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Comment by chewxy | Hacker News Reader

> But in my opinion, this is going to kill a lot of real-time commentary on posts that are only moderately popular, and it will kill discussion on scrolled-off posts almost completely, for obvious reasons.

Real time discussion is overrated. I would rather prefer people think and research before commenting. That said, this could rapidly get out of hand if the pending queue gets too big.

The pending comments page has another problem in that it is quite context free. You only see the comment, not the context the comment is in (at least when I visited the page earlier).

EDIT: The [pending] comment within a thread is poorly formatted. Maybe a different style?

View on HN

But the site is inherently real-time. Submissions pop onto and off of the front page in the course of a couple hours. The window for discussion is quite small before the next thing comes along. As it is, when I comment one something that's more than a few hours old, I halfway assume I'll never get a response/upvote/anything.

Just because a submission goes off the front page doesn't mean that nobody will comment on it anymore. Of course there will be fewer newcomers to the discussion, but people who are already in the thread will keep seeing it in their "threads" page so they can post replies even after a couple of days. Unless you post dozens of comments a day, it's relatively easy to keep track of threads that you're really interested in.

But that's part of the problem - comments will only show up if there are enough people looking at it to do the endorsing. A single site-wide list of pending comments won't work either - surely the whole point is that comments should be endorsed in the context of the thread?

It also runs the risk that things will only get endorsed if they agree with commonly-held views, and I'll also be interested to see how it effects things like whoishiring.

Some sort of moderation is fine, but I think that in its current implementation, this is a rather ham-fisted approach which will have a detrimental effect on HN.

Discussion isn't "efficient" ! Roundabout conversing is still optimal and useful in re the end goal of hitting potentially unreachable topics, and just because they are far-removed from the core topics or the central themes of the OP does not mean that they aren't still enlightening topics!

I left Reddit because it became more interested in policing rather than discourse, and I am so fudging blown that HN is devolving into the same priordial soup of authority that is more concerned with making sure that every submission has a pristine set of comments rather than a potentially controversial battery of back-and-forth argumentation.

Instead, why not allow anyone with +500 comment karma the authority to flag a post and if 3+ users flagged the same post it would die? It would be visible at inception but as time went on, if it was shitty it would get killed... Sure some folks would see shitty posts, but that's ok! Who cares? Its nbd, I see shit all day via the internet and I dont stop browsing! That way normal people could still influence the future of discussions while not deliberating precluding newbs posting just out of a silly fear of low-quality content...

Am I crazy or is what I'm saying make sense to the masses?

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