I do not think this is a good idea. I've already looked through the list of noobcomments and without any context, I have no interest in looking to see if they are relevant or not.
The issue with the current model is that all I see is a list of green comments. What articles are they related to, what other discussions are they replying to?
Realize my comments come from the perspective of someone with 8600+ karma. I won't be silenced by this, but most people that come afterwords will be.
Maybe I misunderstood the system (and with no way of checkin it out myself, having below 1000 karma myself), but I thought users with 1000+ karma would see all comments appear directly on each post and could then decide whether they are "worthy" or not to be shown to everyone.
Thinking about this again I realize that would kind of defeat the whole idea as established users would still see all the "bad" comments, maybe someone can elaborate on how exactly it's supposed to work.
Why not pending delete instead of pending acceptance? Any comment is posted immediately but can be marked inappropriate by >1000 users within a certain (short) time span. If the comment reaches an inappropriateness threshold within that span it's deleted automatically.
It's interesting that this "improvement" to comments was specifically mentioned in Sam Altman's recent blog post about potential female founders. For what it's worth, this change makes me (a female with <1000 karma) feel less welcome and considerably less likely to comment. I'm not saying that this feeling is tied to being female -- it (probably) isn't. But if you want to attract new people and new types of people to HN, then this change seems very much counter to that goal. The feeling that the insiders have to approve what you're saying before you can have a voice is not a good one.
disagree: I just don't see the problem it's trying to solve. HN doesn't have a fluff problem or a flamewar problem - it happens, but not frequently enough to really be a problem.
The problem with HN's comments is the overwhelming negativity. Anything new, any change to something that already exists, is met with a reaction of fear or anger in the comments. I'd like to see effort go into fixing that problem, rather than wasting effort trying to solve a problem that other forums have and this one doesn't. And yes, I know i'm being part of this problem right now.
I don't like it. I don't mind waiting to see what happens - I'm actually kind of curious to see how it changes the community - but my guess is it will decimate the number of comments per thread because it filters the signal as well as the noise. 1000+ karma users aren't going to endorse even 10 comments per thread on average (unless they are exceptionally enthusiastic), so only the most popular threads will have any possible discussion. In my experience the most popular threads are often the least interesting so I probably won't be able to read or participate in worthwhile discussions while this system is in place, though this depends on the balance of comments vs. upvotes which pg et. al have at their disposal to tinker with.
I think this solution approaches the problem backwards. Instead of blocking all comments until they pass some endorsement threshold, why not make 1000+ karma users' downvotes count as 'denouncements' and hide the post if they get three or four denouncements? This should have essentially the same effect on noise levels without filtering out massive amounts of quality posts.
Call me cynical, but this sure seems like an effort to enforce groupthink on the company news outlet.
I suppose we'd do well to remember what business YC is in, and how critical public messaging and perception is to that business, not just in terms of their existing investments, but also ongoing recruitment.
Disclaimer: I am a long-time lurker who has only logged in a handful of times but browses daily.
It seems to me that this change moves further toward a select group of individuals owning and controlling the dialog on this site. This is bad news for the people who are not in this select group.
Before this change, a hacker news thread represented the collective dialog of the users on this site. Now, even though everyone can still comment, a hacker news thread is the collective dialog of everyone who can approve comments.
This is a dramatization; of course people with 1K karma will approve any reasonable comments and do so without any sort of agenda. Still, we can afford to be knitpicky about this change because the current system isn't broken. There is, in my mind, not any significant problem with comment quality. Why make a change now when it can potentially make the site worse and doesn't offer that great of an upside?
About 5 facebook engineers are answering questions. They are of course buried by a meta discussion about whether facebook should use PHP at all.
Since the change, I have written a few 50+ karma comments, and all were trolls. The change makes me like my own comments less. Getting a "high score" just requires posting something popular and mildly offensive, where as before, people could weigh, "what conversation is most important".
Prove that it was a positive change. If anything it's made parsing the comments harder IMO as the comment count provides extra context about how the community feels about the comment.
Jeebus. I been waiting SOOOO long for a chance to tell everyone how much I hate hidden comment karma. Here is my chance. Ok. I am done. Sorry I just had to vent.
