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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

The original url (http://www.fastcompany.com/3029138/world-changing-ideas/goog...) was just a teaser for this much longer piece, so we changed it. Thanks to primigenus for the tip (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593039).

HN prefers the most substantive variant of any story. User comments pointing to better urls for a story are helpful—so helpful, in fact, that I'm working on a bit of software to semi-formalize them, so we'll be more likely to see them all. It should be ready soon, and we'll post about it.

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Thank you for explicitly calling out mod actions. This is much better than changes blindly happening behind the scenes.

It would be nice if this could also be formalized, maybe with a note at the top or bottom of the page instead of a comment that can be lost.

The trick would be to do so in a way that fits the minimalist spirit of Hacker News. We're loathe to change the site in ways that add clutter. Our bias is in favor of using the existing mechanisms where possible. Often the best ways of doing so are surprisingly if not embarrassingly low-tech.

Unfortunately, the other top comments are about space elevators.

Not many are actually discussing the real article.

Yes, that's a problem whenever you redirect or unify ongoing threads. It's a tradeoff. We'd rather have the best stories on the front page. In most cases, comments eventually grow around the new content.

In this case, though, the space elevator content does come from the real article, so these comments are on topic. The original url was basically self-blogspam—full of links back to the long piece.

Wouldn't be possible (worth) to split a converstion and make it a first page post on it's own, if: -it's not directly related to the thread (hijacking) -a certain cuantity of upvotes are received, -and a minimum converstion lenght is reached? Some times very interesting topics or meaningful comments are lost on moderate or low (to first page standart) interest news.

I can't even find the real article. The link the mods changed to seems to go to a photo gallery...

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