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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

#111

Post by mdaniel »

kaolinite wrote: post #32

I'm not sure how the UI for this would work, and perhaps it's best left as an idea for a browser extension, but I like the idea of showing a selection of the five or so most recently submitted stories on the homepage, separate from the main articles. It wouldn't be enabled by default, only when an option is selected in the user profile. I never visit the new section of HN. I really wish I did but I always forget abou…

You wouldn't even need a browser extension in Chrome, as it supports "greasemonkey" style user scripts natively: any `.user.js` file you drag onto the "chrome://extensions" page is converted to an anonymous Chrome extension automagicly. YMMV with other browsers, if course.

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

#112

Post by mintplant »

dang wrote: post #108
burkemw3 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about HN auto-submitting to archive.org? Archive.org does follow some rules (e.g. robots.txt and passwords as you mentioned), so not everything would be guaranteed. It could be a good start for a lot of the content here, though. EDIT: Forgot to add that I'm not sure how much it'd help with sites going down from the HN attention. I could easily see archive.org moving a bit slower than HN's users.

> HN auto-submitting to archive.org Can you describe this in more detail?

Not the same person, but I assume they're referring to the "Save Page Now" function of the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/).

This tells Archive.org's crawler to immediately process a page and add it to the Wayback Machine's cache. Unfortunately there's no public API for this, but it is possible to programmatically submit a request to their endpoint and scrape out the resulting archive link (and I have code that does this, if that would help).

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

#113

Post by jacobolus »

I don’t mind the use of green (as compared to some other color) to indicate 'new site', but could you tone it down a little bit, or give users the option to disable it? On an otherwise neutral page, the green stands out and is quite distracting.

Maybe use something like #6a8966 (http://www.colorpicker.com/6a8966)?

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

#114

Post by dang »

slyall wrote: post #109
dang wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dupe detection software, of course, does run during submission. Clicking on a search link is something that humans have to do, though. That's for catching duplicates that escape simple URL matching. Writing software to identify which URLs are really about the same thing and which URLs are not is a nontrivial problem. I'd love to work on solving that in the general-enough case to be useful for HN, but we shouldn't…

Please don't make the dupe detector "too perfect". Fact is good content sometimes doesn't get noticed first time it is submitted. It is common for re-submissions (sometimes with a better title) a few hours or days later to make the the top of the front page.

> good content sometimes doesn't get noticed first time it is submitted.

Amid all the discussion about catching dupes I can see why this wasn't clear, but the point of these changes is to let more reposts through. That's the motivation for what we've released today (see "We've adjusted the dupe detector to reject fewer URLs" above). Every good story that doesn't get attention is a loss for HN.

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

#115

Post by vertis »

dang wrote: post #11
greenyoda wrote: post #4

The "past" link is a nice feature, but what I'd really like to see is a way of weeding out duplicate stories before they're posted. For example, today there were 9 similar stories posted (so far) about Facebook's new "dislike" button[1], causing none of them to receive a significant numbers of upvotes. Could we have a feature in the "submit" dialog that displays similar stories in the last 24 hours and then asks the…

When a story gets posted in many versions, most are knockoffs. If a knockoff has made it to HN first, I wouldn't want someone to hesitate to post a more solid article. I'm also not sure how to define "similar stories". Your link picks out the word "dislike" to search for, but that essentially encodes the answer to the hard part in the question. I do agree that it would be good to weed out variants of the same story (…

I quite like the way Stackexchange displays a list of similar questions when you're submitting a new question. It doesn't stop you from posting, but it does give pause if you didn't know it existed.

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

#116

Post by Too »

vertis wrote: post #115
dang wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a story gets posted in many versions, most are knockoffs. If a knockoff has made it to HN first, I wouldn't want someone to hesitate to post a more solid article. I'm also not sure how to define "similar stories". Your link picks out the word "dislike" to search for, but that essentially encodes the answer to the hard part in the question. I do agree that it would be good to weed out variants of the same story (…

I quite like the way Stackexchange displays a list of similar questions when you're submitting a new question. It doesn't stop you from posting, but it does give pause if you didn't know it existed.

Yes, stackexchange really got this right. Many times i've been searching for the answer to a question on google, even with site:stackoverflow.com. I don't find anything and eventually i give up and decide to post a question myself but after writing half of the question, stackoverflow finds a previous post about this very topic which answers my question.

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

#117

Post by dredmorbius »

dang wrote: post #105
dredmorbius wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those penalised (perhaps on a submitter basis)? A separate flagging feature (jobs ad) might help? Or just plain flagging.

When job ads appear as regular stories, users should certainly flag them, whether they're by YC companies or not.

I meant more that moderation actions (upvotes, flags) after a time seem not to be enabled. Surfacing crap / spam with improved search seems highly likely. It's another thing that happened on Ello.

Actually, their fix was pretty slick: spamming profile posts don't show up in normal search.

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

#118

Post by dredmorbius »

dang wrote: post #99
dredmorbius wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Totally understand on all points.

Caches on their own would be totally worthwhile, even without de-crufting. If IA are up for it, HN as signal for relevance would likely be worthwhile. Talk to Brewster.

As I said, decrufting/readability would be a really nice value-add!personally. Readability themselves have an API for this which might be one way to approach the concept, and they've done much of the heavy lifting in terms of sorting out sites' various CSS/HTML cruft and sanitizing it. I do my own pretty significant CSS restructuring locally (we've chatted about this before w/ HN), and with some 1800+ individual sites' CSS modified to some extent or anohter, I've got a really good idea of just how effed up the stuff can be.

I totally agree with Nic Bvacqua's "Stop Breaking the Web" posted yesterday.

But on an effort/reward basis as a greenfield project, likely not worth it. Going with Readability (or Instapaper, or Pocket) themselves could well be worth investigating.

As a suggestion: another consideration would be to simply reject submissions which aren't accessible via some putative minimal client. If enough aggregators started penalising sites for inaccessible content, they might start wising up.

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

#119

Post by SamReidHughes »

krapp wrote: post #21
smacktoward wrote: post #13

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…

I would argue against green usernames as well. I think it appears to be a stronger signal of quality than it is (like karma, which if it works should be enough.) Hacker News needs fewer such filters, or at the very least more intelligent ones. If noob accounts act out, downvote and correct them, and if they continue, someone will ban them.

I found green usernames to be useful for voting -- I'll upvote anything by a green user that's a reasonable post a normal functioning human would make, and if it's something to downvote, you can check their posting history and often there's stuff worth upvoting to cancel out the downvote.

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

#120

Post by dang »

jacobolus wrote: post #113

I don’t mind the use of green (as compared to some other color) to indicate 'new site', but could you tone it down a little bit, or give users the option to disable it? On an otherwise neutral page, the green stands out and is quite distracting. Maybe use something like #6a8966 ( http://www.colorpicker.com/6a8966 )?

I agree that the classic noob green is a little loud, but wow, your eyes are way sharper than mine, or we're using different devices, or both.

Maybe we can tone it down a bit though.

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