

Ask PG: Please can we have a way to merge items? - ColinWright

It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes there's a topic that gets several submissions. Today it's the trillions of frames per second camera, last week it was something else.<p>Please can we have a way to combine items so that the discussion doesn't get split, and so the different reports (which often have different details) get linked?
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markkat
I think that identical URL submissions don't work. However, sometimes a
discussion isn't just about the topic, but the specific coverage of the topic.

I'm not sure that merging discussion based on topic would work, or how it
would be decided.

~~~
ColinWright

      > ... sometimes a discussion isn't just about the
      > topic, but the specific coverage of the topic.
    

That is exactly my point. I'd like to have a way of linking together the
different discussions as related to the different ways the topic has been
reported. I'd like to see the ability to create a "link node" of some
description that allows the different submissions to be found from each other.
Perhaps just a meta-submission that has the different submissions of the same
story linked in, by hand, as children. Then we can go to the parent of a
submission to find other submissions of the same story, each possibly with a
different slant, each possibly with a different discussion.

Some people - llambda particularly in my experience - think that HN is fine as
it is and should be left alone - nothing can improve it. My engineering and
entrepreneurial instincts are, however, screaming at me that the experience
can be significantly improved, and information made easier to find.

I'd've liked to have seen it tried, but it would seem that a vocal minority
want HN left exactly as it is.

~~~
markkat
I see your point. I'm still not sure how it would be implemented in a way that
the signal/noise was high, that the associated articles were relevant.

I run <http://hubski.com> that was built on top of news.arc. One of the things
that I did to help tie posts together was to add tags. It's not perfect, but
it does help pull up similar articles. You can follow tags too. EX:
<http://hubski.com/tag?id=architecture>

It's a tough call. HN does work for most people, I think. The maybe the
potential blowback is not be worth experimentation at this point? PG seems
willing to make changes, but he's conservative about it. Maybe from lessons
learned?

~~~
ColinWright
Here's a poll asking people about tags on HN:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2367949>

To consolidate topics, I see a "Consolidation Node (CN)" being defined by
anyone with enough karma. Topics can then be attached as children of that. Any
submission that's a child of a CN gets a parent tag, and the CN has as its
"thread" the children, sorted as the existing algorithm sorts.

When a CN gets at least (configurable) number of children, the children are
removed from the listing of submissions and the CN is listed instead. Ranking
algorithm to be determined, perhaps the CN inherits the highest ranking from
its children.

Attaching a child to a CN can be flagged if it seems inappropriate.

Just an example re-using existing ideas. No doubt there are half a dozen
reasons why it wouldn't work, but it would make more space on the front page
for fresh news, and link together existing discussions and reports from
different angles.