Edit: Crap! my comment is pending... I guess I won't get to say it at all.
Even if it's just a test, it seems a reasonable scenario that just the test will cause permanent damage. I understand trying to promote better discussion, but this system is downright unwelcoming to any newcomers. When I registered to comment I thought the downvote restrictions were odd and I was willing to try it out, but if this was in place I'd have closed the tab and never come back. Maybe subject-matter experts wouldn't be so put off, but novices and students like myself would feel shunned. That's not saying I'm the most valuable poster, but I am far from a troll and I contribute real opinions and questions. I think lesser experienced posters like myself are important.
I also fear that this may fail silently with an echo chamber as a result. I think this is a real concern here. Unless there is a great amount of monitoring on those posts that don't make it through, none of the automatic posters may even miss the ones who never get a voice. That doesn't make it a positive change though.
That sounds reasonable and yet isn't always good advice; you don't throw yourself out the window and "wait to see what it's like".
I fail to see the problem with the current system / current comments; bad comments usually drown at the bottom of the page and that's that.
What would be the point of preventing noobs from commenting? What's with this love of aristocracy? "We were here first!!" So what? (I have 4k+ "karma" and my account is more than 2k days old but that does not make me special in any way, shape or form. If anything, it probably means I have already said all I ever had to say and should be shot in the head to make room for the young!! ;-)
But in this supposedly "democratic" system we're not given any choice so I guess we simply have to take it...
That being said, I think people are especially worried that if it's a bad change, it won't be reverted or tinkered with in a timely manner. HN has a (deserved, I think...) reputation for being unresponsive to user feedback.
Sir, I certainly hope this will not be taken as being overly critical. However the change as I understand it will mean that if a new user writes a single comment that is unpopular or simply gets missed, he will forever be banned from commenting again. This is unworkable because it will mean many people will be banned just by virtue of their comment being missed, or by making a mistake and saying something that isn't appreciated by whatever senior members happen upon it.
I guess I'm just worried that I will go to the front page and see two or more interesting stories I want to comment on and know I will only be able to pick one. I comment in bursts during breaks. I will also probably not comment on stories on the new page because it will be iffy on them getting the attention needed to not block me for a long time.
I think the community is just nervous, but I'm willing to give it a shot (as a sub 1000 karma-er). I do feel the heaviness of the new comment system though; and I understand the uneasiness of those commenting--kind of like swapping files in production.
I think it would be great to have some sort of "Beta HN" where whoever is taking over HN could try out all sorts of new features before they become adopted into the main HN site.
I'd maybe agree if the issue was dealing with comment spam.
The system kind of gives me the feeling of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I think it'll be much tougher to get to that 1000 karma threshold which will make sub 1000 users less likely to comment if their comments aren't actually getting posted. 1000+ users may also get bored of having to endorse other peoples comments. From what it sounds like it could seem like a job.
One alternative could be to only allow 1000+ users to upvote and all other users can only downvote comments. That way you still get your idea of having top karma users pick what everyone else reads. In either case I'm a fan of the Reddit model for all users.
There are lots of ideas that I think are dumb that still manage to do well so it'll be interesting to see. The free market will decide soon enough.
I suppose with 2.5k I'm one of the rich guys here. I would love to prevent what you describe as the rich getting richer, but the regulators will be regulated. If I don't do exactly as some superadmin wants, I'll be banned from comment approving myself. My only options seem to be, to put it bluntly, to become pg's bitch and do as the model requires, or get out.
This may be difficult for some people to understand such as famous users, but quite a few of my best comments were never upvoted. So I believe that this will also filter out many valid comments.
I think this would make more sense if comment karma, and link karma are a different (like on reddit). For example, I have nearly 1000 karma points, but most of those points came from links I have posted. And then there is bob who has 500 karma, but has never posted a link and most of his karma comes from contributing to discussions. I pass the 1000 point threshold, and now I have the ability to decide whether bobs comment is good enough to be live when I haven't proved that I can contribute to the discussion.
