

HN Suggestion: Give editors the ability to turn Posts into Comments - AndrewDucker

Let's say someone posts a new bit of news "Sun won't let you write JVM apps in Closure any more." That's fine - it's a new bit of news that nobody has heard before.  There's space for that on HN.<p>However, some people then get really frustrated because there are thirty follow-up posts because Joel Spolsky has a post on that subject, and Daring Fireball has a post on that subject, and so do 28 people you've never heard of, but other people think that their posts are interesting enough to submit, and some people are so incensed about this that they're voting them all up.<p>So - here's a suggest solution.  Let editors move these new posts so that they're comment threads under the original article.  So far as I can tell comments are basically posts that have no parent - so there's no reason why they couldn't have one assigned.  Doing this could bump the original article back up the charts - but at least there'd only be one article for people to ignore.<p>The only problem I can think of there is that some over-zealous mods might move things that didn't actually need to be moved.  But that'd be an argument for the comments :-&#62;
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Rust
One possible partial solution would be for HN to check submitted URLs for
"majority matches" (say, 90% similar) and a check against submission titles
over the last 48 hours, then offer the submitter an option to simply up-vote
an existing story instead of submitting a brand new duplicate. If submitted
pages were also scraped for headings and keywords, that could be used to
provide similar matches as well.

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whimsy
The problem proposed is not duplicates (i.e. 3 of the same story from Daring
Fireball) but multiple writers on the same topic. URL matching would fail to
identify these.

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Rust
True enough, but that's what title matching and content scraping are for.

There would still be a percentage of misses (and false positives), but with
the end decision to up-vote an existing, similar article or submit a new one
left in the hands of the submitter, I think it's a reasonable feature.

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whimsy
Content scraping introduces a much higher load than mere URL regex magic...

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Rust
No question about that. It's one of those "do it if we can" features.

One could have a "light" version that just scraped the target page for header
tags alone though. That might be a good compromise.

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jknupp
It's funny: I never really noticed this as a problem except in the past two
weeks or so. April Fools' Day, the iPad release, and Apple changing it's TOS
has created the perfect storm of "categorical dupes". Do you think this is a
trend likely to continue, or merely a somewhat frustrating blip on the
submission style radar?

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AndrewDucker
I don't know. I've just seen people complaining about this a lot recently, so
when I thought of a possible solution I thought I'd throw it out there.

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Aron
I'm surprised there isn't a Google API or existing service somewhere for this.
Google aggregates their news links already.

I would start with just informing the link submitter of the similarity measure
to other URLs, and give them the responsibility of deciding what to do.

