Dean Baquet Responds to Jay Carney’s Medium Post | Hacker News Reader

Dean Baquet Responds to Jay Carney’s Medium Post

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101 pointsplanetjones10 comments

Interesting that a Medium post was refuted with just a Medium post, given that it's essentially a row between to companies, one of which happens to be a newspaper. I wonder what their strategy is by leaving it there, as at time of writing I see no reference to it on the Times' website.

This is one heck of a rebuttal.

This has had 30 upvotes in the past hour and yet is already on the second page.

I don't usually go all tinfoil about HN votes, but it's pretty easy to assume is flagging this one down.

We marked it as a follow-up post, which downweights it. The reason is that there shouldn't be two posts about the same story on the front page.

The top comment in the other head begins with a link to Baquet's rebuttal, so it's unlikely that anyone will miss the chance to read both posts.

People who read the first submission (before the rebuttal) will miss the follow-up if it doesn't reach the front page. Assuming they don't go back to the first submission to read new(?) comments.

This happened with me. I normally don't go back to a topic that I've read and not commented on.

Perhaps if something is flagged as a follow-up, the original submission title can be changed to reflect new information?

Fair point, but then many of those people would miss the rebuttal even if it did stay on the front page, since a lot of readers check HN in the morning and then get to work.

I don't think there's any way to get perfect or even very good balance here—the instruments we have are too crude.

Perhaps not marking rebuttals as follow-up posts might be a good start?

It's one thing to downweight a post that duplicates content on the front page. It's another thing entirely to downweight a post that tells the other side of the story.

> Perhaps not marking rebuttals as follow-up posts might be a good start?

It's easy to argue for a different approach when you care about one story in particular, but we need an approach that generalizes well. Front page slots are the scarcest resource on HN, and we have a responsibility to keep them diverse. If we didn't do that in general, I guarantee you that many more readers would complain.

Btw, this isn't a question of taking a side in the dispute. The original NYT article received more attention on HN than any of the pro-Amazon responses did. We weren't anti-Amazon in that case and we aren't pro-Amazon in this one.

I don't think there's a lot of harm to having additional follow-up posts show up on the front page, especially for stories as big as this one is. With 30 items per page, and items not taking up a lot of real estate, it's not that annoying to skim past the headline if you're not interested.

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