6 ms·

Ask HN: automate submission from popular sources?

• RossM 18y ago
  True, TechCrunch is another of the always-submitted sites here. It wouldn't be too hard to setup a script to automatically post to HN whenever the RSS feed is updated, so this could be done for a special user. Personally, I'm not as bothered about karma on here as I am on other communities - I'm much more of a reader than a contributor - and I agree with your comment on finding "unknown writers". The more obscure articles are what I use HN for at the end of the day.
• nanijoe 18y ago
  How will your 'automator' determine what stories are interesting?
  • davidw 18y ago
    (Apologies, I accidentally clicked the down arrow - hopefully someone will rectify that) Pretty much everything from certain sites gets submitted anyway, so it ends up being votes that determine what is of interest.
  • mattjung 18y ago
    That remains the task of the readers by voting up articles they like. The automator just automatically submits posts from pre-defined sources (RSS-feeds). The idea is to give an incentive to find interesting stuff "outside the main-stream" instead having a competition who is the first to submit the newest PG-Essay...
  • bdfh42 18y ago
    I feel that a plan such as that proposed would just increase the "noise" level on the site while doing little to add to the overall quality of the content - indeed it could just have a negative impact. I am guilty (if that's the word) of posting the odd Seth Godin item but I am pretty selective about the ones I post. From time to time Seth's blogs can sound like they came out of a fortune cookie and then along comes an absolute corker with direct relevance to HN. Blindly posting them all would just add to the (rapidly growing) stream of new stories that are not going to get any up-votes - adding yet more noise and making the signal just that little bit weaker.
    • davidw 18y ago
      I guess to really get a good idea, you'd have to take a survey like this: * Look at all the posts from site X in the past, say, 3 months. * See how many have been posted to HN * See how many of those got votes. If the percentage is small, then adding the site automatically would generate noise. If, on the other hand, the site is paulgraham.com, they all get submitted and they all get tons of votes, so it would make sense to automate it.
• wheels 18y ago
  Karma can't be traded in for anything in the real world. Contrary to urban legend, Paul Graham does not make you a sandwich (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129). So it seems a little silly to get bent out of shape over who's getting lots of karma by submitting things. More problematic seems that people are submitting stories to get karma rather than because they think they're interesting. That seems a dangerous trend. Perhaps the solution would be to nullify karma gains on such "obvious" sites. However, what would suit me more would be if things were adjusted inversely to their PageRank -- meaning less stories from CNN, New York Times, BBC and so on, but things that are a little further out would be ranked better.
  • davidw 18y ago
    Karma, above a certain level, is primarily an indication of who wastes too much time on this site!
    • swombat 18y ago
      6. davidw 8356 Irony? We've heard of it :-)
      • DanielBMarkham 18y ago
        This is probably an example of the old George Carlin joke about driving: everybody that drives slower than you is a idiot, and everyone that drives faster than you is a maniac. I'm perplexed -- a top ten karma person posting that having high karma is a sign you spend too much time on the site. Do I upvote that? Sets off a recursion alert. As for "does karma matter" -- if it didn't matter, we wouldn't have it, sandwich or no. Study after study has shown that if you give people arbitrary rewards, they'll work to gain them. Perhaps there is a lesson in there for startups, no?
        • davidw 18y ago
          I kind of liked the idea of getting rid of the 'leaderboard' and only showing 'karma' for comments... where it is sort of useful for pointing out 'hey, this is a good comment!'. Either that, or, yeah, introducing 'real world rewards' for it;-)
• DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  Perhaps instead of automatically submitting them (which would just increase the firehose nature of the "new" page) whoever submits them the first time simply makes the articles active. This will encourage people to find more rare articles. For me, I like articles from joe the blogger, since I'm that guy. If I wanted Seth, 37Signals, or some such I'd just subscribe to their site (which I don't). I get the same signal-noise ratio from them as from the average blog post that has been upvoted several times. Perhaps better.
  • RossM 18y ago
    That's how I feel. I almost wish there were some sort of filter to allow me to filter out Joel, Jeff, 37Signals, TehCrunch etc. from the RSS feed (I prefer to pick and choose from 50 items I haven't seen before). I get around this at the moment because I know I need to read the blogs folder, then TC and then the HN feed, then I can recognise title's I've just read. I could, in theory, not subscribe to those blogs but I don't know if everything is going to get submitted to HN.
• swombat 18y ago
  I'd vote against this. I don't think the fact that some people gain karma by being the first to post popular articles is so terrible a thing that it should be offset by auto-submiting all that stuff. Most of what 37signals post is trash, anyway... one-liners and quotes that really don't belong here. If you really want to deal with the "karma problem", then make submissions from those sources karma-free - i.e. they don't influence the submitter's karma. But since I don't think that there is actually a "karma problem", I think this is a non-issue and not worth dealing with.