to exert a
chilling effect on participation as a whole.

I strongly, strongly object to and oppose turning on the prior-restraint
feature sitewide by default, and especially to the "if a user has a comment in
the pending-approval status, they may not post new comments at all" part of
the feature.

That said, the history of moderating large discussions, especially in digital
media, demonstrates that giving moderators programmatic tools to enforce their
judgment is a Good Thing. So if you consider the proposed feature as "Allow
moderators to say that any reply to a comment in the tree rooted at Comment
Foo, must be human-approved before going live," sounds like a great tool for a
moderator to have at their disposal. It is limited in scope and its effects
can be judged and known. I think that's a reasonable thing to add, with the
caveat that that shouldn't include the "users who have pending comments can't
create other comments" part.

~~~
pg
If we didn't have prior restraints on people speaking about places where you
could buy cheap Ugg boots, HN would be so overrun with spam that it would be
unusable.

~~~
couchand
That's a good observation, but doesn't really get at the point the parent was
making. If I may continue the example of First Amendment rights, consider the
well-founded prohibition on yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater, which seems
more or less in line with an ad for boots on the Internet.

Could you address the issue of only allowing a user to post one comment at a
time? I think the parent made a good point on the potential chilling effect
that may have on parallel comment threads.

~~~
pg
That's a variable the moderator can tune as well. We actually ended up setting
the limit at 5 when we launched, which I don't think inconvenienced anyone.

~~~
sedev
I didn't know that part, thank you for bringing that up again (I imagine
you've had to repeat it). That reduces my worry level a lot.

------
jcampbell1
My instinct is the hidden scores are the bigger problem.

There are so many posts where the top comment seems relevant and interesting,
and I up-vote it blindly, even though it already has like 50 up-votes, and the
more interesting discussion is buried. As a 1000+ karma user, I'll make the
same mistake, under the new system.

Hiding the scores was a popular change because comments that would normally
generate +5, all the sudden were getting +60. It made everyone feel better.
None complained, but the site got worse.

I really miss the old days, when I could check the comments page, and the top
comment would be a new, interesting, nuanced, balanced, comprehensive,
perspective on the issue. Now the top comment is the first popular opinion
followed by a bunch of trolling.

Can we bring back showing scores for a week? Maybe as a april fools joke.

~~~
dfc
Why not put a new mental rule in place: _Do not upvote top level comments
unless they are extremely new <10 minutes ago._ Then you get the benefits of
hidden scores and you do not contribute to burying the interesting
discussions. It is also worth rethinking blindly up-voting. How reasonable is
it to expect a comment scoring system to succeed when users blindly upvote
things?

~~~
jcampbell1
That is a good suggestion for me, but it doesn't fix anything.

I want to read interesting, comprehensive, and nuanced comments. My voting
won't change that.

The reason HN moved to blind voting was because there was ugly complaining
about high karma users. HN should have hidden the usernames rather than the
votes. The Economist works this way.

My new theory is that HN should exploit the Hawthorne effect. Basically change
the rules constantly to get the best results.

------
exodust
For what it's worth, I disagree with pre-moderation. I'm not frequent enough
to ever have hundreds of karma points, and it's very rare for me to see a
"nasty comment".

What's wrong with reactive moderation? Or the existing system where unpopular
comments fade away literally?

Pre-moderation kills the flow of conversation. It's a massive bottleneck, is
more work for moderators, and for what benefit? Sanitation?

There's nothing wrong with a bit of grit. We're not all sensitive flowers,
reduced to tears at the sight of a nasty spray by Mr X. I hardly see that
anyway, I'm really suprised to see pending comments even being contemplated
here.

------
CoolGuySteve
Why does the site reward high karma rather than high average karma?

