
Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality - dang
Here are some experimental new features to help improve story quality on HN.<p>We&#x27;ve adjusted the dupe detector to reject fewer URLs. If a story hasn&#x27;t had significant attention in about the last year, reposts are ok. That&#x27;s been the policy for a while, but we&#x27;ve brought the software closer to it. It will still reject reposts for a few hours, though, to avoid stampedes. Allowing reposts is a way of giving high-quality stories multiple chances at making the front page. Please do this tastefully and don&#x27;t overdo it.<p>When reposting, please don&#x27;t delete the earlier post. Deletion is for things that shouldn&#x27;t have been posted in the first place, such as if you regret having said something publicly.<p>When a story is a duplicate—that is, has had significant attention on HN in the last year or so—it&#x27;s helpful to post a comment linking to the previous major thread, so users and&#x2F;or moderators can flag the dupe. In addition, when a URL isn&#x27;t the best source for a given story, it&#x27;s helpful to post a better URL in the thread. We often see those and change the posts to use them.<p>Both these practices are common in the HN community and make a big difference to story quality here. Thank you all! The following features are intended to make them quicker to do. We built them to make moderation easier for ourselves, but hope they&#x27;ll be helpful for community moderation too.<p>First, you can click on a story&#x27;s domain to see the previous HN
submissions from that site.<p>Second, when you&#x27;re logged in, stories on &#x2F;newest and on &#x2F;item pages have &#x27;past&#x27; and &#x27;web&#x27; links. Click on &#x27;past&#x27; to search HN for previous stories with that title. This helps with finding duplicates. Click on &#x27;web&#x27; go to a Google search for the story title. This helps with finding better sources and catching spam.<p>Finally, when a story is the first post from a site, logged-in users will see the site name in green, by analogy with the green usernames of noob accounts.<p>These really are experimental and if any proves unhelpful, we&#x27;ll toss it. We want HN to stay simple and coherent and not just be an agglutination of features. Your feedback will mostly decide what we do, so feed away!<p>Edit: ok, we tossed the green sites. More people disliked than liked them, and the same information is available just by clicking on the site name anyway.
======
greenyoda
The "past" link is a nice feature, but what I'd really like to see is a way of
weeding out duplicate stories _before_ they're posted. For example, today
there were 9 similar stories posted (so far) about Facebook's new "dislike"
button[1], causing none of them to receive a significant numbers of upvotes.
Could we have a feature in the "submit" dialog that displays similar stories
in the last 24 hours and then asks the user if they really still want to
submit theirs?

[1] [https://new-
hn.algolia.com/?experimental&sort=byDate&prefix=...](https://new-
hn.algolia.com/?experimental&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story&query=dislike)

~~~
dang
When a story gets posted in many versions, most are knockoffs. If a knockoff
has made it to HN first, I wouldn't want someone to hesitate to post a more
solid article. I'm also not sure how to define "similar stories". Your link
picks out the word "dislike" to search for, but that essentially encodes the
answer to the hard part in the question.

I do agree that it would be good to weed out variants of the same story (or
better, merge them), and we're open to working on that. But today's features
are more modest—nothing more than a way of easing the manual work that many of
us are already doing. Not least yourself!

~~~
eevilspock
How about grouping stories covering the same current event/topic and ranking
them by an aggregate score? This would keep the front page clean while also
giving the event/topic a more appropriate rank (i.e. one higher listing rather
than 2 or 3 separate lower ones).

    
    
      6. SOPA making a comeback  	
        217 points | guardian.com 46 comments | eff.org 27 comments | motherboard.vice.com 13 comments
    

or perhaps:

    
    
      6. SOPA making a comeback  	
        217 points 76 comments
          SOPA Lives on for the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (www.eff.org)
          113 points by DiabloD3 2 hours ago | flag | 41 comments 
          Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo Claim MPAA Is Trying to Resurrect SOPA (www.theguardian.com)
          89 points by runesoerensen 3 hours ago | flag | 23 comments 
          An Undead SOPA Is Hiding Inside an Extremely Boring Case About Invisible Braces (motherboard.vice.com)  
          12 points by lizzard 15 minutes ago | flag | 12 comments  
    

Groupings would be created on-demand by the editors in response to user flags.

