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parent deleted the post, presumably because it was downvoted. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RiderOfGiraffes http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RiderOfGi
by user24 16y ago
parent deleted the post, presumably because it was downvoted.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RiderOfGiraffes http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RiderOfGiraffes
Wrote:
"Same story submitted three days ago and ignored", with a link to their own submission.
My reply:
One of the benefits of relying on crowdsourcing for quality judgements (i.e. using people to determine what content goes on your site), is that by and large the system takes care of itself - good stuff generally floats upwards and bad stuff generally floats downwards. The advantage of this is that the system can respond to current events much much more quickly than any kind of curated medium. Many stories are 'broken' in places like hackernews and reddit long before mainstream media catch the story.
One of the downsides is that the system does have a fair dose of randomness. A story with 50 votes is not necessarily worth half a story with 100 votes. Likewise, some stories will get missed - perhaps the right people weren't looking at the new queue when it was submitted, or perhaps another high-profile story was taking up people's attention.
This is the tradeoff you make; increased reaction time for reduced recall. I.e. hackernews and sites like it feature fresher content with the drawback that some stories don't make it.
Fortunately, this system takes care of the drawback by virtue of the fact that if an important story is somehow missed, the chances are it will be submitted again by a different user and have another chance to rise.
Which is exactly what happened here. The system works, it self-corrected the omission of this story. How cool is that!
- michael_dorfman 16y agoWhich is exactly what happened here. The system works, And one of important parts of that system is RiderOfGiraffes letting us know when the dupe-filter has failed, and pointing us to previous discussions, when they exist. It's an amazing service he provides. Seriously, take a look: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=RiderOfGiraffes http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=RiderOfGiraffes
- user24 16y agoYeah, I did take a look... I felt that it added nothing to the conversation. What's the problem with dupes? 2 sets of insightful conversations instead of one? So? Obviously if more than a few dupe stories get through then that's something to be solved technically. But one or two dupe stories on the homepage now and then? So? Compare with a huge history of comments saying nothing other than "this is a dupe [link]". especially when the link has no comments attached to it. edit: example on an "A humble programmer" submission they wrote this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1895032 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1895032 linking to ten other submissions of the same article, none of which had any interesting comments, and all of which had exactly the same content for the link. What's the point in that? I can totally see the point in saying "there's some interesting discussion over here [link]", but it seems mostly his efforts to de-dupe add nothing of value.
- michael_dorfman 16y agoBut one or two dupe stories on the homepage now and then? I think you're underestimating the scale of the problem. Anyway: I, for one, greatly appreciate the work RiderOfGiraffes does for us in this regard.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoSimilar to a bead in an electric field, reversing entropy to climb up an energy hill through the magic of information. I guess that makes us all Daemons?