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Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

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Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#91
post #71

Minor feedback, if you look at "past" for a domain that's a YC company that often posts jobs to HN, the results are littered with those postings rather than other content from the site which may be more relevant.

Good catch. Let me see if we can exclude job posts. Do you have a good example you could link to? Edit: this should be fixed now. Is it?

yep yep! thanks dang :)

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#92
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the don't collapse, It might be nice to see first level comments have some kind of distinguishing visual context...to get to another thought... eg, comment number 2,3 etc...is ofetn buried under 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.4 sub comment discusion minutia....when a top comment has 30 or 40 sub comments. you should be able to scroll a page and pick out the top 5 original comments...even without collapsing...

Yes. What do you think of my https://github.com/alain94040/arguably , which is an extreme take on your suggestion?

Interesting. Some of this fits in with my "non-brief moderation thoughts" essay: https://redd.it/28jfk4/

In particular: no content-ranking system is perfect. Some level of random ordering (within a range) is probably actually preferable.

Also, Aon on randomness:

"When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the dark" http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/is-the-most-rational-choi...

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#93
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good catch. Let me see if we can exclude job posts. Do you have a good example you could link to? Edit: this should be fixed now. Is it?

yep yep! thanks dang :)

(But it isn't fixed for the cases where bad boys and girls submitted job ads as regular stories. That would require a job ad recognizer.)

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#94
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll argue against the green domains on slightly different grounds: the color is being applied as a sort of caution or warning sign, and from a UX perspective green is about the worst possible color for that sort of thing. Green is positive; green means "go," not "caution" or "warning" or "stop." When I first saw the green domains I thought HN was trying to tell me that these domains were particularly good , as in so…

As an HN user, I've never thought of it as a warning sign. And "green" can of course mean "new" as well as "go". The color choice is moot, though, because green usernames have been around for so long that we're not likely to change them. If people really don't like the green sites, we're happy to plunge them back under the moderator-only covers. But maybe let's try them for a while? In practice I think they're pretty…

Red is more auspicious than green in China, though green is also generally favourably viewed. Except for hats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture#Green

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#95

What does everyone think about links opening in a new tab rather than the parent tab? I'll often find myself getting off on a wikipedia tangent (or some similar learning loop) and HN will be several back buttons back. I now open every link in a new tab manually to solve for this problem.

Absolutely not.

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite certain the world's optometrists are paying HN to keep that font tiny so my eyes are strained every time I use the site on mobile. But seriously, I've heard in the past that they wish not to break the many apps that scrape HN, and therefore have hesitated to change the markup.

The "break HTML scraping" reason makes zero sense when an HN API exists.

The HN API still has some important gaps. But you have to expect the HTML to change, so cautious scrapers never hardcode XPaths!

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#97
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep yep! thanks dang :)

(But it isn't fixed for the cases where bad boys and girls submitted job ads as regular stories. That would require a job ad recognizer.)

I didn't realize people did that! I only checked my own company (vanity!) – I hope we're not guilty of this, if so, I'll raise hell :)

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#98
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep yep! thanks dang :)

(But it isn't fixed for the cases where bad boys and girls submitted job ads as regular stories. That would require a job ad recognizer.)

Are those penalised (perhaps on a submitter basis)?

A separate flagging feature (jobs ad) might help? Or just plain flagging.

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#99
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We worked on something like this for a while last year (code name "the archivist") with the intention of making Readability-style versions of stories with plain text, major images and no cruft. The purpose of the experiment was to see if it would speed up moderation. If we kept it, we hoped to share it with everybody (where by "hoped" I mean "would have unless we couldn't"). In the end, we didn't keep it because it d…

Sorry to see you've not kept up with this. I access HN on a few devices, including some whose rendering of "modern" (that is: broken) site designs is at best poor. Frequently no content is visible, either due to text not appearing at all, or being completely obscured by other elements. A Readability view, stripped of cruft, would be excellent for this. I'm aware of issues with site referrals, copyright, etc., but rea…

I'm open to working on it again. Qua user, I would love to be able to view Readability-style versions of stories quickly. And think of all the analytics people could do on a near-complete archive of all HN stories.

But it's a matter of priorities. Had it sped up moderation it would have both paid for itself and made certain campers happier. But it didn't turn out that way. Beyond that, technically it's a nontrivial problem to get working on the full range of content, and then there are the nontechnical obstacles. We wouldn't do it without being sure we could release it.

Sending requests to Internet Archive might be an option if they'd be ok with it, but that of course would only help with caching, not decrufting.

Re: Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

#100
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(But it isn't fixed for the cases where bad boys and girls submitted job ads as regular stories. That would require a job ad recognizer.)

I didn't realize people did that! I only checked my own company (vanity!) – I hope we're not guilty of this, if so, I'll raise hell :)

They do it without meaning to. People building startups don't always have time to re-learn the intricacies of HN.
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