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Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#31
I agree. I think HN is becoming a victim of it's own success, and it's UI wasn't built to scale. (aside - that's a challenge to all you folks interested in ux ;) ).

I would say that we definitely need a way of detecting duplicate submissions. And I would also add another suggestion: categories (or tags) for filtering.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#32
post #28

If you really believe your story is FP-worthy and it doesn't make it the first time around, I suggest you delete the original post and resubmit it a few hours later.

Or resubmit from deeper fathoms of the omnivorous echoplex. Although... HN never rewards reposters, I mean never. If it has already been submitted from a different site it won't get a single upvote, ever. Well maybe not ever, but extremely rarely, but that's because the community is not very fragmented.

I'd disagree with that. In terms of who is browsing the site now, versus 4 hours from now, it is very much fragmented. If you make the frontpage, it's likely you'll be viewed by a large enough portion of the community to be punished for reposting. If you don't reach the frontpage, I think it's OK to delete and try again.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#33

If you really believe your story is FP-worthy and it doesn't make it the first time around, I suggest you delete the original post and resubmit it a few hours later.

I wouldn't recommend that, it can be seen as spamming. Not to mention that everybody thinks his story is FP-worthy.

Spamming would be spamming. Reposting once is not spamming.

I think people have different incentives. If you spent time hacking together something and want to share it, I think you'd be more likely to think your story FP-worthy. If you're just submitting something that you read, much less so.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#34
post #9
post #5

I like number 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724516 I think that a resubmission should have more weight than an upvote.

Then people could game the votes more easily by submitting in groups, rather then voting in groups.

This is already happening. Some bloggers like ryanwaggoner are openly asking for upvotes by submissions at the end of the blog posts. So, unfortunately, this is something that will always remain broken.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#35
post #15
post #11

It probably did not get the attention you thought it deserved because the title is just not interesting. If you think the content is worth the time, take some of your time to give it a better title so people are attracted to the article. This does nothing for me: "IPhone's Trainyard developer share his story on how he got featured" But change it to something like: "From 0 to 450k, an App Store Success Story - With Ch…

This just leads to another problem though: the first submitter can bury a story by submitting a poor headline.

Yep that's correct, but that's how it is now. I can submit a story with any title I want. If you really want to submit a story that has been buried by a lousy title, there are ways to do so (as I did with this story a couple of hours ago)

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#36
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then people could game the votes more easily by submitting in groups, rather then voting in groups.

This is already happening. Some bloggers like ryanwaggoner are openly asking for upvotes by submissions at the end of the blog posts. So, unfortunately, this is something that will always remain broken.

I think that an active HN member "asking for the sale" at the end of a post is clever and responsible marketing.

More so than many blogs' gratuitously inflammatory titles or even having widgets to submit every post to Reddit or Digg or every other site under the sun.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#37
A couple of hours ago I made a comment here about the importance of giving a good article a good title so it does get read in here. In comparison at this moment the original post went from 6 to 25 points (thanks to this post), this post and it's 'better headline' had 90 points, the post I resubmitted has 104 and is second on the home page right now.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809051

The new post completely won over thanks to a better title. Food for though.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#38
post #16

i think the reddit system of featuring one new story on the front page would be good. Show a story to a 100 users...if it doesn't get an upvote...retire it, if it does show it to another 100...if a story doesn't get 5 upvotes...retire it.

Yes I agree. I've found that the reddit system has a lot better chance of bubbling up interesting articles irrespective of who submitted it. Unfortunately, from my experience, HN has become a bit of an echo chamber in the sense that certain posters have a lot better chance of having their articles noticed than the majority; irrespective of the relative value of the individual articles. I don't have data to support; b…

"new users (who have an extremely difficult time of getting anything noticed) and longterm posters (those who whatever they post gets noticed and promoted). Long-term this is not conducive to a healthy, growing community."

^ Digg

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#40
post #11

It probably did not get the attention you thought it deserved because the title is just not interesting. If you think the content is worth the time, take some of your time to give it a better title so people are attracted to the article. This does nothing for me: "IPhone's Trainyard developer share his story on how he got featured" But change it to something like: "From 0 to 450k, an App Store Success Story - With Ch…

"It probably did not get the attention you thought it deserved because the title is just not interesting." True. However, I don't like the trend of voting up stories because they have interesting titles. It leads to stories about iPhone developers losing out to stories about civil liberties in airports (that has nothing at all to do with hacking).

The trend is not to upvote stories based on their title, the trend is to attract more users into the story and the inherent discussion of it. I never upvote a story I haven't read or at least skimmed over and agreed its worth other peoples time.
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