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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#81

Post by burkemw3 »

jkimmel wrote: post #80
nkurz wrote: post #78

Maybe add a link to 'cached' in addition to 'web'? You could either do your own caching when the link is submitted, or use a service. The link will be useful immediately if the site goes down over load, and keeping an archive will keep the comments comprehensible for future readers if/when the link erodes.

I really like this idea from a historical preservation perspective. HN comments contain a lot of a value in aggregate, and it would be a shame to lose necessary context to exploit this value due to simple link-rot. However, I can see issues arising with paywalled links. The HN cache would likely display a rather useless paywall for many of the most popular stories. Navigating around the paywall by technical means may…

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.

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

#82

Post by dang »

nkurz wrote: post #78

Maybe add a link to 'cached' in addition to 'web'? You could either do your own caching when the link is submitted, or use a service. The link will be useful immediately if the site goes down over load, and keeping an archive will keep the comments comprehensible for future readers if/when the link erodes.

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 didn't speed up moderation and it is one of those problems that turns out to be increasingly nontrivial the closer you get.

If we did anything like it again, I'd still hope to share it with everybody, but perhaps not by adding a third link. I already feel bad for adding two.

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

#84

Post by dredmorbius »

dang wrote: post #82
nkurz wrote: post #78

Maybe add a link to 'cached' in addition to 'web'? You could either do your own caching when the link is submitted, or use a service. The link will be useful immediately if the site goes down over load, and keeping an archive will keep the comments comprehensible for future readers if/when the link erodes.

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 really, it would be helpful.

Otherwise: Internet Archive and Coral Cache are both existing systems which can and do cache some content, on request. IA seems to like having hot stuff fed them, CC have been quite spotty in reliability over the past year or two (both not properly caching content, and simply not responding).

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

#85

Post by dredmorbius »

burkemw3 wrote: post #81
jkimmel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like this idea from a historical preservation perspective. HN comments contain a lot of a value in aggregate, and it would be a shame to lose necessary context to exploit this value due to simple link-rot. However, I can see issues arising with paywalled links. The HN cache would likely display a rather useless paywall for many of the most popular stories. Navigating around the paywall by technical means may…

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.

This would be an excellent start IMO.

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

#87

Post by grmarcil »

grecy wrote: post #30

Any chance we can have collapsible comments without a greasemonkey script, or bookmarklet?

This is an absolutely bare-bones feature for HN. It would make the site so much more usable in general. The big case for collapsible comments relative to HN is stories where the top voted comment is only semi-related to the article (usual suspects being security, software freedom, political leaning freedom, ...) but spawns its own megathread and drowns out any hope of other discussions more germane to the original post.

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

#88

Post by dredmorbius »

koala_advert wrote: post #48
grecy wrote: post #30

Any chance we can have collapsible comments without a greasemonkey script, or bookmarklet?

This seems to be the most obvious thing they're missing. I can't stand trying to read through HN comments without a greasemonkey script.

Quite this.

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

#89

Post by dredmorbius »

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 realise this gets complicated, but showing some level of stats for domains could also be interesting. Possibly:

● Submissions

● FP/Submissions ratio

● Most recent submission

● Submissions/interval (day, month, year).

● Ratings and comments scores -- what sites typically get high discussion and/or high comments?

Might want to trial some of this internally. But I'm sure the data itself would be fascinating.

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

#90

Post by dredmorbius »

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 (…

Some way of aggregating the stories and their votes would help. Almost certainly manually. But a way of tagging and linking similar submissions under a single link, with grouped votes and comments.

One thing I've appreciated about Ello is that its re-shares of posts aggregate activity rather than divide it. In terms of increasing apparent activity, it's a tremendously useful feature.

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