Ask: Why not implement a "url database" with all the news?

5 points by Creegan 14y ago ↗ HN

I started checking periodically the news site since last week and noticed the avalanche of news; sadly, most of them are "repeated" news that sometimes displace the "old" ones and thus, making the current thread "useless".

Wouldn't it be better to have some URL database and whenever someone is "double posting" the same link just append that to the "old" thread?

Just an idea to keep this place a little bit more organized.

What do you think?

5 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 18.4 ms ] thread

benologist 14y ago ↗

HN could just crack down on all the blogs rewording someone else's article, that'd cut down on duplicate stories.

Rewrites via x via y via z aka most of AOL's properties and the many blogs that copy their business model should get killed. It might even encourage some of them to write some original content for a change.

nathan_f77 14y ago ↗

Or we could just use Reddit's codebase, which already handles a lot of these things very gracefully.

Kind of like how http://www.thecutelist.com/ just points to a modified http://www.reddit.com/r/aww

http://news.ycombinator.com/ could point to http://www.reddit.com/r/hacker_news

dangrossman 14y ago ↗

Are you talking about this site? Submitting the same link twice will not create a new submission, it'll redirect the submitter to the existing one. If there's a duplicate, there's some difference in the URL.

Creegan 14y ago ↗

yeah, i'm talking about this site. The think is that you can browse through the first 4 or 5 pages and you will notice a bunch of duplicates; which is sad because among a lot of duplicates and posts about exciting things in twitter the real content gets lost.

Creegan 14y ago ↗

@benologist yeah, what worries me the most is that right now this site is becoming something like that. Looks like people would rather post the link than look around here and see if the topic was already "posted"

@nathan_f77 that's a great idea, I mean, that would make the site so much cleaner and will keep more "real" content being pushed.