Please consider making pending comments anonymous. Let the comment stand on its own.
User names are shown next to comments now, but I find that my eye gravitates to the text of the comment. I used to think I had an "enemies list," that is I used to think that there were other participants here who I would reflexively never upvote, but in fact I have found that among all the user names I recognize, I have from time to time upvoted comments from all of those participants. (And, in general, to fight the rot here I try to upvote the good stuff at least as often as I downvote the bad stuff. Changing either the numerator or the denominator can change a signal:noise ratio.)
But if it's not too much technical trouble (I have no idea about that issue), sure, we could let pending comments live on the basis solely of their content, with their authorship being exposed when the comment itself is exposed after review. I could live with that, as a user who has enough karma to review under the new system.
What if they just made all the comments anonymous for 24 hours after they're posted? If you really wanted to know someones user name you could just go back in 24 hours. Hard to say whether it would improve content, but it does still allow people to have a name tied to a comment thus providing incentive to post well thought out answers and not go on sprees of acting obnoxious (I assume).
Whether that makes sense depends on the context. Particularly in the case of someone submitting a link to their own (startup|open source code|blog post|etc), people often ask questions along the lines of "what does the author think about X" and the identity of the person replying matters a great deal to whether a reply is meaningful.
It should be obvious whether such an answer sounds authoritative or not, and it sounds like a comment could still be downvoted once endorsed. So I don't think this is as big of a problem as users endorsing (or not endorsing) based on username.
Please consider making pending comments anonymous. Let the comment stand on its own.
User names are shown next to comments now, but I find that my eye gravitates to the text of the comment. I used to think I had an "enemies list," that is I used to think that there were other participants here who I would reflexively never upvote, but in fact I have found that among all the user names I recognize, I have from time to time upvoted comments from all of those participants. (And, in general, to fight the rot here I try to upvote the good stuff at least as often as I downvote the bad stuff. Changing either the numerator or the denominator can change a signal:noise ratio.)
But if it's not too much technical trouble (I have no idea about that issue), sure, we could let pending comments live on the basis solely of their content, with their authorship being exposed when the comment itself is exposed after review. I could live with that, as a user who has enough karma to review under the new system.
What if they just made all the comments anonymous for 24 hours after they're posted? If you really wanted to know someones user name you could just go back in 24 hours. Hard to say whether it would improve content, but it does still allow people to have a name tied to a comment thus providing incentive to post well thought out answers and not go on sprees of acting obnoxious (I assume).
I second this, too. HN has some very divided cliques.
Whether that makes sense depends on the context. Particularly in the case of someone submitting a link to their own (startup|open source code|blog post|etc), people often ask questions along the lines of "what does the author think about X" and the identity of the person replying matters a great deal to whether a reply is meaningful.
It should be obvious whether such an answer sounds authoritative or not, and it sounds like a comment could still be downvoted once endorsed. So I don't think this is as big of a problem as users endorsing (or not endorsing) based on username.
There's also certain commentators who are more authoritative on certain topics, because they are known to have positions at certain companies etc.