Comment by e12e

Surely allowing two comments to be pending (and posted) rather than one, isn't a big deal? I do wonder if this can scale, though. I usually open up the top 10-15 interesting (to me) stories, along with a list of my old threads, whenever I take the time to check hn. I then reply to old threads (if that seems to make sense), and post the occasional comment across the stories that I find interesting.

Do we really believe positive moderation will be in the range of a few seconds to a minute?

I know there's been really great experiences[1] with negative moderation/flagging -- but then all users could flag, not just a subset -- and flagging something that's clearly wrong (as in goatsex wrong) is much less effort and much higher incentive than approving a somewhat contributing comment to a story.

Which brings us to what the goal of a comment policy should be. Should we really work towards discouraging people to post things like github-links to stories missing them, because sometimes they'll be beat to the punch by someone else, and now have to wait before contributing to the discussion on a different post?

Perhaps allowing "one pending post per story" might work better?

[1] I'm not sure which talk this was from, but I think it was "building web reputation systems" with an example from Yahoo that touched on flagging (users flagged in sub-second time, much better than automated spam detection). Not sure if this is the same thing(s), but they seem relevant to this discussion:

Randy Farmer (I think this is what I remember) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn7e0J9m6rE

Bryce Glass (similar topic/similar takeaways) http://www.slideshare.net/soldierant/designing-your-reputati...