Comment by waterlesscloud
12 years ago
2b is not really an issue. Endorsing only the best of similar comments is a feature.
You can remove your pending comment after some time.
It may also have a second order "unintended" consequence over time- People would stop posting shallowly obvious responses, due to the negative feedback of never having them endorsed.
The problem is that people are being penalized for writing something completely reasonable because someone wrote something slightly better or wrote it first, even if they were unaware of the other comment existing at the time of posting.
As a penalty, they will have to go back and delete their pending comment from whatever thread they were on, if they came back to HN after a break. cperciva's auto-purge or my auto-accept suggestion partly solves this issue.
Perhaps another feature is needed: mark redundant. So when you mark one of several similar comments as good, you can mark a others as redundant -- so that the owner can retract it.
I suppose preferably you'd link it somehow, so that the author of a "redundant" comment would get a "deemed redundant due to: <list of> comment<s>.
Why list: maybe 1kkarma-user #1 found commend x to be best, #2 found y to be best, and both found your comment, z, to not be best.
That sounds like a waste of time for the non-winning comment writer (especially if they could have seen the situation comin from the beginning like now). People put time and effort in their comments; I suspect they don't want to play quality lottery with it.
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Is not being endorsed a penalty, or is it just neutral?
On one hand, it doesn't subtract from your karma, but on the other it may discourage you from posting in the future.
Eh. Yes, but not at the cost of wasting good-faith efforts to contribute and making it hard for them to contribute on other threads. I'd probably endorse similar comments on a thread, even though they were redundant, for that reason.
I definitely won't, unless they're adding something unique.
Threads are cluttered enough as it is, and the idea isn't to encourage good faith efforts, but to improve comment quality.
But that's the problem. It's going to shut me up and out of conversations. I can ask a question but someone else may have already and I can't / don't want to risk not getting endorsed and not being able to comment else where.
I see this new feature as being a reason I stop participating altogether. I get not wanting reddit like comments and threads, but I fear this swings too much towards a "good old boys" club.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446499
But, I mean, it's your button, use it how you want.
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"Endorsing only the best of similar comments is a feature."
Since vote count of posts was hidden, there hasn't really been a way to tell how many people agree with a viewpoint other than similar comments.