HN Submit button | Hacker News Reader

HN Submit button

saicharan.in

10 pointsscharan6 comments

I submit about one out of three posts that I write to HN for consideration.

Out of those, HN'ers usually upvote about one out of three to the front page.

Out of those, only about one in ten are really great posts.

I don't mind those odds. Heck, if I could write a great post every time I went to bat I'd be a famous author and not a consultant. I just enjoy writing. But I think there is a bit of self-censorship that goes on at HN with submissions and comments that I don't see elsewhere. I'm perfectly happy with folks submitting everything they write. I just think when we start flooding the net with HN submit buttons we're really stressing out the filtering mechanism past it's design limit. We've already reached the point where you have an hour or less to catch articles on the new tab before they roll off to page two. If folks are going to have to go digging through several pages of new articles everytime they visit it's going to be a turn-off, I'd think. (Although it might grow the site, which means that there is always going to be trade-off between culture and volume around here -- but I digress)

So I'm not crazy about the button. Nice hack, though.

This is a fine idea, but could possibly end up lowering quality of topics on HN. By making it all too easy to submit stories, quality may be endangered in a longer run due to rapid flood of links.

But then again, perhaps the voting system can hold its own well against that.

Actually, one can probably write a wordpress plugin that auto-submits a post own your own blog to HN, and then adds a "comments" link at the end of the post to point to the HN page containing your submitted link--effectively using every HN page as your comments page.

pg can probably filter based on repeated submissions from the same IP to prevent this type of abuse though.

The thing with HN is that if a website owner cares enough to put the HN submit button they could just as easily sumbit there own article.

I guess if the button worked as an upvote/ submit like a digg one it could be useful.

It does, although the author probably didn't intend it. If a submission is a duplicate, you're redirected to the first submission and it gets your automatic upvote. So the first person clicks it and submits it, and then the following clickers think they're submitting it but are really voting it up. I think it'd be cooler if looked more like the Digg button (which shows the number of diggs), but you'd have to scrape for the current number of upvotes.

totally unnecessary for the kind of topics covered on HN. A lot of posts aren't time sensitive at all, and the ones that are generate enough interest without making the process any easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com