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A huge chunk of HN stuff is blog posts. Plus if there's nothing to say about the thing than isn't more than a messageboard comment then there's not much reason

by pvg 3y ago

A huge chunk of HN stuff is blog posts. Plus if there's nothing to say about the thing than isn't more than a messageboard comment then there's not much reason it shouldn't just be a messageboard comment. It's definitely less 'effective' at dominating the discussion with a single comment but that's more or less the point.

Dylan16807 3y ago
A huge chunk of HN stuff is substantial blog posts talking about their own things. Things get called blogspam all the time, and a three sentence post linking to a video will definitely get called blogspam. And the goal isn't to "dominate the discussion". Nobody else wants to submit this video. Nobody is being shouted over. The goal is to start a discussion about a specific thing, and making a comment on an otherwise boring link is not actually very good at starting a discussion.
- pvg 3y ago
  The thing has to be interesting/substantial/big enough to carry a discussion. That's pretty much the functional difference between a comment and an HN story. 'Every comment should be allowed to also be a story' doesn't seem like a practical way to have a site that distinguishes between stories and comments.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Big enough to carry a discussion doesn't mean you have an entire blog post ready to write all by yourself. In general my complaint is that it's hard to link to a specific section or piece of information inside a larger article. So letting comments become stories willy-nilly is not my suggestion. This is about having an external story, but no good way to point at it. And a submission like this can't just be a comment because there's no story for it to be a comment on. The video would not otherwise have been submitted. And yes the option of "submission plus comment" exists but again that's a bad way to start a discussion when the submission has nothing obviously interesting about it. And it makes the experience even worse for someone that tries to read/watch the entire submission before looking at the comments, when most of the submission is pretty boring and the submitter only wanted to submit one portion.
    - pvg 3y ago
      I mean, this is all very theoretical so perhaps you can come up with an example of something that would be a good story but isn't actually just a comment. Because this submission? Just a comment. Nearly all of them are and primarily revolve not around the difficulty of linking some subsection of a story but around the importance the poster assigns to their commentary. when the submission has nothing obviously interesting Again, the argument here is 'what I have to say about an uninteresting thing is interesting enough to be its own HN story'. You can see how this is tricky, right? Like, the point of the site is not uninteresting things. The trivial solution is 'find something interesting to post'.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        > Because this submission? Just a comment. A comment on what submission? > Like, the point of the site is not uninteresting things. The trivial solution is 'find something interesting to post'. Sometimes interesting things are inside larger uninteresting things. Imagine if you could only link to a domain. Half the submissions people make would become far more difficult to make. > Again, the argument here is 'what I have to say about an uninteresting thing is interesting enough to be its own HN story'. It's not. The argument is "this section is interesting enough to be a submission, but it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to find it in this large article/video". The pure form of this has no commentary, just linking to a very very specific part. This exact submission isn't the purest example since it's more of a caption, but I've seen many pure examples where someone wants to submit a specific section without even a single word of extra explanation. The kind of thing you could do with text fragment links but only in some browsers and only for text.
        pvg 3y ago
        A comment on what submission? This submission was just a comment, is what I mean. It wasn't really an HN story. Sometimes interesting things are inside larger uninteresting things. Sure but those are almost never interesting enough to be HN stories. There are ways to turn them into HN stories but that's done by adding interestingness. Playing logic games about what is and isn't a comment really isn't adding interestingness, it's simply claiming one can rule-lawyer one's way to interestingness and it seems sort of obvious one can't? It's not. The argument is "this section is interesting enough to be a submission, but it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to find it in this large article/video". Well, it is, because those things are rarely actually interesting. Like, you have to demonstrate interestingness not just claim it. And this practice is effectively elevating a claim - my claim to interestingness in someone else's uninteresting thing is so important, it deserves its own title. It's a serious special pleading and you could make the case for it with examples but as far as I can tell, there aren't many or any. The pure form of this has no commentary I'm not sure what the 'pure form' is, we're talking about people making up their own titles, i.e. turning their comment into the most important comment. Incidentally, there is a site dedicated to not-having a distinction between 'comment' and 'story' and the exchange of snippets of things - twitter. It works pretty well for that use case.

