Comment by davi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davi | Hacker News Reader

1) Click through, read, upvote post.

2) Look at comments to see what HN denizens have said. See post is a duplicate. Upvote comment noting that.

3) Think to myself, "I should've checked comments before upvoting post."

4) Think to myself, "Why is it incumbent upon me to do this? The site should do it for me."

5) Think to myself, "There is an interesting analog between a social news site and ebay. At any given moment, there is some market for a given story or item (respectively). The size of this market varies around some mean, through time. The traction that a particular story/auction receives is a function of the size of this market."

I have a friend who makes his living off ebay, and he likes the store a lot better. He says he's getting triple what he would for small-market, rarely purchased items than he would if he'd posted an auction for the same thing.

A store averages the size of the market through time. An auction samples the size of the market for a much shorter time, and so experiences more noise in market size.

A social news site has some algorithm to let stories with traction decay from the front page as a function of time. The faster this decay, the more approximately instantaneous the sampling is of the size of the market.

So went a semi-random, diverging-from-topic chain of thoughts during lunch break. Maybe others will be interested.

Lots of people (51 upvotes) didn't see the first one, so maybe it doesn't do any harm?

Also, there's arguably a market in titles - I know I've missed stories of interest to me, because I didn't recognize that aspect of them from a specific title.

4) [I believe] the site matches URLs, but doesn't catch non-significant differences, because it's difficult to tell what's significant. e.g. in this case, the previous submission's URL had an appended: ?tid=true

5) [I believe] there is a HN list with a slower decay, so it's averaged over a longer period of time (like Digg's "Top in ..." on the RHS): http://news.ycombinator.com/best but it's not very newsy, because it's averaged over a longer period of time.

With your friend, isn't the asking price also an input? The experience of getting more sales when you increase prices is not uncommon.

5) cool! Didn't know about that.

4) fair enough

"Lots of people (51 upvotes) didn't see the first one, so maybe it doesn't do any harm?"

- It harms the people who already read the story, and now have decreased signal:noise on their front page.

- It helps the people who missed it the first time around who find it interesting.

- It helps the people who already read the story, and who were interested in the HN discussion of the story (at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412). These people now get an influx of new comments to think about.

The last point only works because the user community pointed out the duplicate, and collectively decided that on-topic discussion (as opposed to this meta-ish discussion) best belonged under the original posting.

Possible conclusion: dupes are okay (even net good) on a site with a principled user community. Probably net bad on a site with a more chaotic community.

Feature idea for social news sites: let (high karma?) users fuse dupes' discussion pages into one.

I beg to differ, we are programmers. If there is a problem with the system we fix it, we don't justify it.

If dupes are allowed the karma whores will start reposting top stories all the time and many quality posters will just move on (again.) You have to reward quality and punish sloppiness. That's why I admire this site, flagged dupes or inappropriate submissions get deleted very quickly.

Funny, I was thinking how weird my original post got back to the main page at the top and started to think there was something else in the main page algorithm...

Now, seriously, my original title:

  The End of Wall Street (Liar's Poker author) (portfolio.com)

This post title:

  The End of Wall Street's Boom (portfolio.com)

Obviously the poster didn't check it wasn't a dupe. I've been flagging several dupes in the last few days and they've been deleted quite fast. It is ironic one of my few posts got the worst front page dupe :(

[Edit: Both are on the front page!]

For what it's worth, I was quite unaware that I was posting a dupe. I ran across the article through my RSS feedreader and, feeling that it might be of interest to the community here, posted it using the Hacker News bookmarklet. It was not until much later that I saw that it had already been posted (usually the site catches duplicate submissions automatically). I would have retracted my submission, but it had already gained too much traction.

> I was quite unaware that I was posting a dupe.

Again, the original was in the front page with practically the same title. I don't think you did it intentionally, but you didn't do an obvious check, either.

Regarding the other post here, I was replying the "dupes are OK" (paraphrasing) suggestion, in the general case.

But watching:

  * the points of this submission (practically the same as the original),
  * the votes for the guys saying it is OK to have dupes,
  * only one vote for my suggestions,
  * and your reply here getting a vote right away,

...I am clearly not in line with HN community. And maybe my "romance" phase just died and I should give it up.

My mistake, I suck, etc.

I thought the reason for submitting was sharing something worthwhile with other HN'ers. The dupe only increases that sharing. That you're making this a personal thing seems to imply a different motivation.

I don't think dupes are good, but we'll live.

As explicitly in my other post IMHO encouraging dupes is the problem, what the top voted comment here said.

I find it appalling most people here don't seem to see it, as it happens in most other user submitted link sites. Even Digg, usually mocked here, has quite strong software to mitigate this issue, and very often the comment discussions go quite hard on obvious dupes.

If you prefer instead to second guess me, like I care about points or something along the lines, fine.

The point of my first comment on this page is to think about noise in the size of the market for a given post. You probably just hit a "small market" blip. To get a sense of your fit w/ HN community, average over many submissions.

Looking at your profile seems you're doing fine...

Regarding "dupes are okay" -- I don't think they're necessarily okay for HN, I was thinking more hypothetically -- just noticing that they're not bad for everyone all the time.

I wouldn't have seen this article if someone hadn't resubmitted it. Their resubmission helps counteract the "small market" fluctuation you ran into.

I agree though that dupes might attract karma-maximizers, and this might not be desirable.

I leave it to the moderators/owners of this site to worry about. If I stop liking the site, I stop using it.

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