I don't have any experiences miderating a forum, but intuitively it seems to
me that those who spend a lot of time contributing low quality posts gain more
moderation privileges than those who are either too busy to do so or who spend
time writing a few quality posts.

~~~
derefr
Mostly because high-quality posts hidden in low-traffic subthreads "look like"
low-quality posts under such a system. People who go out of their way to help
some individual without the expectation of a status-gain would be punished,
while sycophants would be rewarded. This is the opposite of the incentives
you'd want.

------
codezero
I worked on the moderation team at Quora, and though you and your moderators
know HN better, I'd be happy to share some of what I learned there with
respect to hairy comment threads. One of the main focuses of my work was
pragmatic solutions that reduce the necessity of human (moderator)
intervention without eliminating it entirely.

------
simonsarris
Some concepts are controversial, but the resulting discussion hashed out from
them can often be more insightful and meaningful than the original article.

Some concepts are odd on the first take, and it might take a child comment to
flesh out what may be a very good but difficult to understand idea. And if
most people do not understand the point right away, they may not endorse it.

Some people are creative with their use of language, or are non-native English
speakers, and may not be able to effectively articulate what may well be a
very interesting idea or important concept that adds to the conversation.
Alone such a comment may not be useful, but child comments exploring it
further may yield some excellent discussion.

Some comments may seem flippant, but solicitations for back-story reveal what
the original commenter was really getting at.

One of the best things about HN is the comments, and it follows that one of
the best things about any particular comment is a another comment reply.

~~~

There's a problem you can peek at in academia, it doesn't have a name, but
it's the reason that 125 Harvard students were caught cheating a few years
ago. The problem isn't that the students were cheating - Harvard students are
not dumb and I doubt they're particularly lazy. The problem was that _grading_
had become such a low priority for a professor that the take-home final
answers, that only a gradable subset of possible answers were really accepted
for any question, so that grading could be done more on the number of
citations than how effectively you communicated an answer. Implicitly and
usually explicitly it's understood that you cannot just give an original
answer, you must give an answer relating to something that was taught in the
course. This does not optimize for interesting or insightful answers, it
optimizes for regurgitation. Originality becomes dangerous, since it demand
deviation.

I fear we will run into a similar issue here. People will tailor their
comments to please the endorsers that be. We will be turning inward mentally,
and we will never know how much.

And for what? It's true that sometimes there's a controversial comment and it
ends in a 60-comment emotive goose-chase.

Is that such a bad price to pay?

> Indeed, the only way to figure out if pending comments will work at all is
> empirically.

We _cannot know_ what interesting conversations and discussions might be lost.
No comment is an island, and I think this concept ignores that.

~~~

I do hope that if you turn it on it is as laser-focused as possible. The
smaller the unit you damage though, the more you put the the ability to shut
down/delay conversation in what might be an otherwise interesting thread into
the hands of one/a few people.

~~~

[1] There are probably other problems at play, such as Harvard students being
pressed for time and giving low priority to an intro to government class. That
Harvard has an intro to government class is also probably a (separate) issue.

~~~
chacham15
Wow, this is very well written. I apologize that I am not nearly as eloquent a
writer as you are.

I think that your theory in general sounds good, but the problem is that you
assume that the emotive comments can be easily ignored. I have seen too many
cases where the number one comment is a simple casual dismissal of a new
product or idea. This problem is compounded by the layout of this site such
that a -1000 scored comment will still appear above the number two comment if
it is a reply to the number one comment. Therefore, the amount of attention
given to any comment below the number one comment (that is not a child) is
very very minimal. To even get to the number two comment requires scrolling
past very large amounts of replies and replies to replies.

This is not to say that I think the pending system will fix all these flaws as
I dont know. I am waiting to see how it will play out. My point here is simply
that there is a need.

~~~
briantakita
> the amount of attention given to any comment below the number one comment
> (that is not a child) is very very minimal

This seems more like a UX issue. Maybe folding replies after n levels will fix
that problem?

~~~
chacham15
Oooh, or maybe folding when the response's value (value meaning the score +
initial + decay over time, etc) is below some fraction of the parent it gets
folded out.

------
molecule
_> Indeed, the only way to figure out if pending comments will work at all is
empirically. The plan is for the moderator to experiment with turning pending
comments on for individual threads. If that works..._

If this is going to be empirical, then what is the measurement for 'it works'
and how quickly do you expect to determine efficacy of the endorsement system?

