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Comment by busymom0 | Hacker News Reader

I swear I read this article 2 or 3 days ago and the comments on that post were also same as this post. Am I missing something here?

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You're missing the second-chance pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool which allows certain posts to reappear as if they were new.

Once again expressing my opinion that this is the worst anti feature of the site. Threads are like commenting in the void because most people are not going to be looking for replies to comments they made days or weeks ago. I see the true datestamp of the comment I replied upon upthread was not 3 hours ago, but 3 days ago.

The fact that they change the timestamp is also very stupid (yes you can hover and still return the datestamp, but this is by definition a dark pattern). These posts should preserve the timestamp vs masking it and even should be flagged as [Second Chance] in the title imo.

That doesn't show for me unless I click the link.

How does it work?

dang selects a post to be second-chanced, and this resets the timestamp on it so it appears again.

wait what the heck yeah, this is the same post as from a few days ago, i guess the comment and post timestamps got glitched??

That'a thing HN's second chance pool does. If you mouseover the "3 hours ago" or whatever on a comment, it will tell you the actual post timestamp.

That is insanely bad borderline hostile UI.

Before we started doing it this way, the threads would fill up with far more off-topic comments ("why is this 3 day old post on the frontpage?" and so on). That was a much bigger problem. Relativizing the timestamps to reflect the re-up time was our attempt to address that. Overall, it has worked ok—that is, while it does still lead to offtopic confusion and complaints in the threads (boo) there is far less of it than there was before (yay).

I'm open to suggestions of how to do it better! But you also need to consider the cost of adding explicit details to the UI. If we did that every time something like this came up, HN would have become an unreadable mess a long time ago.

I guarantee you've thought more about this than I have, but the first impression I had of the "second chance" pool was that it would essentially be a repost of the top-level post and not the comment threads. I think part of the reason people bring it up is because they see the same post PLUS the same comments with new timestamps and feel disoriented.

Oh, that isn't how I thought the pool worked at all. Invisibly rewriting dates feels very dishonest/disorienting!

maybe just adding something like (revived) to the timestamp, or a [?] link that explains what happened to the date? If you want to avoid adding info to the ui it will inevitably create confusion

Just display the post's original timestamp and optionally a second-chance badge, instead of the timestamp it was second-chanced.

That's the status quo ante, which didn't work, plus a UI element which most people wouldn't understand. My guess is this would lead to even more offtopicness.

There have been almost zero visible changes to the HN codebase in over a decade, but the one thing I would love to see them add is a little flag on the heading of the post to say it is 2nd Chance Pool to avoid all these comments every time this happens and everyone is confused :)

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