Usually it's not a problem, because people only vote up the first version of a story. And when a dup does get upvoted, mods can just kill it. The Airbnb situation is unique because
(a) an angry mob is upvoting any story to do with this and
(b) we have to err on the side of not killing stories critical of YC or companies we've funded, or we get accused of censorship.
Fortunately the combination only occurs occasionally, so it's probably not something that needs a structural fix.
I don't see the respondents as an angry mob. Are you lumping edw519 in with those people?
You aren't applying Occam's razor. The simple explanation is that this is the most relevant HN story in recent memory. It involves a startup, it involves a YC company, it's one of the most valuable startups in the site owner's portfolio, it's an international print news story, it involves tragedy, and the outcome will make us all think about what it means to be a successful start up.
That's why the stories all have traction. It's a fantasy to think it's an irrational mob.
Edit: I should say I see neither the respondents nor the upvoters as an angry mob.
If you take a look at the front page of reddit you may change your mind about what Occam's Razor implies in this case. There is nothing more common than to find people reflexively upvoting stories about something they're agitated about.
which has no less than 275 points (so far), despite being a completely derivative article that adds no new information. People aren't upvoting it because of something they learned in it that engaged their intellectual curiosity.
That story originally carried a title like "AirBnB scandal makes front page of the Financial Times". I thought it was interesting from the perspective of "How does bad press about a startup spread and what are the effects of various ways of responding?" rather than "Let's keep piling on AirBnB." This is the first big YC crisis management story I can recall; it's not surprising other founders would want to learn from it.
Although it's correct that the article itself is completely derivative, the simple fact that the story is in the FT provides new information. The fact that this narrative can go mainstream is itself fascinating and new, and worth discussing.
Would that they were discussing the fact that it's in the mainstream media, but it seems that they're simply hashing over the same ground in the other items.
On the contrary, searching for "mainstream", "ft", "financial times", or "media" in the comments for the ft article suggests that people actually are discussing the fact that it is now in the mainstream media. It might not be the majority of the comments, but at least those subjects are broached in there, and much more so than in the other threads.
But regardless of whether people are discussing something new, my point is that the story reaching the broader media is an interesting information point in of itself. Whether HNers choose to discuss that in an intelligent manner is an entirely different thing.
That being said, like you, I am also bugged by the repetitive stories -- both in this instance and more generally. And although I think that sometimes multiple submissions are warranted and useful (when the story changes, or there are new sources, etc.), I think that often new threads add very little to the discussion.
I still love it here though. But I only lurk, so...
The original title for that submission was something to the effect of "AirBnB story now on the front page of the Financial times". It has been edited to be both more in lines with the traditional HN submission guidelines (i.e. the topic of the submission, no editorializing) and less representative of the actual point of interest.
This is a tragic story that many of us can relate to on both sides (as a homeowner and as a technologist/entrepreneur), for which the most current publicly-available information is completely contradictory. And unlike you we don't have the people who can give us the full story a phone call away. Can you really blame us for wanting to hear about all developments to this story until there is some kind of resolution?
Maybe its a design problem. Just now the first thing you see is the upvote link. People could be upvoting on the basis of the title (i dont, i always read the story then forget to go back and upvote if i like it). What if you put the upvote link for the story in the bottom right corner of the comments page. Then it's presented as something you act on after you've read the story/comments, which is how it should be acted on.
Indeed - and frequently when I point out that a submission is of a derivative article that adds no new information I get down-modded. As of today, I'm giving up, especially in the light of this poll.
I've learned something new and disquieting about the current HN - and I'm fairly sure this has changed. I seem to remember seeing an earlier poll on this, and I'll go look for it later when I'm more awake.
That seems to be true with the "blitz" of stories like the Airbnb ones, but at a more general level, a lot of duplicates seem to be occurring because there are lots of different subgroups now using HN at different times of the day.
For example, these are the same story but did well with similar karma and similar discussions, a week apart from each other:
I certainly visit HN far too much but I notice "repeat" stories like these frequently.
MetaFilter (which is certainly pretty resistant to change) ended up implementing an automatic search feature at the posting stage to highlight potential conflicts like these. It seems to work well (it's not enforced - it just makes users think first). Edit: Realized I should add I don't necessarily think this is a good idea for HN. Personally I'd prefer to see the per-page # of items go up a bit. A 50 item front page would better cope with the higher levels of FP items.
When the articles appear simultaneously it's obviously a pain to have discussion fragmented, but if they're appearing distinctly, is it such a bad thing if people are discovering something new?
I am fine with repeats, but I think a mechanism that detects "related" articles and providing links to previous/later discussions would be useful. I certainly would like to hear more of what people say if a topic or a specific article interests me.
I am not necessarily advocating that this should be a built-in feature; on the contrary, I think it would be more elegant as external feature and I think in that form it would be more useful, since this sounds like one of those problems where the general solution is easier than a particular solution
I think that's quite subjective. It may not be a bad thing! I just think it indicates fragmentation of the readership in a way that didn't used to occur. Perhaps this is a natural part of a community growing beyond a certain size.
