<story><title>Pending Comments</title><url>https://news.ycombinator.com/pending</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grannyg00se</author><text>I really appreciate the sentiment here, but at the same time I don&amp;#x27;t want to see a thread with five hundred comments that say&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    This.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Or whatever trendy catch phrase is floating around the mindspace that month.  And this system differs from what you describe in that there will be no set group of moderators.  The community itself will decide what it wants to see and encourage the type of contribution it deems valid.</text></item><item><author>RogerL</author><text>I am currently spending my life working on signal processing - constructing a story of what is happening in the world from sensor data. And you know what - noise is good. You would perhaps think that the thing to do is to turn on the filters, crank &amp;#x27;em up, and don&amp;#x27;t ever let a noisy bit of data through.&lt;p&gt;But, of course, that does not work. Noise is helpful. It&amp;#x27;s still signal. I can construct more information from a noisy signal than an overly filtered one.&lt;p&gt;Back to forums, I was a participant in several for a different niche area. One was obsessed with post &amp;#x27;quality&amp;#x27; - a horde of moderators swarming around, then after awhile they&amp;#x27;d comb through every thread, deleting every comment they found not worthy so they would have some kind of pristine archive, and so on.&lt;p&gt;They utterly failed. Oh, they are still trundling along. But the sites with the industry leaders posting? Those are the ones with far less concern with &amp;#x27;quality&amp;#x27;. Why would an expert spend time crafting an answer to somebody when it is likely or possible that it will either not get approved to show up, or later deleted? It made no sense to them, they vocally complained, were again and again told this was for the greater good, and so they all left. Now, if you want to talk to an expert, you go to one of the other forums; if you want to talk to a complete amateur, but with never a post off topic, well, you go to the controlled one. You&amp;#x27;ll get terrible advice, or no advice at all, but hey, it&amp;#x27;s civil and on topic.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve concluded nothing about HN yet, but I don&amp;#x27;t forsee myself clicking away, endorsing post after post. This is mostly a &amp;#x27;consume&amp;#x27; site for me, and occasionally, post. I don&amp;#x27;t want to spend my time endorsing and clicking away. I&amp;#x27;ll upvote once in a while, and almost never downvote. I can&amp;#x27;t see that changing much. I can&amp;#x27;t see posting anymore; I am giving you value (or trying to), and you hold it hostage. Ya, okay, if that is how you feel, I&amp;#x27;ll go elsewhere. I recognize that sounds petulant, but back to the site in the first paragraph - a lot of people stopped posting because so much did not survive the great purges that went on. Why go to this effort if others will silence you?&lt;p&gt;Noise is not the enemy of quality. It is not the enemy of value. It&amp;#x27;s a wonderful side effect of free thinking, innovative thinking, of creation, of invention. It&amp;#x27;s messy, it&amp;#x27;s beautiful. I love noise for what it represents. Long live noise.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RogerL</author><text>We don&amp;#x27;t have that problem here.&lt;p&gt;Notice my argument was not for anarchy. Back to signal processing for a moment, I used &amp;#x27;noise&amp;#x27; loosely. Signals of interest have noise and signal interspersed. It is often trivial to filter out pure noise, such as white noise. In forums, our white noise is &amp;#x27;this&amp;#x27; comments, and we trivially filter those out with downvoting, and I suspect it is not particularly hard to write some lisp code to require endorsement for, say, one word or one sentence replies, and prevent the &amp;#x27;post&amp;#x27; button from working if the text is &amp;#x27;this&amp;#x27; in any variant.&lt;p&gt;But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal. Sure, there may be snarkiness there, or not the most civil tone, but we have doing a good job of handling that on a personal level - in the form of replies such as &amp;quot;RogerL, your post, while interesting, is a bit negative. We strive for better here&amp;quot;. I see that all the time (well, not addressed to me, but you know what I mean). That is wonderful. Regardless, there is still a lot of signal there. I have my settings set so that I can see hellbanned people. They are all posting things of value, even the one person with the religious content occasionally posts something worth reading.&lt;p&gt;It is true that there will be no set group of moderators. I don&amp;#x27;t see how that changes the fundamental equation, but it might. As I said, I haven&amp;#x27;t formed any solid conclusion, but my gut reaction is that I don&amp;#x27;t think I feel like participating in endorsement.&lt;p&gt;If we have a quality problem, it is one of submissions, of bad titles, not of &amp;#x27;this&amp;#x27; comments.</text></comment>
