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Comment by ralph | Hacker News Reader

If I wanted volumes of information I know where to find it. This is news.yc. I'm hoping for quality, not quantity, and if that means a 70% fall in submissions, who cares?

Besides, having the ability to attach a comment to the URL does't mandate putting anything in it. It's suggestive to the submitter that they should make the effort though else their submission might not compare well against those that do.

And if a submitter thinks "Oh, this article isn't really good enough to spend my time on summarising" then that's a good test of whether they should inflict it on the rest of us in the first place.

Rant over. :-)

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'... Besides, having the ability to attach a comment to the URL does't mandate putting anything in it. It's suggestive to the submitter that they should make the effort ...'

I've tried now to add title + (summary) on the submissions resulting in a more descriptive subject line. It actually works at the expense of size & a bit of time. So I have to agree with this bit and have changed my approach.

'... If I wanted volumes of information I know where to find it. This is news.yc. I'm hoping for quality, not quantity, and if that means a 70% fall in submissions, who cares? ...'

This is already automated by users in the news link ( http://news.ycombinator.com/news ) and for the best articles in the best link ( http://news.ycombinator.com/best ) As for me I'd rather more articles submitted & gain the benefit of the long tail of submissions (lots), let the brains filter submissions (users) and see the resultant niches of information pop up instead of just the hits ~ http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/07/how_finely_can_.html

'... Rant over ...'

It was a good one, because it made me think about this & in the process solved a few problems I was working on :)

The news and best links don't help avoid the long tail. best is too static; it rarely changes. And http://news.ycombinator.com/rss presents too much dross. Dross which is hard to for my brain to filter because each item has too little info so I end up having to visit every thread and then often each linked external article.

(Thanks for starting to add (comments) to the title.)

"... (Thanks for starting to add (comments) to the title.) ..."

Believe me it makes a difference & really solves the crappy title problem. But it can be improved. I haven't used the the rss feed much ( http://news.ycombinator.com/rss ) but doing so I found that there is a cut-off on the browser I use (Firefox = toolbars = bookmarks ) toolbar cuts the text off at 40 characters. So If the title contains the most accurate info in the first 40 characters it even works in the RSS feeds (reader) with readers truncating the rest of the message. The other problem I noticed with the RSS feed is the transporting you to the direct link, not the news.yc feed which as the original link in the title. So rule of thumb: good title in 40 char http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/587744795/

It's unfortunate that some RSS readers limit the amount of displayed text, e.g. Firefox's menu items.

As for the RSS linking to the external article, the feed has both that URL and a "comments" URL. Some RSS readers appear not to show or give access to the comments URL, others do. For those that give both, I choose the comments one first to get more of a clue as to whether anyone bothered to comment.

There are posts elsewhere about some RSS readers ignoring the comments URL and what if anything can be done.

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