

Ask HN: automate submission from popular sources? - mattjung

I would like to put a proposition up for discussion: Lots of articles that raise interest on HN come from the same sources: 37signals, Seth Godin, Paul Graham, etc. The one who is the first to submit an article from such a popular source, gets a lot of Karma points for a safe bet. I think we should rather reward people that find interesting articles of quite unknown writers or from new sources. One way could be to automate submission of articles from popular sources. Opinions?
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wheels
Karma can't be traded in for anything in the real world. Contrary to urban
legend, Paul Graham does not make you a sandwich
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129>). So it seems a little silly to
get bent out of shape over who's getting lots of karma by submitting things.

More problematic seems that people are submitting stories to get karma rather
than because they think they're interesting. That seems a dangerous trend.
Perhaps the solution would be to nullify karma gains on such "obvious" sites.

However, what would suit me more would be if things were adjusted inversely to
their PageRank -- meaning less stories from CNN, New York Times, BBC and so
on, but things that are a little further out would be ranked better.

~~~
davidw
Karma, above a certain level, is primarily an indication of who wastes too
much time on this site!

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swombat
6\. davidw 8356

Irony? We've heard of it :-)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
This is probably an example of the old George Carlin joke about driving:
everybody that drives slower than you is a idiot, and everyone that drives
faster than you is a maniac.

I'm perplexed -- a top ten karma person posting that having high karma is a
sign you spend too much time on the site. Do I upvote that? Sets off a
recursion alert.

As for "does karma matter" -- if it didn't matter, we wouldn't have it,
sandwich or no. Study after study has shown that if you give people arbitrary
rewards, they'll work to gain them. Perhaps there is a lesson in there for
startups, no?

~~~
davidw
I kind of liked the idea of getting rid of the 'leaderboard' and only showing
'karma' for comments... where it is sort of useful for pointing out 'hey, this
is a good comment!'.

Either that, or, yeah, introducing 'real world rewards' for it;-)

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RossM
True, TechCrunch is another of the always-submitted sites here. It wouldn't be
too hard to setup a script to automatically post to HN whenever the RSS feed
is updated, so this could be done for a special user.

Personally, I'm not as bothered about karma on here as I am on other
communities - I'm much more of a reader than a contributor - and I agree with
your comment on finding "unknown writers". The more obscure articles are what
I use HN for at the end of the day.

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swombat
I'd vote against this. I don't think the fact that some people gain karma by
being the first to post popular articles is so terrible a thing that it should
be offset by auto-submiting all that stuff. Most of what 37signals post is
trash, anyway... one-liners and quotes that really don't belong here.

If you really want to deal with the "karma problem", then make submissions
from those sources karma-free - i.e. they don't influence the submitter's
karma. But since I don't think that there is actually a "karma problem", I
think this is a non-issue and not worth dealing with.

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nanijoe
How will your 'automator' determine what stories are interesting?

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bdfh42
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
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.

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DanielBMarkham
Perhaps instead of automatically submitting them (which would just increase
the firehose nature of the "new" page) whoever submits them the first time
simply makes the articles active. This will encourage people to find more rare
articles.

For me, I like articles from joe the blogger, since I'm that guy. If I wanted
Seth, 37Signals, or some such I'd just subscribe to their site (which I
don't). I get the same signal-noise ratio from them as from the average blog
post that has been upvoted several times. Perhaps better.

~~~
RossM
That's how I feel. I almost wish there were some sort of filter to allow me to
filter out Joel, Jeff, 37Signals, TehCrunch etc. from the RSS feed (I prefer
to pick and choose from 50 items I haven't seen before). I get around this at
the moment because I know I need to read the blogs folder, then TC and then
the HN feed, then I can recognise title's I've just read.

I could, in theory, not subscribe to those blogs but I don't know if
everything is going to get submitted to HN.