<story><title>Pending Comments</title><url>https://news.ycombinator.com/pending</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grannyg00se</author><text>I really appreciate the sentiment here, but at the same time I don&amp;#x27;t want to see a thread with five hundred comments that say&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    This.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Or whatever trendy catch phrase is floating around the mindspace that month.  And this system differs from what you describe in that there will be no set group of moderators.  The community itself will decide what it wants to see and encourage the type of contribution it deems valid.</text></item><item><author>RogerL</author><text>I am currently spending my life working on signal processing - constructing a story of what is happening in the world from sensor data. And you know what - noise is good. You would perhaps think that the thing to do is to turn on the filters, crank &amp;#x27;em up, and don&amp;#x27;t ever let a noisy bit of data through.&lt;p&gt;But, of course, that does not work. Noise is helpful. It&amp;#x27;s still signal. I can construct more information from a noisy signal than an overly filtered one.&lt;p&gt;Back to forums, I was a participant in several for a different niche area. One was obsessed with post &amp;#x27;quality&amp;#x27; - a horde of moderators swarming around, then after awhile they&amp;#x27;d comb through every thread, deleting every comment they found not worthy so they would have some kind of pristine archive, and so on.&lt;p&gt;They utterly failed. Oh, they are still trundling along. But the sites with the industry leaders posting? Those are the ones with far less concern with &amp;#x27;quality&amp;#x27;. Why would an expert spend time crafting an answer to somebody when it is likely or possible that it will either not get approved to show up, or later deleted? It made no sense to them, they vocally complained, were again and again told this was for the greater good, and so they all left. Now, if you want to talk to an expert, you go to one of the other forums; if you want to talk to a complete amateur, but with never a post off topic, well, you go to the controlled one. You&amp;#x27;ll get terrible advice, or no advice at all, but hey, it&amp;#x27;s civil and on topic.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve concluded nothing about HN yet, but I don&amp;#x27;t forsee myself clicking away, endorsing post after post. This is mostly a &amp;#x27;consume&amp;#x27; site for me, and occasionally, post. I don&amp;#x27;t want to spend my time endorsing and clicking away. I&amp;#x27;ll upvote once in a while, and almost never downvote. I can&amp;#x27;t see that changing much. I can&amp;#x27;t see posting anymore; I am giving you value (or trying to), and you hold it hostage. Ya, okay, if that is how you feel, I&amp;#x27;ll go elsewhere. I recognize that sounds petulant, but back to the site in the first paragraph - a lot of people stopped posting because so much did not survive the great purges that went on. Why go to this effort if others will silence you?&lt;p&gt;Noise is not the enemy of quality. It is not the enemy of value. It&amp;#x27;s a wonderful side effect of free thinking, innovative thinking, of creation, of invention. It&amp;#x27;s messy, it&amp;#x27;s beautiful. I love noise for what it represents. Long live noise.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>virtuabhi</author><text>No offense but your argument is quite similar to UK&amp;#x27;s internet censorship law. Hey you don&amp;#x27;t want CP (in your case &amp;quot;trendy catch phrase&amp;quot;), so we should have a level of censorship (moderated comments). And in no time the system becomes the oppressor of free speech and flow of information.&lt;p&gt;Also please note that the earlier system had upvotes&amp;#x2F;downvotes for comments. Through votes the community can decide the type of contribution it deems valid.</text></comment>