Comment by eevilspock

10 years ago

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).

  6. SOPA making a comeback  	
    217 points | guardian.com 46 comments | eff.org 27 comments | motherboard.vice.com 13 comments

or perhaps:

  6. SOPA making a comeback  	
    217 points 76 comments
      SOPA Lives on for the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (www.eff.org)
      113 points by DiabloD3 2 hours ago | flag | 41 comments 
      Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo Claim MPAA Is Trying to Resurrect SOPA (www.theguardian.com)
      89 points by runesoerensen 3 hours ago | flag | 23 comments 
      An Undead SOPA Is Hiding Inside an Extremely Boring Case About Invisible Braces (motherboard.vice.com)  
      12 points by lizzard 15 minutes ago | flag | 12 comments  

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.