Some concepts are odd on the first take, and it might take a child comment to flesh out what may be a very good but difficult to understand idea. And if most people do not understand the point right away, they may not endorse it.
Some people are creative with their use of language, or are non-native English speakers, and may not be able to effectively articulate what may well be a very interesting idea or important concept that adds to the conversation. Alone such a comment may not be useful, but child comments exploring it further may yield some excellent discussion.
Some comments may seem flippant, but solicitations for back-story reveal what the original commenter was really getting at.
One of the best things about HN is the comments, and it follows that one of the best things about any particular comment is a another comment reply.
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There's a problem you can peek at in academia, it doesn't have a name, but it's the reason that 125 Harvard students were caught cheating a few years ago. The problem isn't that the students were cheating - Harvard students are not dumb and I doubt they're particularly lazy. The problem was that grading had become such a low priority for a professor that the take-home final answers, that only a gradable subset of possible answers were really accepted for any question, so that grading could be done more on the number of citations than how effectively you communicated an answer. Implicitly and usually explicitly it's understood that you cannot just give an original answer, you must give an answer relating to something that was taught in the course. This does not optimize for interesting or insightful answers, it optimizes for regurgitation. Originality becomes dangerous, since it demand deviation.
I fear we will run into a similar issue here. People will tailor their comments to please the endorsers that be. We will be turning inward mentally, and we will never know how much.
And for what? It's true that sometimes there's a controversial comment and it ends in a 60-comment emotive goose-chase.
Is that such a bad price to pay?
> Indeed, the only way to figure out if pending comments will work at all is empirically.
We cannot know what interesting conversations and discussions might be lost. No comment is an island, and I think this concept ignores that.
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I do hope that if you turn it on it is as laser-focused as possible. The smaller the unit you damage though, the more you put the the ability to shut down/delay conversation in what might be an otherwise interesting thread into the hands of one/a few people.
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[1] There are probably other problems at play, such as Harvard students being pressed for time and giving low priority to an intro to government class. That Harvard has an intro to government class is also probably a (separate) issue.