[vwinsyee]

I agree with your general sentiment. However, it only takes one member of the underrepresented group (with endorsing capability), or any member of a centrist or neutral party, to approve the a comment. (And as of so far, it doesn't seem like pending comments can be disapproved, e.g. by a hostile party.)

Granted, it's true that by nature of being underrepresented, the probability of that one member showing up to approve the comment may be unacceptably low. But I doubt it. In other words, to use your example, as long as the probability is high enough that at least one woman will show up to approve another woman's comment, there shouldn't be a problem.

Personally, I think that this probability is pretty high, though, as pg mentions, this'll have to be determined empirically. For example, it's entirely possible (as discussed in previous threads), that the population of active endorsers are skewed toward certain groups. Or that even a slightly <100% probability of legit comments being seen can ultimately compound systemic biases in the long run.

[saurik]

I think it is very important to not discount the emotional complexity of forcing someone into a position where their comments must be "endorsed" by a group of people they are perceiving as "hostile" to them.

Even if there are people who would endorse the comment, that is not what the person leaving the comment is likely going to be "feeling" in that moment: they are reading a bunch of comments that they are bothered by--ones which none of the other people around seem to be taking serious issue with (which is a key part of the original problem statement)--and those are the people they are going to perceive as being the ones who must endorse their comment: the ones to whom they are effectively submitting themselves for "endorsement".

(Which, frankly, I think is a separate reason why this endorsement system doesn't make sense as a solution to an endemic problem: most of those issuematic threads are filled with users--many of which have high karma--who are reinforcing the negative comments; it is unclear to me why the negative comments aren't going to have an easy time getting endorsements given that they currently don't have a difficult time getting upvotes.)

I thereby feel like even if this feature "worked" (and again, it isn't really clear to me why this would help, given that it isn't like these users are currently being downvoted or flagged out of the conversation) it still might not be an "appropriate" way to solve these underlying problems (which I would claim are inherently messy and emotional).

[jlees]

I agree with you and your parent. If this system goes into place I'll probably spend far more time on HN than I usually do these days -- at least at first -- specifically trying to approve comments made by other women, in the fear that others with enough karma will dismiss their point of view.

However, that won't stop many of the negative comments you mention, posted by and/or endorsed by high-karma members, also showing up in the thread. It only takes one high-karma approver to allow the negative stuff through and we're back to square one, but possibly excluding some underrepresented groups.

I like the idea in general, that is, I like the drive to improve the quality of HN comments. I'm not sure that flipping 'flag' around into 'approve' is the solution, but sadly I don't have any better ideas. Well, other than post emotion analysis and multiple-tiered karma systems (+1 Insightful, anyone?).