
A Liar Standing Next to a Hole in the Ground: Gold Mining in Arizona - balbaugh
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration/a-Liar-Standing-Next-to-a-Hole-in-the-Ground.html
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lotsofmangos
He doesn't hire horses suitable for labour, blames them for getting tangled
while also boasting of his cowboy experience, and complains bitterly of the
risk that he might have to spend time tending to them if they get injured.
This guy is an asshole. I hope he chokes on his gold.

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dalke
You liked the article so much you decided to submit it twice?

I read it after yesterday's link. I concluded that I really don't understand
the urge to prospect for gold, at least not in the secret mines, ancient
tales, and schlepping ore by pack and pack animal sort of way.

~~~
dang
> You liked the article so much you decided to submit it twice?

No, that was us. We asked the submitter to repost it as part of an ongoing
experiment we're running to give good stories multiple chances at the front
page. I wrote about this here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134).

~~~
dalke
The account submitted 9 links, including to high-quality print magazines
(Outside Magazine, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone) within an hour. I wondered if
the submitter had not remembered which had already been posted.

Rhetorically speaking, how do I distinguish between someone who was asked to
re-post, and someone who is making multiple submissions for, say, self-
promotional reason? This case didn't look like self-promotion, though others
with a sparser posting history might. I tend to flag the more egregious self-
promoters.

After reading your comments, I'll be more generous about upvoting /newest.

~~~
dang
> how do I distinguish between someone who was asked to re-post, and someone
> who is making multiple submissions for, say, self-promotional reason?

For the time being, you have to tell that by looking at the articles and the
account's submission history. It's usually pretty easy to spot self-promotion.
Keep in mind, though, that self-promotion per se isn't against the spirit of
the site; uninteresting content is.

Also, we modified the FAQ to make it clear that when a story hasn't had much
attention yet, a small number of reposts is ok. The point of all of this is
try to mitigate the weaknesses of /newest as a mechanism for recognizing good
stories.

~~~
waterlesscloud
One of the more frustrating aspects of submitting stories is finding out
someone submitted the same story hours (or days) ago and it only garnered a
few karma. In that situation, there's no hope of the story getting much
attention even though multiple people found it interesting enough to submit.
The karma is just spread out over too long a time for the algorithm to raise
up the story.

I can imagine you need to defend against rings of people submitting the same
spam story over time, but maybe if a few established users are submitting a
story, its rank could be raised more than the karma/time ratio alone would
indicate.

~~~
dang
I agree, and it's one reason why we want to make a better dupe detection
system. We did look at changing that particular behavior but it turned out to
be hard to do in isolation.