Whether or not it will be an improvement remains to be seen. That said, I'm glad to see improvements attempted. One concern is that I've had some nasty unprofessional responses from people with high karma in the past - responses that made me question how they got the karma to begin with given their snotty behavior. What I noticed is that many had made very few contributions to discussions, but they'd racked up the points with a couple successful post submissions. So, I guess I'm a little concerned about putting moderation in the hands of people with high karma, as I'm not convinced the karma count is actually indicative of good, meaningful participation.
It'd be more useful if the graph was in terms of comments per story per month, I think. As it is, the data could just mean that stories hit the front page, get discussed, and disappear increasingly quickly.
Why is it necessarily a bad thing that the number of comments has grown? This only matters if the overall quality of posts has decreased. More comments can also mean more good posts.
It seems like a very primitive solution to a nontrivial problem. Why treat comment quality as binary?
Reddit's approach is slightly more sophisticated and works well in practice. You generally see only quality comments, but you can read all of them if you want to. And you can contribute content without worrying that it may be delayed or outright rejected.
I have pretty high (but < 1000) karma. Even so, this sort of move smacks of consolidation of power into the existing high status group. Another way to look at this is that this is a classic "next-step" for an established player in the market and the market of course is ripe for ... ugh... disruption.
I disagreed, and am pretty happy with the openness of current HN system. I'd rather see some negative comments than missing out a few inspiring ones.
What I do find annoying is (as some have mentioned days/weeks ago)- the OP can delete his own post, even though there are many replies below. So now the other hackers have no idea what the rest of people are replying to.
I read HN everyday and I value the commentary as much as the articles. This change has the potential to censor my contribution to that commentary.
So while I think there is a lot going for the idea, I think there will be a lot of good comments that won't ever be displayed so on balance I think HN will lose more than it gains.
[+] [-] geuis|12 years ago|reply
The issue with the current model is that all I see is a list of green comments. What articles are they related to, what other discussions are they replying to?
Realize my comments come from the perspective of someone with 8600+ karma. I won't be silenced by this, but most people that come afterwords will be.
Its a bad, bad idea.
[+] [-] ximi|12 years ago|reply
Thinking about this again I realize that would kind of defeat the whole idea as established users would still see all the "bad" comments, maybe someone can elaborate on how exactly it's supposed to work.
[+] [-] WestCoastJustin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ExpiredLink|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BadCookie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|12 years ago|reply
The problem with HN's comments is the overwhelming negativity. Anything new, any change to something that already exists, is met with a reaction of fear or anger in the comments. I'd like to see effort go into fixing that problem, rather than wasting effort trying to solve a problem that other forums have and this one doesn't. And yes, I know i'm being part of this problem right now.
[+] [-] heurist|12 years ago|reply
I think this solution approaches the problem backwards. Instead of blocking all comments until they pass some endorsement threshold, why not make 1000+ karma users' downvotes count as 'denouncements' and hide the post if they get three or four denouncements? This should have essentially the same effect on noise levels without filtering out massive amounts of quality posts.
[+] [-] teacup50|12 years ago|reply
I suppose we'd do well to remember what business YC is in, and how critical public messaging and perception is to that business, not just in terms of their existing investments, but also ongoing recruitment.
[+] [-] dchichkov|12 years ago|reply
And if not. Oh well. Anyone who matters is likely to be intelligent enough to detect company bullshit/groupthink and this would be the end of it.
[+] [-] MCem|12 years ago|reply
It seems to me that this change moves further toward a select group of individuals owning and controlling the dialog on this site. This is bad news for the people who are not in this select group.
Before this change, a hacker news thread represented the collective dialog of the users on this site. Now, even though everyone can still comment, a hacker news thread is the collective dialog of everyone who can approve comments.
This is a dramatization; of course people with 1K karma will approve any reasonable comments and do so without any sort of agenda. Still, we can afford to be knitpicky about this change because the current system isn't broken. There is, in my mind, not any significant problem with comment quality. Why make a change now when it can potentially make the site worse and doesn't offer that great of an upside?
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|12 years ago|reply
Only 38.5% of users were in favor of comment scores being hidden, but it was decidedly a positive change for the site.
[+] [-] jcampbell1|12 years ago|reply
Was it?
