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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Novelty accounts? In my Hacker News?

RiderOfGiraffes, is that you? If not, I suggest that you do the same as he; pointing people to the stories that have tons of comments on them. In this case, none really do yet, so maybe a note about that?

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It's semi-automated scripting from RoG. I'm trying to work out the most useful method(s) of detecting duplicates and cross-referencing. In this case I didn't put the number of comments, and marked the referenced items as "related". Compare with:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2005790

and

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2004764

where one is marked strictly as a duplicate, the other lists related, along with a note of how many comments.

I'm working on this. There's a sort-of A/B testing, since I'm able to go back and see which cross-references get up-votes, and which get down-votes. Currently I'm getting precious little of either.

This is a slippery slope. It's just a matter of time before we have novelties like http://www.reddit.com/user/keanu_reeves/ :)

I don't think of it as a novelty account. I think of it as a robot providing a service. Since it's still under human supervision it lags somewhat, but it's already found a discussion that's been split between two duplicate submissions, something I find annoying, and a waste.

It's still an experiment - I may yet give up entirely.

Showing how many comments is a good improvement. Consider only posting when the other thread has comments, otherwise it's a waste of space and a distraction (why would anyone leave the perfectly-good version they're on to go to an empty one?).

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