~~~
matt_heimer
Since all threads are different it would be really cool if there could be some
A/B tests. Every thread or day you round-robin which users have to go through
the pending system. The pending and non-pending groups see completely
different sets of comments. Then we could see what type of effect it had on
comments. Does it raise the average karma per comment? How does it impact the
number of comments? etc...

Probably too much work to implement but it'd be really cool to see.

------
ryandrake
Did you give any thought to the "showpending" idea posted in the previous
discussion? Account config for those of us who don't mind reading the full,
uncensored firehose.

------
newhouseb
> Nor does the threshold for endorsing comments have to be karma. That was the
> obvious choice for a v1, but it would be easy to incorporate or substitute
> other things like account age or average comment score, or even introduce
> randomness.

I don't have a sense anymore for the quality of comments on Slashdot but
Slashdot has had a form of random moderation for long time. I do wonder how
the goals and ideals are (were?) different between HN and Slashdot and how
these differences manifest themselves in moderation policy.

A good overview of Slashdot's history and though process on moderation can be
found here:
[http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml](http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml)

~~~
lnanek2
Slashdot is a lot better, however, because it is user customizable. Comments
are rated on various attributes like if they are funny or insightful, then
users can adjust the scoring of posts based on their preferences. It is also
social - you can adjust posts of people you mark friends or foes. It is also
policed - meta moderation moderated the moderators. As someone who has run
internet forums and picture sharing sites before, I know the problem isn't
finding moderators, the problem is finding moderators who don't get ban happy
and enforce rules just for the fun of enforcing.

------
mrcwinn
I fully support making discourse more productive and agree the problem exists,
but the idea of giving a small subgroup the power to determine whose voices
can be heard is hardly "more democratic." I do agree it is less work for you.

------
eliteraspberrie
You can set the value of the karma threshold automatically, to some multiple
of the standard deviation of karma for all of HN. So you won't have to
constantly revise it.

I assume the distribution of karma here is exponential, so take the
distribution's parameter lambda to be the highest value of karma, and set the
threshold to half of the inverse of lambda. This page explains it better:
[http://www.phy.ornl.gov/csep/mc/node18.html](http://www.phy.ornl.gov/csep/mc/node18.html)

~~~
madsushi
I like the idea of a hidden karma threshold, because it prevents any obvious
attacks like "get to 50 karma and then approve bad comments".

------
dfc
I am confused about the "main moderator." When pg says "main moderator" is he
referring to a specifc person other than himself, himself in the third person
or a functional role (possibly rotating like "pager duty")? Elsewhere in this
discussion he says "IIRC that name was chosen by the moderator, but it will be
easy enough for him to change if he wants." The first mention of endorsing
comments I can find is in pg's initial announcement of the pending comments
change.

------
elwell
> I am at this stage still the one who understands the HN code best

Hopefully not sounding offensive, but objectively: this is probably because
the HN codebase is a complex ball of mud written in an obscure, original
language, further obfuscated by a rabbit-hole filled journey of macros/DSLs.

Ok, maybe that _was_ a little offensive. And, I'm not one to talk about
language choice (much less language _design_ ), as I use PHP heavily every
day. But if PG is going to back off from the code ("I was encouraged to write
it _before I left_ "), then maybe it's time for a rewrite in a more familiar
language, and maybe it's time to open source it properly and actively. While I
think the current Arc situation epitomizes the hacker culture, I disagree that
an open source rewrite in a more popular language could not also function in
the same manner (if not more so).

Edit: "ball of mud" isn't necessarily _all_ negative. I'm borrowing from a
supposed Joel Moses quote: "APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless,
beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue
on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of
mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp."

~~~
sillysaurus3
It's not nearly as bad as you make it sound. Most people just don't give it a
chance by forcing themselves to work exclusively in it for a week while trying
to implement features, etc.

The ice skating analogy is pretty apt. You'll fall and hurt yourself a few
times, but once you get the hang of it you get around much faster.

