31–40 of 50 posts
Even not doing it blindly (say, you save up links that are good and post them all at peak times for better results) is not in good form either if it is more than say 5 at a time.
One thing I've noticed happens quite a bit is that a thread on one story will have someone post a link to an external site. Someone takes this and then submits it as its own story. Take, for example, this comment on the "ACTA will force border searches" story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496269 Two hours after this was posted someone posted the link within that comment as its own story: https://news.ycombin…
Normally it's not a bad thing to have a discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread. Similar to this is when the same event is reported by different sites, each of which gets submitted. We end up with essentially the same discussion happening in multiple places. Ideally there would…
Some, but just to flag the duplication; how to process the dup is a matter of policy and could be largely automated once the humans had annotated it. Some ideas in that vein: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1975950
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Normally it's not a bad thing to have a discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread. Similar to this is when the same event is reported by different sites, each of which gets submitted. We end up with essentially the same discussion happening in multiple places. Ideally there would…
Not necessarily. Google's news aggregation has gotten pretty good at grouping numerous stories on the same subject together. It doesn't always get things right, but helps to reduce the clutter.
One thing I've noticed happens quite a bit is that a thread on one story will have someone post a link to an external site. Someone takes this and then submits it as its own story. Take, for example, this comment on the "ACTA will force border searches" story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496269 Two hours after this was posted someone posted the link within that comment as its own story: https://news.ycombin…
(For the record, I collected 13 points for my comment so far.)
I can't see any obvious disadvantages to having a set limit of, for example, 10 article submissions a day.
As someone who almost never submits stuff, I find it really frustrating that the few times I do find something that I think would be great, I see it get knocked down on the "new" page within an hour because there are so many submissions coming in. The rate of new submissions seems like it makes it almost random what just happens to get picked up in the brief window of time and what doesn't.
80+ stories a day is excessive. I would be in favor of PG rate-limiting submissions. If each article takes five minutes to read, it would take the submitter 6 hours 40 minutes(!) to read all the articles he submitted. This implies the submitter is not reading the articles before submission. This worries me because it is indicating submission by quantity, not by quality, and the thing I love about HN is the quality of…
Users should be rate limited based on the average score of their last x (say 100) submissions. If their last 100 submissions got an average of 1 (no points) then they should be rate limited to 3 a day. If their average score for the last 100 is above, say, 30, then it's obvious the user is providing real value to the community and their rate limit should disappear.
One thing I've noticed happens quite a bit is that a thread on one story will have someone post a link to an external site. Someone takes this and then submits it as its own story. Take, for example, this comment on the "ACTA will force border searches" story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496269 Two hours after this was posted someone posted the link within that comment as its own story: https://news.ycombin…
Normally it's not a bad thing to have a discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread. Similar to this is when the same event is reported by different sites, each of which gets submitted. We end up with essentially the same discussion happening in multiple places. Ideally there would…
80+ stories a day is excessive. I would be in favor of PG rate-limiting submissions. If each article takes five minutes to read, it would take the submitter 6 hours 40 minutes(!) to read all the articles he submitted. This implies the submitter is not reading the articles before submission. This worries me because it is indicating submission by quantity, not by quality, and the thing I love about HN is the quality of…
Users should be rate limited based on the average score of their last x (say 100) submissions. If their last 100 submissions got an average of 1 (no points) then they should be rate limited to 3 a day. If their average score for the last 100 is above, say, 30, then it's obvious the user is providing real value to the community and their rate limit should disappear.
I can't see any obvious disadvantages to having a set limit of, for example, 10 article submissions a day.
Or even two a day. As someone who almost never submits stuff, I find it really frustrating that the few times I do find something that I think would be great, I see it get knocked down on the "new" page within an hour because there are so many submissions coming in. The rate of new submissions seems like it makes it almost random what just happens to get picked up in the brief window of time and what doesn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that is what the flag button is for. Down vote button on a story could lead to people downvoting something they don't like because it is the opposite of upvoting. Flag is more of a "this is an inappropriate story" word.
There's less of a feedback loop there - people don't know if their submissions have been flagged or not.
1. It's overpowered. Based on some experiments I conducted a year or so ago, it seems like 1-2 flags equal about 10-20 places dropped in the rankings. It's brutal. A single person in a bad mood can drop a story like a stone. I don't know the exact maths, but a single flag seems to have the effect of many downvotes.
2. It's not what it was designed for! According to the guidelines, flagging is meant to be for "spam or offtopic", not for stuff you don't like or disagree with and want to downvote. If you disagree with it, write a comment to explain why, or find a comment that agrees with your disagreement and upvote that. Flagging is not a way to express disagreement!
3. It's mean. I regularly get articles on the front page, and I don't care that much what happens to them (though of course I like to see the discussion they generate!), but once upon a time I did, and I'm sure that's still the case for many. When you put your heart and soul into an article, and it miraculously got picked up by HN, and it's on the front page, and people are finally checking out your blog, and it's getting more visitors in one hour than it had in the last 6 months... and you see the story suddenly vanish to the second page because someone flagged it... wow, that feels like a punch to the stomach. So please don't flag "real" articles, only flag spam/trash.
If you think an article sucks, post a comment to explain why you think so. Maybe you misunderstood. In any case, the feedback will be clearer. Please don't use the flagging sledgehammer to express disagreement.
(note: I don't know if pg would agree with the above, but these are my feelings)