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1 day ago, 3 days ago... there is a serious problem with the short attention span of HN. No sensible forum should split threads like that. Some interesting disc

by dTal 9y ago

1 day ago, 3 days ago... there is a serious problem with the short attention span of HN. No sensible forum should split threads like that. Some interesting discussions take longer than a day to execute, and there is no reason why a thread could not be alive for years, but HN actively discourages it - there is no interface for discovery besides the novelty firehose of frontpage+new, and voting is forbidden after a certain age (possibly replying? I've never tried).

ColinWright 9y ago
I see this as an inevitable consequence of several deliberate design features. It's a link-sharing site, and people get karma for popular links. The votes serve to make the items rise on the front page, getting more votes, hence more karma. So people will rush to be first, and there is no serious mechanism to check whether the same story, or even the nearly exact same link has been submitted before. But anything more sophisticated will be more complex, harder to understand, more fragile, and possibly less popular. It's not hard to see several things that might make it better, but it's uncertain, more work, and guaranteed to make the system less transparent. <fx: shrug /> To some extent it is what it is. But FWIW, I agree.
- cheschire 9y ago
  Reddit does a simple link comparison to see if the article has been submitted before, which does limit the double-posts, however some people then intentionally subvert the process by running the link through a processor like outline.com or archive.is, or simply finding alternate articles from other sources. This is unfortunate as the thing I really want to see is an in-depth conversation about a topic more than an individual article.
  - jwilk 9y ago
    HN does that too.
dang 9y ago
It's not all that common that threads get split like that, and we often merge them when they do (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=%22comments%20moved%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme..., https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20merged https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). As for attention span, threads often go for longer than a day but rarely go for longer than a few days. That's just how the community behaves and if, as I assume, it's true of internet forums generally, there's little to be done about it.

by dTal 9y ago

ColinWright 9y ago

I see this as an inevitable consequence of several deliberate design features. It's a link-sharing site, and people get karma for popular links. The votes serve to make the items rise on the front page, getting more votes, hence more karma. So people will rush to be first, and there is no serious mechanism to check whether the same story, or even the nearly exact same link has been submitted before. But anything more sophisticated will be more complex, harder to understand, more fragile, and possibly less popular. It's not hard to see several things that might make it better, but it's uncertain, more work, and guaranteed to make the system less transparent. <fx: shrug /> To some extent it is what it is. But FWIW, I agree.

cheschire 9y ago
Reddit does a simple link comparison to see if the article has been submitted before, which does limit the double-posts, however some people then intentionally subvert the process by running the link through a processor like outline.com or archive.is, or simply finding alternate articles from other sources. This is unfortunate as the thing I really want to see is an in-depth conversation about a topic more than an individual article.
- jwilk 9y ago
  HN does that too.

dang 9y ago

It's not all that common that threads get split like that, and we often merge them when they do (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=%22comments%20moved%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme..., https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20merged https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). As for attention span, threads often go for longer than a day but rarely go for longer than a few days. That's just how the community behaves and if, as I assume, it's true of internet forums generally, there's little to be done about it.