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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

#11

Post by dang »

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 (or better, merge them), and we're open to working on that. But today's features are more modest—nothing more than a way of easing the manual work that many of us are already doing. Not least yourself!

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

#12

Post by dang »

gkop wrote: post #10
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…

I suspect what kawera meant is if the submission form notified you that the URL is a dupe via ajax, so that then you wouldn't have to bother to copy and paste the title (which can be a pain on phones and tablets).

In that case I'm not sure I get it. Care to explain in more detail?

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

#13

Post by smacktoward »

dang wrote: post #3
minimaxir wrote: post #2

Very good improvements! However, the green-URL-for-noob-domains may be problematic. The green is used to give an indication for potentially low-quality content, but public startup/project launches would all fall under the noob-domain heading.

> The green is used to give an indication for potentially low-quality content. I wouldn't say that at all! It's just interesting to know what's new. We've been displaying new sites in green to moderators for a while now. When a high-quality story comes from a brand new (to HN) site, that's interesting. The converse, too: it's interesting when you can see that an obscure site isn't new to HN (because it's not green).…

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 sources that have yielded a lot of high-karma stories in the past or something. It never occurred to me that it could mean they were new or iffy until I read this thread.

I'd suggest using yellow instead, as (in the US, anyway) yellow has a strong association with caution and warning signs, without the strong "do not proceed" vibe of red.

(And the same logic would probably apply to colors on usernames, come to think of it. Green should be for usernames that HN wants to call out as MVPs for some reason. New accounts could be yellow, to indicate that they don't have a track record yet.)

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

#14

Post by dang »

Amorymeltzer wrote: post #9
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…

Second this. I feel like I've seen more dupes lately as people rush to get a hot story in. The past and web links will help for sure but it won't stop the submitter unless they're prompted. That being said, these are all great features. More information access without being overly cluttered is a huge win for everyone.

> I feel like I've seen more dupes lately as people rush to get a hot story in

Hard to say, of course, but this might be sample bias, not counting a bug we had briefly yesterday. From what we see, the community has been doing a lot more to track down duplicates lately. That's what inspired this new work.

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

#16

Post by dang »

smacktoward wrote: post #13
dang wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The green is used to give an indication for potentially low-quality content. I wouldn't say that at all! It's just interesting to know what's new. We've been displaying new sites in green to moderators for a while now. When a high-quality story comes from a brand new (to HN) site, that's interesting. The converse, too: it's interesting when you can see that an obscure site isn't new to HN (because it's not green).…

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 cool.

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

#18

Post by happyscrappy »

gkop wrote: post #10
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…

I suspect what kawera meant is if the submission form notified you that the URL is a dupe via ajax, so that then you wouldn't have to bother to copy and paste the title (which can be a pain on phones and tablets).

That's pretty minor, how about a mobile style sheet?

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

#19

Post by gkop »

dang wrote: post #12
gkop wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect what kawera meant is if the submission form notified you that the URL is a dupe via ajax, so that then you wouldn't have to bother to copy and paste the title (which can be a pain on phones and tablets).

In that case I'm not sure I get it. Care to explain in more detail?

A submission requires a title and URL. It would be nice if we could paste in the URL and see a green checkmark if the URL is not an invalid dupe or a red x if the URL is an invalid dupe. Then we don't have to copy and paste (and sometimes reformat) the title if the submission is an invalid dupe.
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