Within the group you could list the links in order of their individual scores.
The title of the group could come from the highest ranked or could be manually
chosen by editors. You could have separate comments pages, but also a group
comment page which is just the union of all the comments.

Later you could take this a step further and include historical posts in the
list, thus avoiding redundant comment streams (but only use new votes and new
comments for ranking the group -- it has to freshly earn any reappearance on
the front page).

~~~
krapp
If and or when they add thread folding, folding for the story links themselves
might be a logical extension of that. You could have the top ranked story and
under the fold the last, say, five related.

~~~
solistice
The discussions could likely be put on one page as well, allowing you to
reference to the other articles without having to add links to other similar
articles or other comment threads. That'd be pretty cool.

------
grecy
Any chance we can have collapsible comments without a greasemonkey script, or
bookmarklet?

~~~
001sky
Even if the don't collapse, It might be nice to see first level comments have
some kind of distinguishing visual context...to get to another thought... eg,
comment number 2,3 etc...is ofetn buried under 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.4 sub comment
discusion minutia....when a top comment has 30 or 40 sub comments.

you should be able to scroll a page and pick out the top 5 original
comments...even without collapsing...

~~~
alain94040
Yes. What do you think of my
[https://github.com/alain94040/arguably](https://github.com/alain94040/arguably),
which is an extreme take on your suggestion?

~~~
dredmorbius
Interesting. Some of this fits in with my "non-brief moderation thoughts"
essay: [https://redd.it/28jfk4/](https://redd.it/28jfk4/)

In particular: no content-ranking system is perfect. Some level of random
ordering (within a range) is probably actually _preferable_.

Also, Aon on randomness:

"When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice
is a random stab in the dark" [http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/is-the-most-
rational-choi...](http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/is-the-most-rational-
choice-the-random-one/)

------
ClintEhrlich
I'd like to suggest a very basic fix that will help new users.

People need to know about rules before they can reliably follow them. And
Hacker News makes that surprisingly hard for new people.

Above the submit button, there is a line that says: "If you haven't already,
would you mind reading about HN's _approach to comments_?"

I wanted to make sure I followed the rules, so I clicked the hyperlink and
began reading a new page. It began, "Hacker News is a bit different from other
community sites, so we'd appreciate it if you'd take a minute to read the
_site guidelines_."

I thought that was the page that I had just clicked through to, so I continued
reading. And it seemed like I was right: I learned about the rules against
crap links, rudeness, etc.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. The first link took me to the 'welcome page' —
which provides _some_ guidelines for using the site, but not _all_ of the
rules. If you want to learn the rest of the rules, you have to know to click
on another hyperlink to reach the _site guidelines_ page. I found this
counter-intuitive, and I doubt I'm the only one.

If you want people to learn the rules, please consider placing them beneath
the existing text on the welcome page, so everyone will realize they exist.
Or, at minimum, place a link to the guidelines page directly above the submit
button, instead of just sending people back to the welcome page. And maybe add
a "Rules" tab to the top navigation bar.

Thanks for your help!

~~~
dang
Ok, we changed the text of both
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)
and the "would you mind" blurb to make it clear that the HN guidelines are an
additional thing to read.

~~~
ClintEhrlich
Nice job! :) Thanks for responding to my feedback.

------
minimaxir
Very good improvements!

However, the green-URL-for-noob-domains may be problematic. The green is used
to give an indication for potentially low-quality content, but public
startup/project launches would all fall under the noob-domain heading.

~~~
dang
> The green is used to give an indication for potentially low-quality content.

I wouldn't say that at all! It's just interesting to know what's new.

