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Comment by chdir | Hacker News Reader

Off topic : Is it ok to re-post an ignored article [0] the very next day, just curious, not complaining :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10443814

I reposted because I got the following email from HN:

    Hi there,

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10443814 looks good, but didn't
    get much attention. Would you care to repost it? You can do so
    here: https://news.ycombinator.com/repost?id=10443814.

    Please use the same account (jgrahamc), title, and URL. When these match,
    the software will give the repost an upvote from the mods, plus we'll
    help make sure it doesn't get flagged.

    This is part of an experiment in giving good HN submissions multiple
    chances at the front page. If you have any questions, let us know. And
    if you don't want these emails, sorry! Tell us and we won't do it again.

    Thanks for posting good things to Hacker News,
    Daniel

Interesting that the process needed you to repost it for the mods to boost it. Seems like they could have just fiddled with it without you having to manually interact with it.

I can't help but wonder what the logic is there.

Also interesting that HN is moving (has moved?) toward a curated site. HN asks for reposts of things they deem good. They also adjust downward the score of many articles. (As can be seen through large jumps on sites that track article ranks, some of which will be automatic from the flamewar detector, some of which is likely manual.).

It seems like we're reaching a "web 3.0" which uses users to do the expensive bit of an intial sift but then the site admins edit/curate that into their own vision.

We're moving away from user driven content, back to curated content with user-sourcing.

Web 3 or not, I'd see it as an extension of user sourcing, where users have various levels of moderation powers. I would guess these HN emails (I also received one recently and duly reposted) are triggered by some count of admins voting up unloved posts, maybe from a list filtered by a user karma threshold.

As Jeff Atwood says about StackOverflow, it should be possible for a sufficiently privileged user to do just about anything staff can do.

Not really a new concept as /. had the notion of metamoderation, but a richer model with multiple levels of user.

So Slashdot has survived long enough to be on the vanguard again!

I got the same mail and indeed my submission went from no attention at all to stay in the front page for a while. I figured out that maybe it had to be with posting time, maybe the email is sent when it's a good time to repost? Or the first upvote is crucial?

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