It's important that I preface what I say with the following disclosure: I fall in the >1000 karma range and even the >10000 karma range (though not much beyond that.)

Whether you think the 'pending comments' change is a good idea stems from two things:

1.  Do you think the level of discourse on HN can be improved?
2.  Do you think, on average, users with higher karma have a better level of discourse than those with lower karma?

If you disagree with the former, the rest of this post doesn't apply to you -- if you don't see the massive flaws in the general culture of this site, which overall I cherish and choose to spend *way* too much time on, then you're probably not going to agree with the following stuff anyway.

The latter, of course, is tricky.  I think HN does a really good job of dealing with the absolute craziness -- I mean the overt ignorance and insanity, the comments that you have to highlight with your cursor to read clearly because they have to be squashed.  The thing is, I think those are the same comments that would really get weeded out by such an endorsement system -- the ones that literally nobody would put their name behind (besides the person posting it.)

The problem, then, is everything else -- the vast spectrum of bad commentary that falls in the chasm between "this is the discourse we aspire to" and "this is the literal worst".  The casual misogyny and what pg calls 'middlebrow dismissals' -- the valuation of snark over substance.

The thing is, I'd argue the majority of these comments are made by people with a four-digit level of karma.  These things get upvoted -- which is why they're a problem in the first place, because they're visible and that visibility dictates the culture -- and those users get further rewarded and incentivized to pursue a negative culture.

This new system will do a perfectly good job of disguising the comments that nobody took particularly seriously anyway while reinforcing the ones that were *just* bad enough to hurt the community, all the while discouraging new contributors in a time and atmosphere when we're pining for diversity and exciting voices.

My personal suggestion for HN: pursue a moderator/community admin system.  If you want to embrace the idea that flagging and moderation is the best way to solve the problem of a deteriorating community (and I come from SA, so I'm somewhat biased in this regard), then you might as well embrace it whole-heartedly.  And have these people be transparent, since a huge source of outrage (manufactured or otherwise) stems from "hey, why did this important thing suddenly disappear"?