Hacker News Reader

Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

Submitted 12 days ago[0] with a few up-votes and no discussion, then submitted 6 hours ago[1] with no up-votes and no discussion. Now submitted again with /?attempt=2 on the end of the URL to avoid the minimal dup-detection that HN does.

This submission gets traction. Maybe everything should be submitted again and again until it gets traction. Then again, maybe there's nothing wrong with lots of re-submissions of the same stories over and over, and I'm just grumpy and need more sleep.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7659277

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725858

Edit: And yes, I've made this point before. Perhaps people are tired of me saying the same thing repeatedly. Well, I'm tired of seeing the same stories repeatedly. I guess I'll just have to take a break for a while. Feel free to vote me up or down as you will.

View on HN

The criterion is simple: a small number of reposts is ok when an article is solid and hasn't had significant attention on HN. We want good stories to have multiple cracks at the bat, or sheer randomness would prevent many from ever getting seen. If you pay close enough attention to HN that those two previous submissions counted as already having seen the story, you're way beyond the 99th percentile!

That's why we leave the dupe detector so porous. HN's goal isn't to build a database of unique urls—it's to have the most interesting front page possible.

This system is easy to abuse, so we ask people not to abuse it. For example, don't delete things and then repost them. But I don't see abusive reposting as a huge problem on HN right now. We catch most of it, and alert users catch nearly all the rest.

Edit: I should mention that we're going to be releasing a new approach to /newest that addresses the tendency of good stories to lose their chance at the front page too quickly. Exactly when we release it depends on how much code I get to write in the next month or two.

It seems like you guys (dang and .. I forgot the other one's name) added a feature to tag "meta" comments so they appear all the way down the bottom of a comment thread?

Because that's clever. I really like that solution, because "meta" comments usually do not deserve the downvotes they can get to move them away from the top part of the discussion.

I'm generally quite impressed by the new and improved job you are doing at moderating HN. I don't pay close enough attention to tell if it's improved the quality of discussion so far (it probably did, definitely did not get worse). I can say, however, the changes you made and especially the openness about most things, really improved the atmosphere and general feeling of "fairness" of this place. And that counts for a lot! Well done :)

BTW did that whole /pending experiment go anywhere? That page is always empty to me. I'm still not very sold on the idea, but just wondering.

Thanks! To answer your questions: yes, we flag some subthreads as off-topic (especially when they become weird local optima that would otherwise sit at the top), and no, we haven't turned pending comments on. We decided to try other experiments instead (such as changes to downvoting, which we've posted about quite a bit) and reserve pending comments as a last resort.

  > It seems like you guys ... added a feature
  > to tag "meta" comments so they appear all
  > the way down the bottom of a comment thread?

I have no personal knowledge of this, but I suspect other people have flagged the comments, and that's what's caused them to sink. No other mechanism would be required.

My understanding is that resubmitting good stories is explicitly permitted. If we had a more meritocratic way to decide what exposure each story gets we wouldn't need to, but we're not there yet.

It took me four tries over three years (!) to get Citizen Kubrick to the frontpage[1]. It is IMO the #2 article I've ever read, and it's too good to submit once and give up just because of the vagaries of /newest. Given that I was willing to be so persistent, I'm not sure what harm my repeated submissions did.

I wouldn't have been as persistent with this one, but it seemed worth a second attempt. (Though I wasn't aware that it had been attempted the very same day; knowing that would have changed my decision.)

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=citizen+kubrick

No, Colin, not tired of reading your posts on multi postings. Although I do let out a chuckle every now and then when I realize how thoroughly you've researched a story's history on HN :-)

This article is terrible, and your evidence makes it worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com