

Why is Hacker News only about "news" and implemented as such? - amichail

Some submissions are interesting for a long time (e.g., decades), yet Hacker News and other social news sites select submissions for the front page based on their newsworthiness.<p>For submissions that are interesting for a long time, there should be a way to show them on the front page for a long time to some fraction of users.<p>Ranking on the front page would be (partially) based on recent scores for submissions. Users could hide a submission once they are no longer interested in it.<p>Why don't social news sites do something like that?
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gdl
That's what social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) are for. When I make
the choice to come to a news site I'd rather see news, or at least current
discussion relating to a "classic" link. If I instead see a bunch of old links
without any active discussion attached, I'm quickly going to find another
place to get my news.

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amichail
Why wouldn't the old links have an active discussion? Perhaps not as active as
the news, but still active.

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mechanical_fish
New comments have to compete with old ones on the page. Once a page hits one
million words it is pretty much done, unless there's a mechanism by which it
gets edited, condensed, summarized, or updated.

One technique that has been tried is giving every visitor the power to edit,
summarize, or update the entire page. That's the Wikipedia model. But, of
course, you lose the history of the conversation [1], and the individual
voices, and you're subject to the editorial whims of whoever happens by.

Another idea is to keep the content in the form of discrete comments but allow
visitors to _rearrange_ the comments. That's kind of how Stack Overflow works.
The HN voting system also serves to rearrange comments on the page. These
things are kind of indirect, though, and they do nothing to deal with the
volume problem. Words take time to read; you have to cut down the supply
somehow, and that inevitably requires some rewriting as well as cherry-
picking.

Or you could just periodically archive the discussion and start it over with a
fresh page, ending up with a series of discussions, each lasting only a day or
two, but possibly related to or built on predecessor discussions that stretch
back into history. This is pretty much how HN works.

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[1] Yeah, there are edit logs. Most people don't read those for fun. Most of
the events in an edit log are tedious and unenlightening, like reading raw
Postscript source.

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retroafroman
HN content hasn't been purely news in my experience, there is a lot of
interesting content that is submitted that isn't new, nor does it fit it in
the "news" category. Many well thought, well written essays end up on the
front page and recieve many upvotes, even if they were written years ago.

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amichail
Yes, but HN is implemented for news and doesn't handle submissions of long
term interest properly.

Moreover, the name "Hacker News" encourages mostly news submissions.

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dholowiski
Build it!

