Comment by DangerousPie
12 years ago
How about purging pending comments after a certain time (say 24 hours)? If they haven't been endorsed by that time, they will most likely never be endorsed. And even if they would be, nobody would read them anymore.
That is exactly what happens.
A shame.
Whilst I am always intrigued with what hits the front-page, I rather more often than occasionally, find myself getting to page 10 or so on the weekends.
Just to see what has been going on that I missed.
Your change will basically mean that someone like me who might have something to add to an existing conversation might as well not bother.
It'll be years before I have enough karma on ycombinator's hackernews >1000, and that means I might as well seek another avenue. I guess I am back to post link on social media and comment on it.
Oh well, back to the 00's I guess.
> Your change will basically mean that someone like me who might have something to add to an existing conversation might as well not bother.
That is already the case. Very few people read or participate in threads more than 24 hours old. You're already walking into an empty room and having a conversation with yourself; all this change does is lock the door.
5 replies →
I wasn't aware that there was a page 10.
In my experience, page 2 is inaccessible after carefully scanning page 1 for a minute or two, and maybe clicking on or two links and reading the articles. Some generated link to page 2 expires during the time I'm scanning page 1.
Five years, I thought that was by intent and not some bug. Equally frustrating, but damn.
TLDR: Yes, Virginia, there is a Page 10 of HN. You'll just have to take someone else's word on that.
This is my core concern also. pg says that hopefully traffic will be high enough that you won't even see a delay - that's logic that only holds true for the front page. Further down, comments won't come through for large amounts of time. That's going to ruin discussion and also create pileups where 10 people see that some link should obviously be posted and do so before anyone gets approved.
Will the comment actually disappear completely, or will it just go into a state where nobody else can see it? It seems like it is 1) useful to be able to see your comments that never got endorsed (to let people build a mental model of what makes the cut and what doesn't), and 2) less confusing than just having stuff mysteriously disappear.
People who can see pending comments (= those who can endorse them) will always be able to see them. They just won't be endorsable after a day.
2 replies →
Another problem that you may not have thought of:
Several sub-kilo-karma users may realize the same useful and valuable thing to comment (say, a reference link or clarification). They all post this before the first one gets endorsed.
All the others get penalized with a 24 hour no-posting timeout, for contributing a thoughtful/useful post.
(maybe a few of them will eventually get endorsed, so they may suffer a somewhat shorter penalty, at the cost of everybody else seeing duplicate content)
Oh, that's just a great solution.
You have any idea how much time I spend sometimes on a comment?
(it can sometimes be quite a bit longer than the average person would on a similar comment, for reasons I don't really want to go into)
The first time one of those gets flushed down the toilet for no other reason than that nobody with >1k karma happened to notice it within 24 hours, I will know not to bother contributing any more.
Sometimes when I make a contribution to an older or less popular thread, I take the trouble anyway because I know there will at least be a few people that see it. Random passers-by, maybe in a few years arriving from some Google search. There's gems there. But I don't like to gamble on whether my post will even be kept around or not.
Downvote, bury, sure. But to delete without ever even being seen?? Well I guess it ties in with the joyful hellbanning theme here, or something.