Ask HN: automate submission from popular sources? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: automate submission from popular sources?

5 pointsmattjung15 comments

I would like to put a proposition up for discussion: Lots of articles that raise interest on HN come from the same sources: 37signals, Seth Godin, Paul Graham, etc. The one who is the first to submit an article from such a popular source, gets a lot of Karma points for a safe bet. I think we should rather reward people that find interesting articles of quite unknown writers or from new sources. One way could be to automate submission of articles from popular sources. Opinions?

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Karma can't be traded in for anything in the real world. Contrary to urban legend, Paul Graham does not make you a sandwich (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129). So it seems a little silly to get bent out of shape over who's getting lots of karma by submitting things.

More problematic seems that people are submitting stories to get karma rather than because they think they're interesting. That seems a dangerous trend. Perhaps the solution would be to nullify karma gains on such "obvious" sites.

However, what would suit me more would be if things were adjusted inversely to their PageRank -- meaning less stories from CNN, New York Times, BBC and so on, but things that are a little further out would be ranked better.

Karma, above a certain level, is primarily an indication of who wastes too much time on this site!

6. davidw 8356

Irony? We've heard of it :-)

This is probably an example of the old George Carlin joke about driving: everybody that drives slower than you is a idiot, and everyone that drives faster than you is a maniac.

I'm perplexed -- a top ten karma person posting that having high karma is a sign you spend too much time on the site. Do I upvote that? Sets off a recursion alert.

As for "does karma matter" -- if it didn't matter, we wouldn't have it, sandwich or no. Study after study has shown that if you give people arbitrary rewards, they'll work to gain them. Perhaps there is a lesson in there for startups, no?

I kind of liked the idea of getting rid of the 'leaderboard' and only showing 'karma' for comments... where it is sort of useful for pointing out 'hey, this is a good comment!'.

Either that, or, yeah, introducing 'real world rewards' for it;-)

> Karma can't be traded in for anything in the real world

Right. But the concept is used to reward people for wishful behaviour on this site.

> More problematic seems that people are submitting stories to get karma rather than because they think they're interesting.

That's exactly the problem I would like to tackle with my proposition.

True, TechCrunch is another of the always-submitted sites here. It wouldn't be too hard to setup a script to automatically post to HN whenever the RSS feed is updated, so this could be done for a special user.

Personally, I'm not as bothered about karma on here as I am on other communities - I'm much more of a reader than a contributor - and I agree with your comment on finding "unknown writers". The more obscure articles are what I use HN for at the end of the day.

I'd vote against this. I don't think the fact that some people gain karma by being the first to post popular articles is so terrible a thing that it should be offset by auto-submiting all that stuff. Most of what 37signals post is trash, anyway... one-liners and quotes that really don't belong here.

If you really want to deal with the "karma problem", then make submissions from those sources karma-free - i.e. they don't influence the submitter's karma. But since I don't think that there is actually a "karma problem", I think this is a non-issue and not worth dealing with.

How will your 'automator' determine what stories are interesting?

I feel that a plan such as that proposed would just increase the "noise" level on the site while doing little to add to the overall quality of the content - indeed it could just have a negative impact.

I am guilty (if that's the word) of posting the odd Seth Godin item but I am pretty selective about the ones I post. From time to time Seth's blogs can sound like they came out of a fortune cookie and then along comes an absolute corker with direct relevance to HN. Blindly posting them all would just add to the (rapidly growing) stream of new stories that are not going to get any up-votes - adding yet more noise and making the signal just that little bit weaker.

I guess to really get a good idea, you'd have to take a survey like this:

* Look at all the posts from site X in the past, say, 3 months.

* See how many have been posted to HN

* See how many of those got votes.

If the percentage is small, then adding the site automatically would generate noise. If, on the other hand, the site is paulgraham.com, they all get submitted and they all get tons of votes, so it would make sense to automate it.

That remains the task of the readers by voting up articles they like. The automator just automatically submits posts from pre-defined sources (RSS-feeds). The idea is to give an incentive to find interesting stuff "outside the main-stream" instead having a competition who is the first to submit the newest PG-Essay...

(Apologies, I accidentally clicked the down arrow - hopefully someone will rectify that)

Pretty much everything from certain sites gets submitted anyway, so it ends up being votes that determine what is of interest.

Perhaps instead of automatically submitting them (which would just increase the firehose nature of the "new" page) whoever submits them the first time simply makes the articles active. This will encourage people to find more rare articles.

For me, I like articles from joe the blogger, since I'm that guy. If I wanted Seth, 37Signals, or some such I'd just subscribe to their site (which I don't). I get the same signal-noise ratio from them as from the average blog post that has been upvoted several times. Perhaps better.

That's how I feel. I almost wish there were some sort of filter to allow me to filter out Joel, Jeff, 37Signals, TehCrunch etc. from the RSS feed (I prefer to pick and choose from 50 items I haven't seen before). I get around this at the moment because I know I need to read the blogs folder, then TC and then the HN feed, then I can recognise title's I've just read.

I could, in theory, not subscribe to those blogs but I don't know if everything is going to get submitted to HN.

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