Yes, I saw. But I'd never seen it before, found it to be fascinating reading, and there hadn't been a submission in months, so I thought I'd share it again. Evergreen!
Reposts are fine within reason. This one is a classic hack with a lot of
history and you reposted a great write-ups of it, but dupes create
unnecessary clean-up work for the admins/mods/editors. The general,
unwritten rule is if a story has been posted within the last year and it
received 15 or more points, duplicate submissions of the story will get
deleted.
Can you provide a cite for the unwritten rule (e.g. 15 points)? Just want to know what expectations are and how they are grounded. I couldn't find any relevant cites or discussion with a search. The FAQ entry sounds like a moderator policy, not a submitter guideline.
Also, I'm curious what work gets created by such dupes (presuming they're moderately low-volume). The vast majority of submissions go quietly to the 1-point grave, it looks like to me; as such, it would seem like there's little to no moderation problem with (some moderate load of) reposts that people have no interest in.
And if people are interested, presumably it's new to them? Not sure why their votes would be less relevant than votes for novel content of similar net interest. IMO, existing dedup'ing and moderating discretion is probably sufficient to keep things clean.
If anything, it would seem like HN should merge dup'ed submissions (so we don't have comments across a dozen different entries) while resetting the time to give them a new shot at the front page. And if people care about Internet Points, figuring out a way to share the karma.
Unofficially defining "significant attention" from the above quoted FAQ
entry as _currently_ being "more than 15 points or more than 5
comments" (and posted within the last year) was told to me by email. If
you absolutely need official confirmation, then you'll need to email
our fearless HN dev/admin Daniel (hn {at} ycombinator {dot} com) as
requested in the site Guidelines.
The rule is unwritten for a reason; it may change without notice, and it
most likely will change eventually. As HN grows and changes, both the HN
forum software and people who run HN try to adjust accordingly.
It's difficult to show the work involved with keeping HN clean, since
any details posted would just be abused to game the system. By default,
killed comments and stories are hidden, so you'd need to turn on
"showdead" in your HN profile to even see the junk. Since the junk is
hidden, it's are not indexed by search engines, and hence, it can't be
found with common search engines. The associated Algolia HN Search
powering the search box on the bottom of most HN pages also deletes the
junk, eventually, even though it might initially index and show it for a
short time.
The "News-To-Me" and related "Nobody-Noticed" problems turn out to be
horrendously difficult when you ponder them in depth. Every discussion
system is subject to attempts to game the system. Some attempt to gain
magic imaginary Internet points, or improve their reputation, or promote
of their content and comments. Others try to suppress and demote bad
news, or technologies they don't like. There are rings, bots, and
similar user clusters using voting, flagging and submitting in attempts
to manipulate results.
Merging all of the related submission links into the active submission
on a general "story" topic (e.g. all of the recent Pluto related news
stories) has been mentioned numerous times, but it is far more difficult
than it seems at first glance. A blogspam link to a Pluto story should
definitely not be merged with links to stories from NASA, BBC, NYT, and
other original and reputable sources. Your idea of "merge and share the
imaginary Internet point rewards" would unfortunately fail. Abusive
people would game it immediately. Also, it would be a ton of mostly
manual work sifting the good from the crud, and dealing with the usual
complaints.
No. I've never bothered to automate it. Though I did run a query on Algolia HN Search, most of the above list comes from an old comment by ColinWright:
As far as I know, Colin does/did have some form of scripting to generate dupe/related lists.
BTW, the Algolia "experimental" interface is easier since it allows you to shut off the annoying thumbnail image loading. You can enable the "experimental" interface through the "settings" link at the bottom of the page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203676
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213056
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419166
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=573912
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896092
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599635
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332793
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115168
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3259199
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4526609
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519365