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Normally it's not a bad thing to have a discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussi
by jamesbritt 15y ago
Normally it's not a bad thing to have a discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread.
Similar to this is when the same event is reported by different sites, each of which gets submitted. We end up with essentially the same discussion happening in multiple places.
Ideally there would be some magical way to have all these posts direct to a canonical discussion, but in practice it seems this requires human intervention.
In the meantime perhaps the best action is to flag the late-comer posts and post a discussion link to an existing thread.
- tyre 15y agoNot necessarily. Google's news aggregation has gotten pretty good at grouping numerous stories on the same subject together. It doesn't always get things right, but helps to reduce the clutter.
- billpatrianakos 15y agoRight, while this is technically possible (and really, anything is technically possible when it comes to programming) I'm not sure if PG and whoever else maintains the site have the time, energy, and resources to set up such a system. I'm not sure what it would really take but I assume it'd be quite a bit of work to put it conservatively. The way things are run now are, in some ways, base on a compromise between the site maintainers and the users. It's as if to say "We'll manually intervene on occasion if everyone promises to play nice". Once you have to start implementing the kind of automatic quality controls we're talking about here programmatically instead of relying n good behavior, that's when you know the community just lost the quality it was known for.
- blahedo 15y ago> Ideally there would be some magical way to have all these posts direct to a canonical discussion, but in practice it seems this requires human intervention. Some, but just to flag the duplication; how to process the dup is a matter of policy and could be largely automated once the humans had annotated it. Some ideas in that vein: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1975950 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1975950
- raphman 15y agoActually, I find it most annoying if the link to a original source gets less upvotes/discussion than a rehash of the same story from a popular news site. Therefore, a link to the original source of a story should never be seen as a dupe, even if it is a late-comer.