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.
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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.
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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.
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[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.
People will tailor their comments to please the endorsers that be. We will be turning inward mentally, and we will never know how much.
This might be the goal.
YC has been fairly heavily criticized for comments on certain topics which don't toe the party line. Mitigating such comments may be beneficial for YC (the business) in order to avoid negative publicity and attacks from powerful adversaries looking to score a symbolic victory [1]. Remember "The [mis]Information" interview with PG?
Discussions of such topics are mostly a distraction from what most of us come here for anyway, so it likely would not hurt HN much, particularly if it is turned on in sensitive threads only. In my view banning such topics would be a better solution, but I'm aware that HN has been attacked by critics for the soft ban (which pushes such stories down quickly), so this might be the best compromise for the business.
(It's important to remember that YC is a business and HN is just advertising for the business.)
[1] YC is a good target for such a symbolic victory since they are weak supporters of the cause and are unlikely to fight back too strongly but are also highly visible.
If our goal were to decrease criticism of YC, this wouldn't work. In fact, it wouldn't work as a way to eliminate any specific type of critical comment, because all it takes to make a comment visible is a small number of the many people who can endorse comments. To ensure a comment would be suppressed, the endorsers would have to be unanimously opposed to it, and it's hard to think of opinions that many HN users are unanimous about. Certainly an uncritical admiration for YC is not one of them.
What you say about YC being a good target for a symbolic victory is very insightful though. That is a real conundrum. I think it explains why any company over a certain size tends to express itself pretty blandly.
I don't believe the goal was to decrease criticism of YC on HN, I believe that part of the goal might be to reduce HN comments which have provided fodder for criticism of YC in other media.
Being specific, assorted feminist critics of YC/technology have complained strongly about HN comments being skeptical, not toeing the party line, etc. In the mainstream media, it's not too hard to blame YC/you/Altman for views that commenters here might express.
Similarly, such critics have also complained about cursing/mysogyny/racism in github repos and implicitly attributed them to Github, Inc. (For example, I don't work for github, but github could be blamed for the fact that "I have no fucking clue why this speeds things up": https://github.com/scalanlp/breeze/blame/master/src/main/sca... )
You suggested in some previous discussion on this that people who use the endorsing power incorrectly (I don't believe this was clarified but I haven't followed this endorsement thing closely [1]) might lose the power to endorse. Combining endorsement with filtering the "bad" endorsers could certainly work to steer the sort of comments that are endorsed. Rather than filtering all comments one need only filter the much smaller group of endorsers.
If you say this is not the goal and the plan is not to do this, I will drastically reduce my estimate of the probability that this is the goal. But at the moment I don't find it implausible.
[1] Most of the time I waste here is waiting for computations to finish and code to compile. But I imagine if I stopped commenting here I might be more productive, so I'm not personally strongly opposed to changes that might push me away from this site.
Oops, I get it now. It should decrease the sort of comment people attack HN for, but that wasn't the purpose of it. Those comments are just a subset of the more general problem of users saying mean and/or stupid things about any topic.
The real motivation for pending comments, incidentally, was simply that I found, as a user, that I didn't like reading comment threads as much as I used to. HN was an instance of me following the advice I often give founders: to build something you yourself want.
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.
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.
The situation you describe is the exact reason I read the comments less and less these days. I still like the content that floats to the Hacker News front page, but the fact that the term, "top dismissive comment" exists, and is damn near ubiquitous with the site is a pretty big problem. On Hacker News, rather than simply writing "First!!!" in the comment box, people seemingly write why OP is an idiot for trying, how X was solved years ago, and nothing their start up solves things better.
> I have seen too many cases where the number one comment is a simple casual dismissal of a new product or idea.
The comment must be agreeable to a large crowd and that is why it is number one. "Pending comments" wouldn't solve it at all.
What it may solve is the moderation of comments which are not voted number one, but still hog your attention span by being children of high ranking comment.
However, I don't think "pending comments" is the right solution. A simpler and more effective solution would be folding of low ranking comments (ala Slashdot).
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.