~~~
couchand
That still doesn't address the apparent issue of PG being the only person
capable of implementing this feature.

------
walexander
It seems like a lot of flame wars could be prevented without a pending comment
feature, or at least a watered down one.

If a comment is particularly offensive/offtopic, it is already downvoted,
eventually greyingout. To prevent flame wars, the reply button could simply be
disabled on those comments, or in comment threads with high vote volatility
(high numbers of up and down votes on parent comment). Vote volatility could
indicate a flamebait worthy topic, and the reply depth could be limited based
on the volatility.

Similarly the reply button could be pulled when two users are chaining long
reply threads alone.

Perhaps with higher levels of karma, the reply thread depth is relaxed for
those particular users.

Modifying reply access should prevent flame wars, but if there is still a
desire to police the content more, then I think a "flag" button is more
effective. If enough people flag your post (regardless of your karma), it
could be placed in a type of quarantine area and then be pending until someone
with the karma privileges decides to moderate it back in or not. I believe
this is what reddit does, though the comments must be approved by mods rather
than users.

------
radley
What about connecting pending comments (or posts) to an initial upvote?

\- Anything posted by K- users is only visible to K+ users and the K- guy who
posted it.

\- Nobody can comment on a K- post/comment until it gets the first upvote by a
K+ user.

\- Once a K+ user upvotes the K- post, it clears for everyone to read and
respond, even if it drops under 0 later.

I imagine this could easily reduce the most obvious friction.

------
fletchowns
I think this feature could have a very positive impact on HN.

What happens if somebody replies to my comment, but I don't get around to
responding to that person for a few days. Now there are hardly any eyeballs
hitting that thread, so probably a low chance of my comment getting approved
by somebody. Is it possible that my reply will never get to be seen?

~~~
pg
The solution may be to have pending comments only enforced on recent threads.
That would be about 30 characters of additional code.

------
zck
I haven't actually been on HN when pending was turned on, but there's one
question I have:

How do I tell when pending is on? As far as I know, it will be in the top bar
-- if you qualify to approve comments. Does it appear if I can't approve
comments? How else could I tell whether pending is on, or if I am able to
approve comments?

~~~
pg
You can tell when a comment of your own is pending because the text is
preceded by [pending]. You can tell when you can endorse a comment because
there is link to do so. The link is currently small and gray, so it should
probably be made a brighter color or replaced by a button or something.

~~~
pigDisgusting
First Question:

Does an endorsement also provide one karma point in favor of the user that
posted the comment?

If yes, why not just bind endorsements to the upvote link? So that it becomes
a natural behavior, in keeping with existing norms on this site. (perhaps
emphasize the upvote button with color-coding, to indicate that the upvote
also endorses the comment)

If not, why not? Why shouldn't an endorsement count as an upvote that provides
karma?

Second Question:

Do pending comments also apply to users with endorsement powers, or are their
comments always visible by default, due to their endorsement privileges? I'm
assuming not.

What if a privileged user were also required to be endorsed by a fellow karma-
enabled user who was not the author of the comment under review, as a form of
peer review? In other words, just because you have enough karma to review
someone else's comments, still does not guarantee that your own judgement of
your personal statements might hold universal, objective merit.

~~~
chunky1994
I think the suggestion of tying the upvote to an endorsement may be a bad
idea. It would be conflating the fact that you want the comment to be seen
with the possibility that you might agree with it. The comment could be
tangential/adversarial to your opinion, and so you might not upvote it,
however it could still add to the discussion, and hence you would endorse it.

To answer your second question I believe pg has stated that only users with
over 10000 karma have their comments automatically endorsed.

~~~
leephillips
"The comment could be tangential/adversarial to your opinion, and so you might
not upvote it, however it could still add to the discussion, and hence you
would endorse it."

I was under the impression that upvoting was to reward comments that added to
the discussion, rather than for ones that you happened to agree with. I have
upvoted comments that expressed a view that I thought was wrong, and that said
that I was wrong, because they were good comments. There is always a chance
that I'm wrong, however infinitesimal that might be.

------
elwell
Would a moderator care to turn on pending comments for this thread, so we can
get an idea of how it works?

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Are there several moderators or just one "main moderator"? I can't work that
out from the text.

