I don't see the point of explaining your mods. I think modding comments is of dubious value by itself.

Private messaging might be helpful, but I don't see an urgent problem to be solved.

Yeah, I see your point. pg probably uses a better weighting for submissions, and there usually aren't too many responses to read through.

I do see this weighting scheme being useful for the best comments list, or a meta list weighted entirely this way.

And I do still think an explanation for modding has merit. I know, it seems insecure to want an explanation for people's reactions. We macho geniuses are supposed to know it all and have perfect control of the room (especially if pg is around)...or at least we need to give that impression; and what better way to learn how than to get private feedback on hacker news?

Also, why are people modding the grandparent up?

Because people agree with me. And that's why modding is so useless. What you want is new insights being modded up - what you get is people being modded up for expressing well what everyone else is thinking, and modded down for dissenting.

I wish I could say that karma left me cold, but it doesn't - if somebody mods me down I feel insulted, if somebody mods me up it feels like praise.

To get on YC-topic, there's room for innovation here...

Along those lines, what do you think of a wikiable application for forums such as hacker news?

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=1884

I think it would be pretty neat for the community here. This would create a small feedback loop for ideas such as yours, and you don't have to bootstrap a new community to test new schemes.

I had the idea once that when you mod people, you must explain why, or it doesn't count. In fact, commenting and modding would be one and the same--in order to reply to something, you must mod it first; clicking the arrows opens the box. Then, I had the idea that your vote is weighted by what people think of your comment, and so on... eventually the scheme got too complicated to implement.

Who would see the comments?

Suppose you could make a reply "private", meaning only you and the person you're replying to could see your comment.

Their reply to your private reply should be automatically private, effectively creating an isolated thread.

People who want to disagree indefinitely on some fine point could do so without creating a ruckus.

If anything especially worthwhile came up in the discussion, either party could easily just repost it as an ordinary public reply.

To discourage people from harassing each other with private replies, you should only be allowed to downvote them.

This would also allow people an easy way to say "Thanks" or "I agree" without having those comments pollute the top level space.

That's an interesting idea.

News.YC does support sending arbitrary messages to other users. It's just only turned on for us and YC founders. I could turn it on for everyone. Would anyone want that?

The advantage/disadvantage of using messages is that they wouldn't be tied to a particular comment. There's also the disadvantage that everyone would invoke whatever that quote is about every system evolving till it adds messaging...

To tie a message to a comment the sender would include the link.

Don't forget the corollary: including messaging itself. Wait what?

Allow the recipient to choose. The default would be private.

shouldn't the default be public? i'm more inclined to write something for the whole site than for one particular person (especially someone i'm downmodding)

If you make the default public then it would be awkward to take it private. If you make the default private then you either keep it private or you risk looking like idiots and being downmodded.

I think you are asking for two features - a way to privately exchange contact info and a way to publicly/privately explain rationale for up/downmod.

I really like the former but am fine with the noise of explaining mod-rationale in the comment itself.

Yes, good clarification, though I would say private messages instead of just contact info.

So, I propose two independent features that seem simple:

1. Private option on comments the receiver can turn off.

2. Weighting of points based on whether the moderator responded to the moderated comment. This requires a reflective pause in the person's action if they want it to have greater significance, reducing knee jerk moderation noise.

While this is a pretty good idea, it adds a significant amount of complexity to news.yc. A lot of the appeal of this site is in its simplicity, and adding this public/private commenting system would kind of sacrifice that feeling.

What would you say about a simple, self similar surface that allows for deeper layers of complexity, if the user wants?

Perhaps just adding an invisibility option to a comment, which the receiver can deactivate?

Hmm. There's very little difference between actual complexity and perceived complexity. If you add options for features that could possibly increase complexity, you also increase the chance that someone feels the perception that the app is complex.

For that reason, I still dislike the idea of hidden/user-activated features.

If it was in the text markup, then it wouldn't be perceived.

I like the idea but it will just end up with tit for tat down modding. It would only work if the down modders idenity was hidden from the person.

I actually think you should get a point for commenting in the first place, this might get more people commenting and joining in.