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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.