We've been displaying new sites in green to moderators for a while now. When a
high-quality story comes from a brand new (to HN) site, that's interesting.
The converse, too: it's interesting when you can see that an obscure site _isn
't_ new to HN (because it's not green). Often someone posted it like 6 years
ago and it got no upvotes; or sometimes there was actually a major thread. Now
you can click on the domain to find out. HN has a rich history that's fun to
explore.

Edit: I'll give you, though, that green sites and green usernames have higher
variance. The good ones are really good (think of the author of a story
showing up in the thread to discuss it), while the bad ones are more likely to
be spam. I think it's fine to call attention to it in either case.

~~~
smacktoward
I'll argue against the green domains on slightly different grounds: the color
is being applied as a sort of caution or warning sign, and from a UX
perspective green is about the worst possible color for that sort of thing.
Green is positive; green means "go," not "caution" or "warning" or "stop."

When I first saw the green domains I thought HN was trying to tell me that
these domains were particularly _good_ , as in sources that have yielded a lot
of high-karma stories in the past or something. It never occurred to me that
it could mean they were new or iffy until I read this thread.

I'd suggest using yellow instead, as (in the US, anyway) yellow has a strong
association with caution and warning signs, without the strong "do not
proceed" vibe of red.

(And the same logic would probably apply to colors on usernames, come to think
of it. Green should be for usernames that HN wants to call out as MVPs for
some reason. New accounts could be yellow, to indicate that they don't have a
track record yet.)

~~~
dang
As an HN user, I've never thought of it as a warning sign. And "green" can of
course mean "new" as well as "go".

The color choice is moot, though, because green usernames have been around for
so long that we're not likely to change them.

If people really don't like the green sites, we're happy to plunge them back
under the moderator-only covers. But maybe let's try them for a while? In
practice I think they're pretty cool.

~~~
petercooper
I agree. And even if green does signify "good", I don't think that's a bad
thing here. I'd rather be drawn towards fresh sources first. Those items are
likely to require more oversight, and voting (and potentially flagging) as
well.

------
nkurz
Maybe add a link to 'cached' in addition to 'web'? You could either do your
own caching when the link is submitted, or use a service. The link will be
useful immediately if the site goes down over load, and keeping an archive
will keep the comments comprehensible for future readers if/when the link
erodes.

~~~
jkimmel
I really like this idea from a historical preservation perspective.

HN comments contain a lot of a value in aggregate, and it would be a shame to
lose necessary context to exploit this value due to simple link-rot.

However, I can see issues arising with paywalled links. The HN cache would
likely display a rather useless paywall for many of the most popular stories.
Navigating around the paywall by technical means may present an IP issue.

~~~
burkemw3
What do you think about HN auto-submitting to archive.org?

Archive.org does follow some rules (e.g. robots.txt and passwords as you
mentioned), so not everything would be guaranteed.

It could be a good start for a lot of the content here, though.

EDIT: Forgot to add that I'm not sure how much it'd help with sites going down
from the HN attention. I could easily see archive.org moving a bit slower than
HN's users.

~~~
dang
> HN auto-submitting to archive.org

Can you describe this in more detail?

~~~
mintplant
Not the same person, but I assume they're referring to the "Save Page Now"
function of the Wayback Machine
([https://archive.org/web/](https://archive.org/web/)).

This tells Archive.org's crawler to immediately process a page and add it to
the Wayback Machine's cache. Unfortunately there's no public API for this, but
it is possible to programmatically submit a request to their endpoint and
scrape out the resulting archive link (and I have code that does this, if that
would help).

------
brento
I guess I need to comment more so I can at least get to 30. :)

------
snake117
So far I like the feature that new links are posted in green. That will give
new sites the opportunity to standout against the larger, common sites posted
(like bbc, wired, nautilus, etc). I just hope some users won't take advantage
and scurry around for new sites to take advantage of this new feature.

Thanks for the changes. I'll definitely send feedback along the way.

------
kaolinite
I'm not sure how the UI for this would work, and perhaps it's best left as an
idea for a browser extension, but I like the idea of showing a selection of
the five or so most recently submitted stories on the homepage, separate from
the main articles. It wouldn't be enabled by default, only when an option is
selected in the user profile.

I never visit the new section of HN. I really wish I did but I always forget
about it. However, if there was a little section for new articles on the
homepage (perhaps at the bottom or the side of the page in a box) I'd
definitely check some out and upvote the interesting articles.

