Comment by biot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by biot | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've noticed happens quite a bit is that a thread on one story will have someone post a link to an external site. Someone takes this and then submits it as its own story. Take, for example, this comment on the "ACTA will force border searches" story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496269

Two hours after this was posted someone posted the link within that comment as its own story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496475

Normally it's not a bad thing to have a new discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread.

Additionally, the person who submitted it as its own story received (as it now stands) 145 points for the effortless submission, far more than would be likely for even an incredibly well-written and researched reply within the original thread.

HN has gamified participation by rewarding people with karma. Even though it's only a bullshit number, it triggers a desire to maximize this number. As it stands, submissions are too highly rewarded relative to the value and behavior like 80+ submissions per day results.

Normally it's not a bad thing to have a discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread.

Similar to this is when the same event is reported by different sites, each of which gets submitted. We end up with essentially the same discussion happening in multiple places.

Ideally there would be some magical way to have all these posts direct to a canonical discussion, but in practice it seems this requires human intervention.

In the meantime perhaps the best action is to flag the late-comer posts and post a discussion link to an existing thread.

Not necessarily. Google's news aggregation has gotten pretty good at grouping numerous stories on the same subject together. It doesn't always get things right, but helps to reduce the clutter.

Right, while this is technically possible (and really, anything is technically possible when it comes to programming) I'm not sure if PG and whoever else maintains the site have the time, energy, and resources to set up such a system. I'm not sure what it would really take but I assume it'd be quite a bit of work to put it conservatively. The way things are run now are, in some ways, base on a compromise between the site maintainers and the users. It's as if to say "We'll manually intervene on occasion if everyone promises to play nice". Once you have to start implementing the kind of automatic quality controls we're talking about here programmatically instead of relying n good behavior, that's when you know the community just lost the quality it was known for.

> Ideally there would be some magical way to have all these posts direct to a canonical discussion, but in practice it seems this requires human intervention.

Some, but just to flag the duplication; how to process the dup is a matter of policy and could be largely automated once the humans had annotated it. Some ideas in that vein: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1975950

Actually, I find it most annoying if the link to a original source gets less upvotes/discussion than a rehash of the same story from a popular news site. Therefore, a link to the original source of a story should never be seen as a dupe, even if it is a late-comer.

I am the author of the comment you mention. While I also wondered about this coincidence, I do not see the re-post as a problem. The re-submitter made this link more accessible to a lot of people. Overall, that's a good thing. I actually think I have found this link somewhere in a HN discussion, too, but could not find the discussion again.

(For the record, I collected 13 points for my comment so far.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com