
Dean Baquet Responds to Jay Carney’s Medium Post - planetjones
https://medium.com/@NYTimesComm/dean-baquet-responds-to-jay-carney-s-medium-post-6af794c7a7c6
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rm_-rf_slash
Interesting that a Medium post was refuted with just a Medium post, given that
it's essentially a row between to companies, one of which happens to be a
newspaper. I wonder what their strategy is by leaving it there, as at time of
writing I see no reference to it on the Times' website.

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pboutros
This is one heck of a rebuttal.

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avolcano
This has had 30 upvotes in the past hour and yet is already on the second
page.

I don't usually go all tinfoil about HN votes, but it's pretty easy to assume
is flagging this one down.

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dang
We marked it as a follow-up post, which downweights it. The reason is that
there shouldn't be two posts about the same story on the front page.

The top comment in the other head begins with a link to Baquet's rebuttal, so
it's unlikely that anyone will miss the chance to read both posts.

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Yver
People who read the first submission (before the rebuttal) will miss the
follow-up if it doesn't reach the front page. Assuming they don't go back to
the first submission to read new(?) comments.

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dang
Fair point, but then many of those people would miss the rebuttal even if it
did stay on the front page, since a lot of readers check HN in the morning and
then get to work.

I don't think there's any way to get perfect or even very good balance
here—the instruments we have are too crude.

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jonas21
Perhaps not marking rebuttals as follow-up posts might be a good start?

It's one thing to downweight a post that duplicates content on the front page.
It's another thing entirely to downweight a post that tells the other side of
the story.

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dang
> Perhaps not marking rebuttals as follow-up posts might be a good start?

It's easy to argue for a different approach when you care about one story in
particular, but we need an approach that generalizes well. Front page slots
are the scarcest resource on HN, and we have a responsibility to keep them
diverse. If we didn't do that in general, I guarantee you that many more
readers would complain.

Btw, this isn't a question of taking a side in the dispute. The original NYT
article received more attention on HN than any of the pro-Amazon responses
did. We weren't anti-Amazon in that case and we aren't pro-Amazon in this one.