~~~
mdaniel
You wouldn't even need a browser extension in Chrome, as it supports
"greasemonkey" style user scripts natively: any `.user.js` file you drag onto
the "chrome://extensions" page is converted to an anonymous Chrome extension
automagicly. YMMV with other browsers, if course.

------
brudgers
I have the feeling that creating a new domain is going to be a way of growth
hacking one's story toward the HN front page. Green is a big bump in a world
of greys.

~~~
dang
Fluff tends to get flagged off the front page pretty quickly, so it may not
turn out to be a problem. But if that does start to happen, please let us
know. We can turn it off, or maybe turn it off on the front page.

I'm surprised that the green sites turned out to be controversial because I
have found them helpful as a moderator and a reader, but in retrospect I can
see why a visually noticeable change would be. We're not attached to this
feature.

~~~
brudgers
This morning, I just felt that the green was striking and drew my attention to
those articles. Admittedly, a lot of it could be my habits and expectations.
But I know I wouldn't ordinarily have focused on them based on other factors.

I'm not being controversial, though now that I think about it, there is a
shift in the semantics of the color: it used to be reserved exclusively for
people, now it is also being used for "things". That may account for some of
the undercurrent for resistance to change.

I can see why it is helpful for moderation. I guess the real question is does
the green spike the level of participation in moderation activities? As a
reader, it doesn't really highlight the sort of information that I make my
decisions on.

~~~
dang
We just turned it off. These were all experiments, the green sites generated
more negative than positive feedback, and it's fine for an experiment to fail.

Also, the same information is available by clicking on the domain: if you see
only that story in the list, it means there has only been the one submission
from that site.

~~~
brudgers
Was there any change in behavior...other than a new target for complaints? I'm
curious about how much editorial activity users do, particularly since mine
seems erratic at best.

Maybe it could be a profile option at 50 karma [aka badge]. Even at the risk
of people saying HN is turning into StackOverflow, gamification for editorial
engagement may be worth pursuing.

~~~
dang
It was too soon to have observed any change in behavior. But the feedback was
more negative than positive, and it did visually disrupt the front page—not
something we want to do without a strong reason.

------
jacobolus
I don’t mind the use of green (as compared to some other color) to indicate
'new site', but could you tone it down a little bit, or give users the option
to disable it? On an otherwise neutral page, the green stands out and is quite
distracting.

Maybe use something like #6a8966
([http://www.colorpicker.com/6a8966](http://www.colorpicker.com/6a8966))?

~~~
dang
I agree that the classic noob green is a little loud, but wow, your eyes are
way sharper than mine, or we're using different devices, or both.

Maybe we can tone it down a bit though.

~~~
DanBC
I was going to ask to make it more prominent!

Maybe an option like the top bar colour?

~~~
dang
Avoiding option proliferation seems important. It might be better to just toss
the feature.

Edit: we tossed the feature. I'll edit the OP.

------
voltagex_
Crap, time to update [https://github.com/voltagex/hackernews-
paywalltag](https://github.com/voltagex/hackernews-paywalltag)

~~~
Laaw
Can this be built into HN? If not, why not?

~~~
dbarlett
Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179140)

~~~
Laaw
Hoping for updates on:

> But we'll think about it.

------
waterlesscloud
Clicking the domain to see other submissions from that site is the best
feature HN has added in years.

~~~
napoleond
Agree! Thanks 'dang and gang.

------
kawera
Very good improvements, thanks.

I think the dupe detection would be even more useful if done during
submission.

~~~
dang
The dupe detection software, of course, does run during submission. Clicking
on a search link is something that humans have to do, though. That's for
catching duplicates that escape simple URL matching.

Writing software to identify which URLs are really about the same thing and
which URLs are not is a nontrivial problem. I'd love to work on solving that
in the general-enough case to be useful for HN, but we shouldn't let that stop
us from doing incremental things to make life easier in the short run.

