What’s the Internet? – Hilarious Video of NBC’s The Today Show in 1994 | Hacker News Reader

What’s the Internet? – Hilarious Video of NBC’s The Today Show in 1994

singularityhub.com

5 pointskkleiner3 comments

Open articleView on HN

Submitted lots of times. Here are a few:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2156163

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157322

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2159550

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161820

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163105

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163466

Currently no comments on any of them.

Well there are a lot of examples of items that get submitted to HN and go unnoticed only to be posted 2 days later and get to the top of the front page.

This video, aside from being hilarious, is actually very informative. As someone who has been on usenet since elementary school I really didn't grasp how clueless the average person was in 1994 until I saw this video. It shows you just how far we've come in less than 20 years and really puts a lot of things in perspective (at least as far as I'm concerned)

  > there are a lot of examples of items that get submitted
  > to HN and go unnoticed only to be posted 2 days later and
  > get to the top of the front page.

Agreed, and I see that as a developing problem. It didn't seem to happen as often two years ago, or even one year ago, but it seems to be happening a lot now. A consequence is that a significant proportion of submissions are duplicated stories. It would be nice to ensure that stories people obviously like (because they are submitted repeatedly) actually got noticed the first time around.

There are simply too many submissions for people to see them all, and so many good submissions are simply lost in the noise. If they get noticed then they get upvoted and hit the front page, but many sink without trace. The resubmissions are indirect evidence that we are missing potentially valuable stories.

It would be nice to fix that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com