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Comment by fragmede

5 months ago

Thanks for this subthread!

In terms of wanting reflective and not reactive, one thought would be to gate it by time, and prevent replies to a comment until N number of minutes have passed. which I know exists as a flag that can be set on specific users, but it's a heavy hammer and extra work for moderators. If, on a post that the system has marked as a flamewar, hitting the reply page started a, say, 15 minute timer before allowing a reply, would that help lessen the reactivity of comments? personally if it's something contentious, sometimes I'll open up a reply page, write what I feel like writing, then give it 15 mins to sit, and then usually come back and delete and rewrite my entire response to be more in line with the guidelines. (though tbh, not 100% successfully)

technical fixes can't fix the underlying social ills, but sometimes you just need a simple lock to keep people honest.

It's a good idea and the HN software already does that in deeply nested threads (it hides the 'reply' link for several minutes). Maybe we could extend something like that to all threads, not just deeply nested ones. Thanks!