~~~
gkop
I suspect what kawera meant is if the submission form notified you that the
URL is a dupe via ajax, so that then you wouldn't have to bother to copy and
paste the title (which can be a pain on phones and tablets).

~~~
dang
In that case I'm not sure I get it. Care to explain in more detail?

~~~
kawera
I was referring to the new "past" functionality running automatically on the
submit form, on focus change for example.

~~~
dang
Ok, I get it now. HN is extremely light on the Ajax, so it would be a major
design change at that level. If we decide to take that step, implementing this
feature would be reasonable. But we probably wouldn't do it for one feature.

------
Osiris
What about a way to merge stories that are duplicates but with slightly
different URLs that didn't get caught in the filter? Perhaps comments from all
the articles could get merged together under the post with the most upvotes.

~~~
dang
We do exactly that when users find the duplicates and link to them from the
thread, as well as when we find the duplicates ourselves.

Making higher-octane software that can automate more of this has been on our
list for a while, but it's hard to know when we'll get to that.

------
codezero
Minor feedback, if you look at "past" for a domain that's a YC company that
often posts jobs to HN, the results are littered with those postings rather
than other content from the site which may be more relevant.

~~~
dang
Good catch. Let me see if we can exclude job posts. Do you have a good example
you could link to?

Edit: this should be fixed now. Is it?

~~~
codezero
yep yep! thanks dang :)

~~~
dang
(But it isn't fixed for the cases where bad boys and girls submitted job ads
as regular stories. That would require a job ad recognizer.)

~~~
codezero
I didn't realize people did that! I only checked my own company (vanity!) – I
hope we're not guilty of this, if so, I'll raise hell :)

~~~
dang
They do it without meaning to. People building startups don't always have time
to re-learn the intricacies of HN.

~~~
codezero
Yeah, it's always good to assume good faith :)

------
chmaynard
New feature idea: At some point, merge duplicate posts and their comments into
a single master post. Create forwarding links as needed.

------
JeffreyKaine
What does everyone think about links opening in a new tab rather than the
parent tab? I'll often find myself getting off on a wikipedia tangent (or some
similar learning loop) and HN will be several back buttons back. I now open
every link in a new tab manually to solve for this problem.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
No, please. Managing your tabs is not the site's job, it's yours or your
browser's, such as you choose to split that labor. In most modern browsers,
manually opening a new tab simply means middle-clicking or Ctrl+left-clicking
instead of regular clicking. And if you really want it to automatically apply
to all HN links, that's a great use case for a userscript.

~~~
JeffreyKaine
In application design, external links tend to open in a new tab (see Facebook,
Twitter, etc...) It's been a standard on the web for almost a decade now.

~~~
chainsaw10
My feelings are mixed on this.

On FB, I'm usually glad that links open in a new tab (well, I middle click
them anyway, but sometimes I forget) because if they didn't, I'd have the huge
problem of trying to infinite scroll my way back to where I was.

On just some random business website, OTOH, I usually take it to mean the
business owner (or developer) thought their site was so important, it should
make me keep it open while I go to another link.

I usually middle-click on HN anyway, but I feel like it's sort of nicer in a
way, to be in control of that. Maybe HN feels like more of a page than an
application to me because it doesn't use infinite scroll / a ton of custom
Javascript behavior?

I'm inclined to agree that web _applications_ should open external links in a
new tab, but I'm not sure it's best for HN.

------
shortlived
Any chance of changing the table background color from #f6f6ef to something
that has sharper contrast with white page background? I look at comment
distance with this border to find new top level comments, but it's hard when
one is white and one is light grey.

~~~
krapp
It does seem odd, that the only thing people can change the color of is the
top bar (and not even the text color with the top bar) and that this is
somehow worth being a karma perk. Just being able to set a default text size
would solve readability issues for a lot of people.

------
hyperpallium
Dup detection didn't seem to be working a couple days ago. Bug or just the
changeover? Details:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211499)

~~~
dang
It was a short-lived bug we introduced while working on this.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10216280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10216280)

Hence the 'avoid stampedes' part I mentioned above.