by pvg 3y ago

Dylan16807 3y ago

A huge chunk of HN stuff is substantial blog posts talking about their own things. Things get called blogspam all the time, and a three sentence post linking to a video will definitely get called blogspam. And the goal isn't to "dominate the discussion". Nobody else wants to submit this video. Nobody is being shouted over. The goal is to start a discussion about a specific thing, and making a comment on an otherwise boring link is not actually very good at starting a discussion.

pvg 3y ago
The thing has to be interesting/substantial/big enough to carry a discussion. That's pretty much the functional difference between a comment and an HN story. 'Every comment should be allowed to also be a story' doesn't seem like a practical way to have a site that distinguishes between stories and comments.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  Big enough to carry a discussion doesn't mean you have an entire blog post ready to write all by yourself. In general my complaint is that it's hard to link to a specific section or piece of information inside a larger article. So letting comments become stories willy-nilly is not my suggestion. This is about having an external story, but no good way to point at it. And a submission like this can't just be a comment because there's no story for it to be a comment on. The video would not otherwise have been submitted. And yes the option of "submission plus comment" exists but again that's a bad way to start a discussion when the submission has nothing obviously interesting about it. And it makes the experience even worse for someone that tries to read/watch the entire submission before looking at the comments, when most of the submission is pretty boring and the submitter only wanted to submit one portion.
  - pvg 3y ago
    I mean, this is all very theoretical so perhaps you can come up with an example of something that would be a good story but isn't actually just a comment. Because this submission? Just a comment. Nearly all of them are and primarily revolve not around the difficulty of linking some subsection of a story but around the importance the poster assigns to their commentary. when the submission has nothing obviously interesting Again, the argument here is 'what I have to say about an uninteresting thing is interesting enough to be its own HN story'. You can see how this is tricky, right? Like, the point of the site is not uninteresting things. The trivial solution is 'find something interesting to post'.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > Because this submission? Just a comment. A comment on what submission? > Like, the point of the site is not uninteresting things. The trivial solution is 'find something interesting to post'. Sometimes interesting things are inside larger uninteresting things. Imagine if you could only link to a domain. Half the submissions people make would become far more difficult to make. > Again, the argument here is 'what I have to say about an uninteresting thing is interesting enough to be its own HN story'. It's not. The argument is "this section is interesting enough to be a submission, but it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to find it in this large article/video". The pure form of this has no commentary, just linking to a very very specific part. This exact submission isn't the purest example since it's more of a caption, but I've seen many pure examples where someone wants to submit a specific section without even a single word of extra explanation. The kind of thing you could do with text fragment links but only in some browsers and only for text.
      - pvg 3y ago
        A comment on what submission? This submission was just a comment, is what I mean. It wasn't really an HN story. Sometimes interesting things are inside larger uninteresting things. Sure but those are almost never interesting enough to be HN stories. There are ways to turn them into HN stories but that's done by adding interestingness. Playing logic games about what is and isn't a comment really isn't adding interestingness, it's simply claiming one can rule-lawyer one's way to interestingness and it seems sort of obvious one can't? It's not. The argument is "this section is interesting enough to be a submission, but it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to find it in this large article/video". Well, it is, because those things are rarely actually interesting. Like, you have to demonstrate interestingness not just claim it. And this practice is effectively elevating a claim - my claim to interestingness in someone else's uninteresting thing is so important, it deserves its own title. It's a serious special pleading and you could make the case for it with examples but as far as I can tell, there aren't many or any. The pure form of this has no commentary I'm not sure what the 'pure form' is, we're talking about people making up their own titles, i.e. turning their comment into the most important comment. Incidentally, there is a site dedicated to not-having a distinction between 'comment' and 'story' and the exchange of snippets of things - twitter. It works pretty well for that use case.