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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

• Dylan16807 3y ago
  > This submission was just a comment, is what I mean. It wasn't really an HN story. Why not? "Apple backs X standard" sounds like enough for an HN story to me. > 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. It happens often enough. Lots of news articles talk about multiple things. Sometimes you even get multiple unrelated stories in the same article. Isolating one story shouldn't be a weird thing. You didn't reply to my question of "what if you could only link a domain" but I think that comparison is important. Sometimes URLs aren't granular enough. > Playing logic games I'm not playing logic games. > Like, you have to demonstrate interestingness not just claim it. That's what voting is for. But first is has to be a submission, and also people are supposed to be able to get a hint of what's interesting from the title. > my claim to interestingness in someone else's uninteresting thing is so important, it deserves its own title. It's a serious special pleading Again, the "entire domain" thing. Finding an interesting thing inside an uninteresting thing that deserves its own title happens constantly. The difference is that most of the time there's a URL you can use, but sometimes there isn't a URL you can use. > 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. The purest form is someone using a direct quote from the article, with no words of their own. Maybe they're even using a heading directly from the article. Then behind that is someone giving a very basic description for something that doesn't have its own title. Because article sections often don't have their own titles. In the former case they are completely objectively not making a "most important comment". In the latter case, they're doing the best they can, it's not like HN blocks submissions that don't have a preexisting title. > 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. And sometimes people submit tweets to HN. HN is supposed to be for anything interesting, no matter the length. The goal here is not to confuse comments and stories. "Here is a thing I found, here is what it is in a few words, nothing further." is something I would call a valid story.
  • pvg 3y ago
    Why not? "Apple backs X standard" sounds like enough for an HN story to me Every story sounds interesting to someone. Again, the burden of adding interestingness is on the author/poster. Could this supposed Apple support for some obscure standard most people haven't heard of be interesting? Sure. Is it interesting to merely state? No. Seems pretty straightforward. You didn't reply to my question of "what if you could only link a domain" I don't understand the question, I guess. The granularity of URLs happens to fit the granularity of HN stories. These things are connected and sometimes the granularity does get broken and the results are often iffy - e.g. posts of individual tweets, posts of random github issues, etc. Such posts are sometimes good but often bad because they don't actually form interesting stories that produce curious conversation. 'What if you could only link domains' just feels like a different version of 'what if HN was just twitter'. And, incidentally, HN does have conventions against certain types of 'domain' linking - if you link a domain that's a collection of things, it will get modded down and you'll be told to pick something from the collection and post that instead of the whole thing. I'm not playing logic games. I am! That's what voting is for. No, voting is just a part of that. There's a lot of convention/culture and there is very much a convention against letting people shape the conversation with their own gloss on other people's stuff. That's what commenting is for and what titling is not for. Finding an interesting thing inside an uninteresting thing that deserves its own title happens constantly. Well, you'll have to find some examples because the ones that come up are almost always of not-interesting things or interestingness special-pleadings. In the former case they are completely objectively not making a "most important comment". Of course they are, especially when they are selecting a non-representative part of the article which is quite a lot of the time - in fact, by the process you are describing, by definition. You don't get to tell other users what is important in an article that isn't yours from the privileged position of a title. You don't get to mega-comment, basically. This isn't some law of physics or the only way to run a messageboard but it's hardly some unreasonable mystery of HN. Lots of subreddits and other forums operate similarly, for similar reasons. And sometimes people submit tweets to HN. HN is supposed to be for anything interesting, no matter the length. Well, not so sure about no matter the length and people do submit tweets to HN and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't, I touched on this above. They're the wrong granularity, there are titling problems, dupeyness problems (there are infinite tweets about the same thing), etc. Tweets do kind of break the classic 'link aggregator' design assumptions. That's not the fault of tweets or the tweeters or the posters of tweets to HN but it's definitely a thing. "Here is a thing I found, here is what it is in a few words, nothing further. Link the thing, add your comment.