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Ask HN: HN Dups, Randomness, Herding, ETC
Curious if anyone has anyone has any thoughts of if there's a better way to manage HN submissions.
For example, there are a lot of duplicate submissions, users tend to herd around top submissions, etc.
One thought is that randomly users are presented with a mix of new and top stories and requested to say if each story is new or a top story.
- Tomte 10y agoI think you're confused about what "new" means in HN submissions. Asking people is unnecessary. The software knows when the story was submitted.
- saycheese 10y agoNot confused. Saying that new/top adds bias - that a blind sampling would help solve. Reference to dups provides proof that "top" stories are being missed, since one dup might have 100+ upvotes, while another will have just a few upvotes and no comment saying it's a dup; meaning to me the only difference is the volume of comments/votes between the two. Beyond that, I've seen research that shows seeding a submission with even just a few comments/upvotes greatly increases the odds of future traction. Point is to reduce noise to signal ratio.
- Tomte 10y ago"New" is simply decided by an unambiguous timestamp. You want to ask users if a story is new, so that they check a timestamp manually and maybe even report correctly? That's inane.