When things were transparent, there were no reason to upvote interesting trollish comments.
Now they get blindly up-voted for being interesting. For example, consider this article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7436401
About 5 facebook engineers are answering questions. They are of course buried by a meta discussion about whether facebook should use PHP at all.
Since the change, I have written a few 50+ karma comments, and all were trolls. The change makes me like my own comments less. Getting a "high score" just requires posting something popular and mildly offensive, where as before, people could weigh, "what conversation is most important".
[+] [-] lbotos|12 years ago|reply
(I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but interesting none the less.)
[+] [-] te_chris|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinhboy|12 years ago|reply
Edit: Crap! my comment is pending... I guess I won't get to say it at all.
[+] [-] rkuykendall-com|12 years ago|reply
1) That poll was conducted well after the change. That makes it a very different type of poll.
2) This change has half as much support, if you ignore the wait-and-sees.
[+] [-] paulrademacher|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddlatham|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonesetc|12 years ago|reply
I also fear that this may fail silently with an echo chamber as a result. I think this is a real concern here. Unless there is a great amount of monitoring on those posts that don't make it through, none of the automatic posters may even miss the ones who never get a voice. That doesn't make it a positive change though.
I hope you reconsider this change,
A concerned member of this community
[+] [-] bambax|12 years ago|reply
I fail to see the problem with the current system / current comments; bad comments usually drown at the bottom of the page and that's that.
What would be the point of preventing noobs from commenting? What's with this love of aristocracy? "We were here first!!" So what? (I have 4k+ "karma" and my account is more than 2k days old but that does not make me special in any way, shape or form. If anything, it probably means I have already said all I ever had to say and should be shot in the head to make room for the young!! ;-)
But in this supposedly "democratic" system we're not given any choice so I guess we simply have to take it...
[+] [-] chrismonsanto|12 years ago|reply
That being said, I think people are especially worried that if it's a bad change, it won't be reverted or tinkered with in a timely manner. HN has a (deserved, I think...) reputation for being unresponsive to user feedback.
[+] [-] ilaksh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catshirt|12 years ago|reply
for what it's worth, i hated the removal of the comment scores too and i'm still here.
[+] [-] ryannevius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] film42|12 years ago|reply
I think it would be great to have some sort of "Beta HN" where whoever is taking over HN could try out all sorts of new features before they become adopted into the main HN site.
[+] [-] koko775|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tripzilch|12 years ago|reply
You even held a poll[0], the outcome of which was the majority didn't like it, but you left everything as it was anyway.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] krapp|12 years ago|reply
Edit: rabble rabble.
[+] [-] dummyAcc988|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mburst|12 years ago|reply
The system kind of gives me the feeling of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I think it'll be much tougher to get to that 1000 karma threshold which will make sub 1000 users less likely to comment if their comments aren't actually getting posted. 1000+ users may also get bored of having to endorse other peoples comments. From what it sounds like it could seem like a job.
One alternative could be to only allow 1000+ users to upvote and all other users can only downvote comments. That way you still get your idea of having top karma users pick what everyone else reads. In either case I'm a fan of the Reddit model for all users.
There are lots of ideas that I think are dumb that still manage to do well so it'll be interesting to see. The free market will decide soon enough.
[+] [-] lucb1e|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggordan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poulsbohemian|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|12 years ago|reply
The number of comments has been growing significantly; perhaps change won't be bad.
[+] [-] derefr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noarchy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlubarov|12 years ago|reply
Reddit's approach is slightly more sophisticated and works well in practice. You generally see only quality comments, but you can read all of them if you want to. And you can contribute content without worrying that it may be delayed or outright rejected.
[+] [-] chetanahuja|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jw2013|12 years ago|reply
What I do find annoying is (as some have mentioned days/weeks ago)- the OP can delete his own post, even though there are many replies below. So now the other hackers have no idea what the rest of people are replying to.
[+] [-] icu|12 years ago|reply
So while I think there is a lot going for the idea, I think there will be a lot of good comments that won't ever be displayed so on balance I think HN will lose more than it gains.
[+] [-] postit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PavlovsCat|12 years ago|reply