~~~
pg
There is one main moderator (who is not me) as well as several other people
who could do something like that but wouldn't.

------
Houshalter
Why not just bury new comments at the bottom of the thread until they get an
upvote (essentially equivalent to "endorsement".) It's a terrible idea (new
comments never get seen), but it's functionally the same and only a small
modification rather than a whole new system.

You can also have an option to "hide" comments below a certain threshold (i.e.
ones that haven't been "endorsed" yet) if that is the desired system. Or an
option like showdead for low karma comments (perhaps count only total upvotes
or "endorsements" rather than upvotes-downvotes.)

------
matt_heimer
I'm not sure I'm a fan yet but the main benefit of pending comments will be
that it should make people think more _before_ commenting. If pending comments
can be enabled per-thread, will there be a visual warning when commenting? I
know mods will still have to approve the comment but that seems the lesser of
the two benefits to me. If not then pending comments need to be enabled for
the majority of threads to make everybody operation under the assumption that
they are enabled.

------
sillysaurus3
Why not turn on pending comments site-wide for 24 hours and see how it works
out? The initial test worked fine, and it'd be a nice experiment.

~~~
pg
The main reason not to is that comments sitewide come too fast for a human to
watch what's happening in real time.

------
Zenst
As for a karma rating to pend, then perhaps some scaling, if backlog of
pending comments then the limit lowered and if low then raised, Base on say
5-15 minute average, or even hoursly or daily...

Also thing the initial poster should automaticly get some level of control
upon the posted comments.

Random is what /. did for a last time I used it and that is pretty random in
results, garbage in, garbage out as they say.

------
webwright
It seems like many/most sites with content issues use a "flag bad stuff"
option rather than an "endorse good stuff" option-- which makes sense if most
stuff is good. Why not give people with karma level of X (5000?) the ability
to insta-kill anything that is rude? And perhaps people with lesser karma the
ability to flag, where X flag points = comment death?

------
cs702
I really like the idea of introducing some form of randomness to prevent
gaming, social stratification, and other unintended consequences.

My immediate thought is to suggest some type of majority voting and maybe even
random bagging -- e.g., show the "endorse" link to a few random users (or
groups of users) and endorse any comment that gets majority vote.

------
baddox
How do you even determine results empirically? Is there some objective measure
of utility, or is it just up to whether HN mods/admins think that things
_seem_ better with the new feature? If it's something like the latter, I
wouldn't call that an empirical approach.

------
yarou
This may or may not be a bad change to HN, it's too early to tell. Instead of
having karma as the sole criterion of whether or not to endorse comments, why
not have additional criteria such as age of the account, or number of threads
started that netted x amount of karma?

~~~
jamesaguilar
You may have never worked in a content industry before, but there are
certainly empirical methods you can use to find out if something is more
appealing to people along some axes.

