For now, things are going to be pretty silly, as everyone is paying attention to it and probably just endorsing for the hell of it. My guess is that PG started with the threshold being really low, meaning that a single endorsement will actually post the comment and that an endorser needs very little karma to give a good comment. As the karma and endorsements required go up, it will become harder and harder for bad posts to actually become viewable.
I really like this way of doing it; it starts off with the default HN and then makes the filter more and more selective.
That is exactly the plan. To prevent the change from being too disruptive I set all the parameters controlling pending comments very loose.
I know a lot of people are worried that this will break HN socially. I frankly am relieved it didn't break HN literally. The new code touches so many things. I'm amazed it works. But if it does seem to be breaking HN socially, we'll tweak it till it doesn't, and if that's impossible, we'll turn it off. I'm not wedded to having pending comments. I just wanted to try it to see if it can eliminate the very worst comments.
We already have upvoting/downvoting of comments. Why do we need to moderate each and every comment? A non-popular post will have no comments at all as all will be pending and no 1000+ karma users to endorse the comments. :(
Or, if the purpose is to have high karma users function as semi-moderators, why not just keep the upvote/downvote system but make a comment's precedence a function of weighted upvotes based on the karma of those voters? I guess that still wouldn't prevent a very deep off-topic tangent off of an ancestor post that's high up on the page, but it seems like a simpler and safer solution with much less potential downside, and there are always specific solutions to the above problem such as collapsable threads.
Please make the page a bit more mobile device (touch) friendly.
A simple HTML5 media query (CSS) that increase the font-size, add some space around the links (above the comments) and make the page content (table width) 100%. Thanks.
My issue with it is if you're posting link bait threads all the time you might get hundreds of karma for very little effort.
However In my case I have 6XX karma which was earned by people up-voting thoughtful comments over several years on HN.
Point being, not all karma is the same and I'm not sure we're going to get higher quality commentary with this new system. I actually think it's going to make users chase karma and try to game the system.
Chasing karma and gaming the system are entirely different in the context of HN.
Chasing karma means you're actively participating and gaining the positive attention of your peers.
Gaming the system would mean that you're somehow gaining karma without participating or without making positive contributions. I'm not sure how link baiting will work, unless you mean that people will go out of their way to be the first person to post a URL. That may become the best way to get karma, but it's also a positive for HN because relevant links will be getting posted immediately. Therefore you wouldn't technically be gaming the system.
I appreciate your commenting and believe that we're on similar tracks (I've been around for about a year and have about 250 karma), but maybe this feature is a signal that we could be doing a better job.
* pg, please move the "endorse" and "flag" links further apart? Upvoting on mobile devices is already a risky proposition (easy to accidentally downvote instead) unless I zoom the upvote arrow to ridiculous size. Now the same problem applies to /pending.
* /pending is moving pretty quickly right now, and I've seen at least one unhelpful comment get endorsed. Hopefully this will reduce as the novelty wears off (or the karma threshold to endorse increases).
* agree with georgemcbay that it's tricky to judge the quality/appropriateness of a comment out of context.
Hmm, on the thread view you are correct (I could only see "endorse"; now I can see only "flag"). But on /pending I see both "endorse" and "flag", and they're right next to each other.
I really like this way of doing it; it starts off with the default HN and then makes the filter more and more selective.