Ask HN: Thoughts on the numerous repostings of Reddit stories? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Thoughts on the numerous repostings of Reddit stories?

6 pointsjknupp5 comments

I've recently notice a trend: every article that is reasonably popular on proggit is cross-posted on HN (and sometimes, but less often, vice versa).

I myself posted something yesterday I first saw on reddit, but doing so gave me pause. Is this really a worthwhile activity? Is it a problem that much of the most popular content on the two sites is identical? If so, what is to be done about it?

I can think of only two reasons for which this phenomenon would occur. Either it is a function of the amount of interesting programming related content that is produced each day (i.e. there are only 30 or so stories per day worth posting and thus they make the front page of both sites). Or, this is an obvious example of an attempt at karma generation by submitters. Which is more likely? Does it matter?

View on HN

It doesn't matter.

And there is nothing wrong with cross-posting stuff on HN. HN is deliberately designed to discourage long-form original material, so everything submitted here has to have been posted somewhere else.

Why repost stuff here?

A. Because you think that parts of the HN community might otherwise not see it, because it's buried in a sea of cruft on other sites and because some of us simply don't read other aggregators;

B. Because you are wondering what the HN community might write in comments.

These are exactly what HN is for so there's nothing wrong with encouraging it.

Of course, if you post A-1 Reddit-quality linkbait here some of it will inevitably get upvoted to the front page, just as water flows downhill, and this will be taken as a harbinger of doom. This, too, is our tradition.

I read HN for the comments. I read reddit for cat pictures.

Often, the HN comments are more interesting and insightful than the article/link itself.

Of those two reasons, karma is useless, so karma generation should be considered just as pointless. I wager that a good number of us could whip up a script that parses rss feeds and auto-post anything that's not already up if we wanted. (Bonus points for randomizing source checked and having patience, so it's not obvious this is happening.)

The other point is cross-posted content has to be relevant to survive. Most of the stuff in 'proggit' is good, but I doubt submitting the contents of r/pics would do more than get your account/ip/netblock flagged.

The crossposting between HN and reddit gets mentioned over there sometimes. (as most of you know)

I do not know anything about Yahoo BOSS, but this was submitted to reddit a few years back and I happened to bookmark it if anyone is interested:

http://lethain.com/entry/2008/jul/12/stripping-reddit-from-h...

It at least seems a creative way to deal with what some see as a problem and others see as just the way things are.

I never visit reddit but I enjoy some of their posts (redirected from HN).

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