Comment by User8712
12 years ago
This is the wrong approach, and it's going to help deteriorate an already small community.
1. HN doesn't have an issue with comment quality.
2. HN should be concerned about growing the community, and increasing comments. A lot of discussions already suffer due to a lack of activity. This is going to do the opposite, it's going to decrease comments.
3. We live in an instant world. Pending comments is a step backwards for user experience.
4. Occasionally I see a topic with 10 comments, the majority of which were written back and forth within the first hour of the topic. You're going to kill these discussions.
5. Manually moderating topics doesn't work for communities like HN. It works on a blog, where your article from last year gets another two or three comments every month, half of which are spam.
6. You're creating unnecessary work for members in the community. People come here to enjoy the community, not to moderate.
7. It's a poor method of moderation. You can have 99 users decide not to endorse a comment, then one person decides to click the endorse button. 99% against, and yet it's approved.
8. I'll have to question every comment I write, and avoid spending time on any detailed responses, because they might never leave the pending stage.
HN comment quality has decreased a bit as it's grown, as you would expect. Some people don't have a problem with that, other find it bad enough to leave (and, ironically, sometimes leave a particularly low-quality comment in doing so).
I do have a problem with 'only one pending comment', which I think is a particularly bad part of the upcoming change. It effectively means that you can't participate in two different conversations happening in the same post. If you have karma 10k+ you are (currently planned to) 'auto-endorse', so those people can have multiple conversations.
One clear example - there was a post recently where an immigration and tax lawyer (can't remember the handle, sorry) did an AMA-style comment, which was massively popular with the community, and he answered a lot of raised questions.
If he could only make one pending comment at a time, it would not have worked: 1) Respond to a question. 2) Wait until enough people have freshly loaded the page to have the new comment in it. 3) Wait until enough people have scrolled to the right place to see his particular comment amongst all the other pendings. 4) Wait until enough of those people were endorse-capable and endorse-willing. 5) During all this waiting, keep on refreshing so you know when you're good to post the next comment.
That lawyer's one posting spree provided many people with pertinent, site-relevant, professional information... but the new system would have made it so onerous that he probably would have decided that he deals with enough boilerplate micromanagement in his day job.
Having only a single pending comment at a time will decrease the sense of community, simply by significantly reducing the number of conversations you can have.