Comment by dang
10 years ago
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!
How about grouping stories covering the same current event/topic and ranking them by an aggregate score? This would keep the front page clean while also giving the event/topic a more appropriate rank (i.e. one higher listing rather than 2 or 3 separate lower ones).
or perhaps:
Groupings would be created on-demand by the editors in response to user flags.
Within the group you could list the links in order of their individual scores. The title of the group could come from the highest ranked or could be manually chosen by editors. You could have separate comments pages, but also a group comment page which is just the union of all the comments.
Later you could take this a step further and include historical posts in the list, thus avoiding redundant comment streams (but only use new votes and new comments for ranking the group -- it has to freshly earn any reappearance on the front page).
If and or when they add thread folding, folding for the story links themselves might be a logical extension of that. You could have the top ranked story and under the fold the last, say, five related.
The discussions could likely be put on one page as well, allowing you to reference to the other articles without having to add links to other similar articles or other comment threads. That'd be pretty cool.
I think this is a great idea; you just put a "group" flag that we can click on new stories, and the context should be enough to know which submissions to group. Limiting them only to new also avoids the urge to just group all resubmissions, create ongoing topic threads, etc.
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.
I also experienced this. I believe it's due to the fact that I phrase my questions differently from how I phrase my searches. :)
What about this for a sketch of an idea:
Give us the ability to cite 'other sources' for the same story (ideally it should be smart enough to dereference other HN submissions if that's passed in). Then mods can, if they so desire, merge comments from separate discussions into one pool.
Finally, for the alternate links, you could consider allowing users to vote the best source. I say 'consider' because I'm a bit iffy as to how it might work out. I don't remember any significant controversy over which story was best and mod rule might be for the best. There are also issues with how you score a poll when some options may not have existed during any given vote and HN tends to use approval voting in polls.
I think a small bibliography type feature would be interesting. so, a story on topic X hits the front page. instead of killing the next 5 stories on topic X, find a way to cite 2-5 as bibliography on topic X.
Point is, the first story on topic X has a random element. killing all other stories leads to monoculture.
legitimate issue is having 5 / 30 front page stories be topic X drowns out other discussion. solution is to have the bibliography become deeper...rather than spam the front page with the bilbiolgraphy-type stories.
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.