Ask HN: Can we prioritize discussions without killing sumbission diversity?
<p>The issue with trolling the comments section is a problem. There seems no easy way around it. But we've reached the state where we cannot submit stories or save stories without endorsing discussions. Those things that take a life of their own after the fact and on tangents.
<p>Related to this is the issue of "duplicates." If we have an issue with say 2 or 3 sides, the "no duplicates" rule (which makes sense in theory) means that one of those views gets priority (often times by being first/random) for reasons not relating to submission quality.
<p>If we have a "dupe" button not a "flag" (which means=/=shit) this would seem to allow people to follow a front page story (say 1 of X=10) and then for people to continue submitting different points of view (say up to a limit=10 or whatevs) and then perhaps keep this on a rolling time frame.
<p>So, we can have max=1 story on top 30 under "topic X" and then something like a rolling N alternative stories (perhaps to educate your commenting on the first page?) somewhere.
<p>So for the story on page 1 the "dupe" button would be an "alt" button with a hyperlink to a new page with 10 stories. This prevents the situation of the first/arbirary story completely being "winner takes all" in terms of its influence on what is ever "learned" on the subject.
<p>To a large extent, we have something like this
"<p>Why topic X is important [page 1]
<p>Why aspect Y of topic X also matters
[alt page: Topic X stories 1 of N].
Right now we have issues with many mixed motives in the voting. Some stories impact people directly. They may be bad PR for the company, they may be bad PR for their personal politics, they may be emotionally loaded by someone's personal experiences.
But a balance between voting up/down a submission that is informative of a discussion needs to be separated from the perception of "endorsing" a discussion that has gone off the rails. Right now it seems if anytime a general topic comes up like this it's to binary the outcome. This only leads to limitations on the comment quality.
Because basically you only have the understanding you start out with.
We had here (for example) a number of front page submissions about a recent book. But the actual original work by the author (10,000 words) never made the front page. And not because of the quality of the submission, but because the "first, no duplicates" rule put a press-release type generic story on the front page.
When discussing complex topics, with many particulars completely non-obvious without prior experience or access to the original piece, this is quite limiting indeed.
So we are now debating only shadows.
Anways, you can't read this most likely. But feel free to chime in anyways with your own thought.