Poll: What should be done about the endless repetition of stories?
This has some undesirable consequences. One is that it dilutes the "newest" page. That I don't mind so much. What bothers me more is that otherwise interesting discussion gets split over multiple pages, and the same points get made in each discussion, with some non-overlap.
I sometimes revert to my native "engineer" mode and try to do something to fix this. Usually I put cross-references into one or the other so point people to where the discussion is, or might be. Some people don't like this and down-vote them. Others do like this and up-vote them. most people don't seem to care.
I really don't mind the constant dribble of down-votes that I get for trying to prevent the splitting of discussions, but I do care that I'm not seen to be harming the "community".
Hence this poll.
What, if anything, should be done about the incessant repetition of stories?
PS: If you care enough to vote, please upvote the item so people get a chance to see it. If you think I'm karma-whoring and you want to punish me for that, find some of my comments and downvote them as scapegoats.
155 comments
[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818407
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2819411
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820611
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821072
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821210
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821635
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821985
But that's a specific example from today. Statistically, showing that on a day chosen at random there is at least one example shows that it's very likely to happen most days. Certainly it happens often enough that discussions do get split, and it annoys my sense of rightness, my sense of good design.
As an engineer, it offends my aesthetics.
It significantly hampers my enjoyment of HN, but based on this poll it seems I'm clearly in a small minority. I guess I'll just have to live with it.
One of my foibles, I suppose.
Alternatively, I'll just stop trying to perform a service by cross-referencing things if people - on the whole - don't care.
I'm just tired of people telling me they value it, then seeing that I get down-voted each time. I'd like a sense of what people really think. A poll is the closest I can get to that.
I generally agree with the premise of your original post (and I deal with it by providing links to earlier submissions by hand) but here you provide the rationale for submitting stories more than once.
I find them useful, but I only upvote them if I see that they are below the level of the worthless comments or if I can tell that they have a negative score.
If everyone acts like me, you're more likely to lose points on a cross-referencing comment than to gain them.
You've done a lot of complaining about the HN community. You seem not to trust them to do what is in the best interest of HN. Why let them determine what you post?
That's a useful comment - thank you for making that suddenly so clear.
It would also be nice to have an "alternate links" section on top of the comments page, with possibily of upvoting the alternate submissions.
Even better if an alternate link could replace the main one if it is voted as more relevant (ex main blog post replacing a post merely quoting it)
It's difficult because so many blogs and other news outlets in the tech media world travel in flocks. After one does some original reporting the rest jump on the story and (usually) cite the original source. However, the original source for the story doesn't always rule on HN in terms of hosting the main conversation. Sometimes this is because of the timing of the submission and sometimes one of the members of the 'flock' are higher profile and gain more knee-jerk upvotes (TechCrunch comes to mind).
yes, there would be obvious issues with keyword overlap and would not apply for customized titles.
Could also use recently, i.e. last week or 24 hours, to compare stories at submitted URLs such that if someone submits a story on G-man advert from a different site it is found or at least present to the submitter to check if their submission is a duplicate.
If the URL is identical it counts as an upvote for the original submission.
Edit: Removed dangling "There's value in revisiting discussion" statement.
Given that the main way to manage duplicates (by downvotes) is disabled, I could support some other mechanism. I like the idea mentioned in the comments about grouping similar submissions and have the comments merged.
The problem to solve is split discussions so I think it would be great if duplicate links would be automatically merged and the discussion page unified.
The more challenging problem to solve is how discussions about stories that are almost identical or link to identical stories could be merged. Could there be an option to view discussions independently or show a page that auto-merges similar discussions?
To take this week's AirBnB PR uproar as an example, many of the front page posts on the issue represent different facets of the story. Sure, only one link to the original blog complaint from the renter is necessary. Subsequent posts highlighting the story's path from HN to TechCrunch to a TechCrunch-hosted official response to the Financial Times and other news outlets are providing useful context here. The story has moved beyond the facts of the initial incident and onwards to its impact on startups, fundraising, disrupting regulated industries, and more.
There's a lot to talk about here and it doesn't all belong on one thread.
Also, there'd have to be a pretty clear standard about what constitutes one item. Sure, same URL - same item. Probably different URLs for the same story on the same day should be one item. But in the AirBNB ransacking case, I'd argue there should have been multiple articles: one for the initial "This is what happened" blog post and one for the "Suspect in custody, AirBNB has made changes to their organization" followup. Edited to add: And another for todays posting, noting that AirBNB probably hasn't done enough for the victim.
I assume some people blindly post TechCrunch URLs to try to boost karma - so a karma based solution might work. You post a duplicate URL, it changes your karma by -1 or 0. Not enough of a karma hit to really change the overall karma, but perhaps enough to search for the article first.
If the merge comment gets enough upvote, then a detection algorithm automatically merges it to the other one.
I left out a couple of details, but this is the simplest way I can think of to automate the merging without reverting to clustering algorithms.
I guess this is equivalent to voting the story down the front page, but it allows for salvaging the discussion in the down voted link.
I've watched these kinds of complaints and calls for correction/improvement/action for some time.
I come to HN late to the party, so I don't miss the old days as much as the first residents. In fact I'm probably one of the people ruining the party, for some of the longer residents.
I come to HN every day, because HN is the most interesting site on the web. I suspect that the earlier residents still come to HN daily or with some regularity, for similar reasons.
While I understand the dismay that earlier residents might have in reaction to the changes, these changes are all but inevitable as a more diverse crowd comes in. This is compounded by HN's relatively poor interface, especially in relation to the current complaint.
I don't mean to put words in pg's mouth. I doubt that there's much real incentive for pg to address all the mechanical issues in HN. He has many other interests, and he probably does well to attend to those before this.
Given the realistic improbability of large interface changes, the only thing left is to restrict membership to invite only. Otherwise you'll experience a slow retreat (as you are) from posts that longer residents like, as HN's low but strong buzz spreads.
Since mechanical and membership (I'm guessing) changes are unlikely, the most practical thing for any individual is to not worry about it.
When duplicate stories appear in the front page then you will probably upvote the first one. Problem is that this may not be the one with the highest score, or with the biggest discussion. When you then realize that there is a better submission of the same story, you can't change your initial vote.
I think that if you could change your vote, the problem would be corrected by the community itself.
Hopefully, that'd result in all Airbnb stories grouped together under tags representing different aspects of the story as well as automatically cross-referencing it with other examples of PR failure.
On the flip side, if someone really wants to read about Bitcoin, then can look at all stories with that tag.
Maybe a good solution would be to let people vote for merging several articles on the same topic, and once there's enough votes, merge them in one, say by concatenating both links and discussion trees?
If that's too heavy, maybe just extend each article with links to other discussion pages (say, adding beneath the text "This topic is also discussed here (link)").
(I, for one, mostly upvote your cross-links - thanks for keeping the graph connected!)
Don't worry, these things always run their course.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839740
Of course, this is going to help people who haven't see the same story repeat, but this isn't going to stop those who repost hot topics just for the sake of gaining karma points.
- Take the title of the post with the most discussion
- Turn it into a link like a poll, where each link has it's own "interior" link
- Throw all of the conversations from the posts and throw it into the main body of the combined post.
Users keep the ability to gain points, the front page stays clean, and no data is lost. The only downside is there's no easy way to flag things as "merges", unless the ability to "flag to merge" is added for people at a certain karma level. Enough flags, it automatically rolls them together.