4 ms·

I came in this thread to say exactly this. The value of HN is the thoughtfulness and conscious submissions people make to this site. I'd hate to imagine what wo

by kaiuhl 15y ago

I came in this thread to say exactly this. The value of HN is the thoughtfulness and conscious submissions people make to this site. I'd hate to imagine what would appear here if people just had to click a button in between the +1 and the Facebook like to submit and upvote articles. It'd become a different version of Digg. Great idea, but this makes me scared.

benologist 15y ago
I'm not sure it would make much difference on submissions. People and bots submit articles indiscriminately from a number of sources within seconds of them hitting their RSS feed: http://jacquesmattheij.com/auto+submission+bots+on+Hacker+News http://jacquesmattheij.com/auto+submission+bots+on+Hacker+Ne... What it would do is give the large-trafficked sites a significant advantage since they can leverage their own traffic. You could see that on Digg years ago, the front page was largely devoted to a selection of sites - Engadget, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Ars etc.
- joelprocrast 15y ago
  I think jacquesm makes a really good point in his article (thanks for that link!). In the article, he explains how some incentives within HN are resulting in negative side-effects: > the race to post my stuff in order to harvest the associated karma got a little out of hand Points/upvotes on articles should not be allocated to the user who submits that article (unless perhaps, it's an "Ask HN" submission); points/upvotes should be allocated to users only on the comments they make. I agree with Jacques that this would improve the level of discourse on HN and also remove down-vote capability from those who have not earned it through quality comments. There are a number of ways to make this change: (i) points received from article submissions could be retroactively eliminated from a users score (ii) or separated out from points received on comments--possibly an interesting new data point, (iii) or the points could simply be associated with the root URL of the content source and then displayed on a new page as a list of "Top Ranked Content Sources"--this might also encourage less duplicates and an effort to find the best source before submitting a story... (iv) or maybe this is all just wishful thinking? edit: here is the associated HN discussion for that article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443

by kaiuhl 15y ago

benologist 15y ago

I'm not sure it would make much difference on submissions. People and bots submit articles indiscriminately from a number of sources within seconds of them hitting their RSS feed: http://jacquesmattheij.com/auto+submission+bots+on+Hacker+News http://jacquesmattheij.com/auto+submission+bots+on+Hacker+Ne... What it would do is give the large-trafficked sites a significant advantage since they can leverage their own traffic. You could see that on Digg years ago, the front page was largely devoted to a selection of sites - Engadget, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Ars etc.

joelprocrast 15y ago
I think jacquesm makes a really good point in his article (thanks for that link!). In the article, he explains how some incentives within HN are resulting in negative side-effects: > the race to post my stuff in order to harvest the associated karma got a little out of hand Points/upvotes on articles should not be allocated to the user who submits that article (unless perhaps, it's an "Ask HN" submission); points/upvotes should be allocated to users only on the comments they make. I agree with Jacques that this would improve the level of discourse on HN and also remove down-vote capability from those who have not earned it through quality comments. There are a number of ways to make this change: (i) points received from article submissions could be retroactively eliminated from a users score (ii) or separated out from points received on comments--possibly an interesting new data point, (iii) or the points could simply be associated with the root URL of the content source and then displayed on a new page as a list of "Top Ranked Content Sources"--this might also encourage less duplicates and an effort to find the best source before submitting a story... (iv) or maybe this is all just wishful thinking? edit: here is the associated HN discussion for that article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443