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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

The 30 or so submissions of this story all set off a bunch of software penalties that try to prune the most repetitive and sensational stories off the front page. Otherwise there would be a lot more repetition and sensationalism on the fp, which is the opposite of what HN is for (see explanations via links below if curious).

The downside is that we have to manually override the penalties in the case of a genuinely important story, which this obviously is. Fortunately that doesn't happen too often, plus the system is self-correcting: if a story is really important, people will bring it to our attention (thanks, tkgally!)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

View on HN

ideating out loud, I wonder if thered be a way to "collapse" all of the different articles submitted within some short time frame within one story, and maybe share the karma between them? In the case of breaking news it sucks to submit an article and you not being the one that gets "blessed", and different articles could conceivably have different valuable viewpoints. I'm sure it would be more complicated than that when it came to it though.

It's on the list!

Thanks for the explanation - I was just wondering the exact same thing as the parent.

Sometimes I wish you'd prune the users (at least from submission privileges) who can't be bothered to search first, which is how you get these n-fold submissions.

That's impossible. We'd have to prune human nature.

Now that is a startup idea, can I apply to next batch with it?

Sounds pretty unethical, so I don't think YC would fund it.

Shouldn't we think in terms of the post-pruning ethics? :D

Sorry, I'm confused. Is there some clever joke I'm missing here? And is there a reason you don't make that clever joke or objection to any other preference for how HN is moderated?

I wouldn't say it's clever, or much of a joke, but when people ask us to change things on HN that are humans-doing-what-humans-do, I do think that's setting the bar too high.

I've made this point in response to many posts over the years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Wait, what? The first link points to you doing exactly what you're now claiming is impossible: pushing back, with threats of a ban, against behavior you recognize as human nature[1]:

>Can you please make your substantive points without snark or ... sneering at the community?

>It's human nature to make ourselves feel superior by putting down others, but it skews discussion in a way that goes against what we're trying to optimize for here [link].

>Edit: it looks like you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in a lot of what you've been posting here. Can you please review them and stick to them? I don't want to ban you but we end up not having much choice if an account keeps posting in this low-quality way.

I get that moderation is hard and time-consuming. But if you're going to reply to justify your decisions at all, I'm confused at why you'd do so just to invent a standard, on the spot, that you're obviously not following. (Hence why I charitably guessed that there was some more substantive reference I might be missing.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37717919

I wasn't chiding that commenter for human nature, I was chiding them for breaking HN's rules. If they hadn't broken HN's rules they could have human-natured all they wanted and much as I might have disliked it, I wouldn't have posted a moderation reply.

When I post a reply of the form "I know it's [... understandable/forgiveable ...] but [... you still broke the rules ...]", it's the second bit which is the active moderation ingredient. The first bit is there to express something in common with the other person, in the hope that they won't feel like they're being attacked personally by the second bit.

More importantly, though: consistency is impossible!

Either way, you recognized the linked rule violation as being motivated by human nature. Yet somehow, in that case, you didn’t handwring (with a clever ironic echo) about how you “can’t prune human nature”. Rather, you called out the rule violation and threatened consequences. So clearly you’re capable!

I thought I had a good suggestion for how to save yourself from cleaning up the torrent of self-important reposts. If you don’t like it, you can ignore a nobody like me! It just seems like a lot more heartache on your end to invent an arbitrary reason why it’s a bad idea, and then link to comments where you reject that reason.

I mean if it's on reddit or other platforms, one could do some simple search for them before they submit the post and prompt "seems like this article has already been submitted" and a checkmark if they want to bypass it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com