That said, there was once a time when any new front page link was something I was sure not to have seen before. Now? Unless it's up to date news, I've seen perhaps 1 in 5 links on Twitter, Reddit, or even my own newsletters already. People are getting 3 week old JRuby release notes on the front page nowadays fer chrissakes..
I appreciate your candor on this, but I'm curious if you are implying two things: 1) you think that people interested in reading about Airbnb are behaving irrationally, and 2) people rarely get angry at YC companies?
I find the interaction between HN and YCombinator rather fascinating, because you obviously have a financial interest in many things posted on the site, but you also clearly feel some responsibility to play the neutral host. I wonder this responsibility comes from HN's value to YC as a barometer of trending ideas (requiring you to retain the faith of your userbase), or from some higher sense of "journalistic" obligations.
None of your points rule out my first implication, and I don't believe the logic for your second point was part of Paul's statement. Despite YC companies being a small part of the world economy (or whatever), they are disproportionately mentioned on HN for obvious reasons.
> 1) you think that people interested in reading about Airbnb are behaving irrationally
Every angry mob is irrational, even if there is a perfectly rational reason for their anger.
While concern about what has happened, is happening, should be happening (in various peoples opinions), and so forth is definitely rational as is an interest in watching it all play out (even if you don't care for airbnb at all specifically, this could possibly have implications elsewhere too).
People posting the same thing that others have already posted (or something so similar it makes no difference) and other people voting everything up whether it is a duplicate or not is irrational. It bends the system here potentially making the site less useful/interesting to others, it isn't going to change the situation, and the confusion of partial discussions spread over threads is going to put people off that might have otherwise cared about the situation (they'll stop reading any post about it, no matter how high up pages 1 it is, as they'll start to assume it is the same as last time).
lt;dr: the interest/concern is not irrational but some of the behaviour seeming steming from that is, so suggesting some people are behaving irrationally is not incorrect (IMO).
Then don't be bothered by the scare word and just do what's best for the site. People (especially internet commenters) don't really understand what "censorship" means and only really use it to whinge about not getting their way.
reddit's /r/politics mods recently decided to start moderating away the "does anything else think this thing that we all think? vote me up!" and all of the comments on that announcement were accusations of censorship. Nobody is trying to censor anyone, they just want to improve the content, but the people making the self-posts (or in the case of HN the anger porn) want their attention and think it's censorship when they aren't given it.
Considering the incentives that YCombinator has for hosting this site in the first place, you aren't going to be able to remove the need to be perceived as being reasonable in not killing bad news about YCombinator companies. This is just a cost the site will have to deal with; all the alternatives are worse for either the community or YCombinator.
I agree with the broad thrust of your post, actually, people do scream censorship at the drop of a hat when inappropriate, but however unfortunate the reality may be, it's best to let this exception through.
Also, I think there are two kinds of links, "original story" links, and "what are people saying" links. For example if you are for some reason genuinely interested in AirBnB as a business, both the original story AND what tech crunch are saying about it is potentially of interest, if you believe techcrunch is an influential source that can affect AirBnB's prospects.
As to the OP, I wish for what some of the open source bugzillas do - when you submit a bug on, say, cups printing with foo driver, the system does a search on those keywords and presents you with bugs that may be duplicate. I don't think that "forces" the user to do research, but assuming a well meaning user, which most of us are, it allows them to realize there is an ongoing discussion and join that.
The problem I haven't figured out is how you would implement this with the bookmarklet - the main site submission would be straighforward.
Clearly giving the whiners whatever they ask to make them shut up isn't good for the community. You teach them that whining gives them what they want, which will just make the whining worse because it becomes a successful tool.
There's an important distinction between "we don't negotiate with terrorists" and "we will never implement a worthwhile feature if it was requested in a disrespectful manner".
Take the Zed Shaw + dongml story [1]. Zed's behavior was silly, but the loophole needed to be closed regardless and so it was.
On the one hand (a) is probably right. On the other hand it is a story of technical interest to those of use who are not part of the "angry mob". For me I have voted up some of the stories because they contrast interestingly - the way, for example, the TC stories have contrasted to EJ's accounts are interesting.
And as an example of how "damage limitation" can bite you (fairly or otherwise) there are a lot of lessons here.
End of the day; this is a big story in this community and there are some key lessons here. I'd definitely vote up someone who could blog about it critically from a "things you could learn for your business" position.
> Usually it's not a problem, because people only vote up the first version of a story.
I'm not sure if this is actually false (i.e. people vote for multiple versions of the same story) or just practically false (i.e. people vote for the first version that they notice, and so multiple different ones bounce around the front page). But either way, it's pretty usual that there are dups of at least one story on the front page at any given time. Or, that today's front page has a dup of yesterday's front page story (rather than continuing discussion on the same submission).
How do you account for the same story about IE users having a low IQ having been submitted at least 5 times so far? Yes, most are sinking without trace, but it's still really annoying to see the same thing over and over again.
(a) an angry mob is upvoting any story to do with this and
(b) we have to err on the side of not killing stories critical of YC or companies we've funded, or we get accused of censorship.
Fortunately the combination only occurs occasionally, so it's probably not something that needs a structural fix.