> 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?
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.
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?