------
coldpie
Pretty please fix the url parsing so it doesn't include the angle bracket
after a link, like this URL <[http://google.com/>](http://google.com/>)
embeded in a sentence.

------
niico
@Dang, I once posted a link and then someone reposted the same link but added
/# to it. HN treated that as a new URL and that link, because karma -I think-
got to the FP. Any solution to that?

~~~
dang
That's the flip side of what I said above: "allowing reposts is a way of
giving high-quality stories multiple chances at making the front page". It's
pretty random which particular submission ends up making it.

We've thought about some form of karma distribution across every user who
submitted the link, but that gets complex quickly and I'm not sure it's a good
idea. In the meantime, the best approach is to realize that any individual
submission is subject to randomness (i.e. /newest is a lottery), and the
reliable way to gain karma over time is simply to enter more often, i.e. post
more high-quality stories. That's best for the community too!

------
some1else
Nice to see some new features! I hope it's not rude to ask if there's a
special reason the URLs in Ask HN submission text aren't hyperlinks?

~~~
dang
That one's in the FAQ ("How do I make a link in a question").

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

------
hoopism
I'd like to see stats of first time URLs pre and post greenification.

I suspect we may see more green links on front page than prior... just a
hunch.

~~~
dang
We'll watch for that. If people start to abuse it we'll deal with it somehow.

Low-quality posts tend to get flagged, though, so it's also possible this
won't be a problem.

~~~
hoopism
Cool...

To be clear I didn't mean to imply that would happen. I was more interested in
the psychology of it. And I thought the data would be fun to look at.

But thanks!

------
keyle
What I really miss is the score against comments.

------
alpb
This change just broke the Chrome extension Georgify for HN.

------
maerF0x0
Would love the ability to fold comment threads.

------
malnourish
Why Google and not DuckDuckGo?

~~~
kawera
Yes!

Even better if we could config it in the settings page (like topcolor...)

------
stevoski
These other features you've added are good. But years after I started using
HN, I still accidentally downvote when I want to upvote because the mobile
experience is...well, you know. You all probably often use HN on a mobile
device.

Please, please, please, can we have a mobile-friendly layout?

~~~
tokenizerrr
I've also done this on desktop. The ability to change your vote, possibly only
for a limited amount of time after casting it, would be far more valuable to
me.

~~~
annnnd
Agree 100%! If you click "downvote", the arrow should just turn to orange
instead of disappearing. If you click "up" ditto. You can then change your
vote for a limited time.

As a bonus: please don't refresh the page just because I upvoted someone. Why
should I search where it is I left off reading just because I upvoted someone?

EDIT: nevermind about second point, it looks like it happens only if JS is
disabled. My bad. :)

~~~
MrBra
HN is gracefully degrading you ;)

------
Kinnard
More information about internal policies like how much karma you need to
downvote and other thing people don't even know exists would be nice.

~~~
dang
You currently need 501 karma to downvote. What are the other things?

------
captainbenises
When are you going to fix the mobile css? Surely that'd take about 4 minutes.

~~~
colinbartlett
I'm quite certain the world's optometrists are paying HN to keep that font
tiny so my eyes are strained every time I use the site on mobile.

But seriously, I've heard in the past that they wish not to break the many
apps that scrape HN, and therefore have hesitated to change the markup.

~~~
minimaxir
The "break HTML scraping" reason makes zero sense when an HN API exists.

~~~
kevan
The API is available but not everyone has switched to it. There is a valid
argument for backwards compatibility, like Linus refusing to break userspace
even when it means rejecting some improvements. However, I'm in full agreement
with you here. The benefit of usability improvements far outweighs the
disadvantages of breaking screen scrapers, especially when so many of those
scrapers exist solely to make HN more mobile friendly.

------
tranthuc
So greate!!!