------
tbirdz
To further the endorsing aspect, how about we link the endorser to the
endorsee? If the user endorses a comment which gets downvoted or flagged,
there should be some negative reinforcement for the endorser. Similarly, if
the user endorses a post that then goes on to get lots of upvotes, the
endorser should also receive some positive reinforcement.

~~~
Semiapies
In that case, then nobody would dare endorse even the most remotely
controversial statements.

Result: Total echo chamber.

------
InclinedPlane
I've been thinking about pending comments and some of the issues I foresee
from it. I have a major suggestion on how to change pending comments
functionality to make it more useful and keep comments productive:

The basic idea is to move away from the model of censorship/moderation and
toward a model around rate limiting, as well as to integrate more seamlessly
into the existing workflow of HN rather than to bolt on new things for people
to do that cause the site to break down if they're not done.

So, instead of hiding pending comments and making them visible only on the
pending comments page until they've been upvoted enough to graduate to real
comments you show them inline, but not 100% of the time. There are lots of
algorithmic options on this part but one simple idea would be to display them
to X% of users with over 500 karma who have been active within the last few
days. The posts would simply appear as normal, and have normal up/down vote
buttons on them.

If the post gathers enough upvotes then it gets promoted to universally
visible. If not then it continues to be only partially visible until some
timeout where it becomes visible.

Additionally, the amount of upvotes/downvotes could change the rate limit
timeouts on the post. If a post receives a few upvotes then it could be
automatically promoted out of pending status faster than one with no upvotes.
If a post receives a few downvotes then it could be promoted slower than
normal. If a post receives enough downvotes then perhaps it disappears, or
simply takes a very long time to show up (days? a week?)

The advantages of doing it this way are many fold. It blends into the normal
functioning of the site. People won't even know they're voting on pending
comments, they'll just use the site as usual. More importantly, it gets rid of
a lot of the clunkier problems of pending comments, such as the potential for
comments to languish in the pending state. In that case this model simply
falls back to the rate limiting model. The site would still continue to
function just fine even if nobody voted on pending comments, but the pace of
discussion would be slower. And it avoids the censorship problem. Moderation
is a fundamentally hard problem even with humans in the loop, by defaulting to
allowing all comments to surface eventually you solve the problem of denying
people a voice while also putting the brakes on overheated emotionally fueled
flame wars and so forth.

Also, I'd propose a few tweaks. First, make it so that high karma users'
comments usually skip the pending step. To me this just seems logical and a
good way to avoid excessive friction. If necessary you can add a toggle which
forces pending comments behavior on a per thread basis. Also, you can add
functionality which pushes a comment into pending status if it's downvoted.
Second, consider making direct replies always visible to the parent poster,
perhaps gated based on karma of the parent/child or both. Third, perhaps make
it impossible to reply to a pending comment unless it has at least one upvote.
That would preserve constructive back and forth comment threads while
discouraging flame wars and vitriol.

I don't want to see commentary, even controversial commentary, squashed in a
misguided effort to turn HN into the digital equivalent of "Pleasantville".
Sometimes controversy leads to extremely valuable discussion. But I think
discouraging and quieting non-constructive commentary is well within the realm
of possibility.

------
NicoJuicy
PS. Release the HN Code.

Need changes to the code, ask for the HN community :)

------
eps
pg, how many moderators are there?

------
morbius
I sincerely apologize for saying this, but should all this have been made
clear since Day 1?

Not making public even a very basic whitepaper as to how to implement a site-
wide change (and such a major one as well) just seems... off, given the high
quality of this site otherwise.

But thanks for the explanation. Duly noted.

~~~
pg
I wrote most of the code the day it launched, and I had to get it done that
day because I had to help the startups prepare their Demo Day pitches.

Thanks for saying the site is high quality, but if so it's despite (or
possibly because of) the fact that much of the development happens in the repl
of the live site. There are not a lot of whitepapers around here. We tend to
think by writing code.

~~~
elwell
> much of the development happens in the repl of the live site

Wow, I guess that gives me an excuse when I'm too lazy to test on a dev
server. "Well, PG live edits HN"

~~~
batoure
>"Well, PG live edits HN"

But HN has a persistent bug where the next button on the first page expires
and doesn't work. That's the difference between doing something for work and
doing something for fun.

The willingnes to tolerate malfunction is higher

~~~
bdcravens
> HN has a persistent bug where the next button on the first page expires and
> doesn't work.

I don't think that's a bug, but a feature - a type of cache invalidation that
forces you to refresh to ensure paging is accurate

~~~
vacri
There's the same 'feature' which works against insightful commentary. Spend
too long crafting a response, get "unknown or expired link". Not particularly
endorsing of a considered, pensive response.

------
cwaniak
Great! So it will be even more left-wing, white knights oriented, immature
behind big books kind of an affair. Write me off today Paul! Have a nice day!

------
gargarplex
I know we're not allowed to complain that HN is becoming Reddit. But with this
feature..

 _HN is becoming Slashdot._

