news.yc really needs the ability to add a descriptive sticky first comment along with a URL otherwise the RSS feed, and this page, has bugger all on it to know whether to click on the link or not. Yes, this is already on the Feature Requests page. I'm just letting off steam.
How about telling the submitter that on the submissions page? (Along with a few other choice things, e.g. there's a Feature Requests thread.)
I agree a good title is important, and a denser front page is good too, but that doesn't rule out an accompanying summary; it just isn't shown on the front page. The summary can still get shown at the top of the thread. And it's a real boon to those reading through RSS.
'... news.yc really needs the ability to add a descriptive sticky first comment along with a URL otherwise the RSS feed, and this page, has bugger all on it to know whether to click on the link or not ...'
To expect the submitter to do this is ideal, but not scalable. (I know I've tried to add comments in articles as I've posted them, but gave up because of the number I submit. I do read them but now comment sparingly.) There is a real problem with generating volumes of information quickly. If you want speed, there is a limit on the amount of meta information a user can reasonably generate. If you want usefulness, this requires more time on behalf of users submitting.
Newspapers have this problem and solved it by training news editors to create catchy titles that neatly summarises the entire article in a small sentence - maybe even a few words. But not everyone writing articles on the web is trained in Journalistic techniques, let alone people who read this site. There is also the other problem when re-phrasing or changing titles of articles. Mutilating them into something un-recognisable from the original.
This is where the software has to work harder. By supplying users with the tools to classify, sort and value the submissions with tags, comments, summaries (already have ranking). I'm thinking here of delicious where tagging has allowed users to sort quickly by tag, then if they want to add more data themselves (descriptions, summary). The other way is to gather meta data from the source document (tags, microformats) where possible (un-likely as it takes time to process documents to generate useful things like summaries - even longer for meta data like microformats). Now the question is, could "pg with news.yc create some tools to help users or process new submissions extracting meta-data"?
If I wanted volumes of information I know where to find it. This is news.yc. I'm hoping for quality, not quantity, and if that means a 70% fall in submissions, who cares?
Besides, having the ability to attach a comment to the URL does't mandate putting anything in it. It's suggestive to the submitter that they should make the effort though else their submission might not compare well against those that do.
And if a submitter thinks "Oh, this article isn't really good enough to spend my time on summarising" then that's a good test of whether they should inflict it on the rest of us in the first place.
'... Besides, having the ability to attach a comment to the URL does't mandate putting anything in it. It's suggestive to the submitter that they should make the effort ...'
I've tried now to add title + (summary) on the submissions resulting in a more descriptive subject line. It actually works at the expense of size & a bit of time. So I have to agree with this bit and have changed my approach.
'... If I wanted volumes of information I know where to find it. This is news.yc. I'm hoping for quality, not quantity, and if that means a 70% fall in submissions, who cares? ...'
The news and best links don't help avoid the long tail. best is too static; it rarely changes. And http://news.ycombinator.com/rss presents too much dross. Dross which is hard to for my brain to filter because each item has too little info so I end up having to visit every thread and then often each linked external article.
(Thanks for starting to add (comments) to the title.)
"... (Thanks for starting to add (comments) to the title.) ..."
Believe me it makes a difference & really solves the crappy title problem. But it can be improved. I haven't used the the rss feed much ( http://news.ycombinator.com/rss ) but doing so I found that there is a cut-off on the browser I use (Firefox = toolbars = bookmarks ) toolbar cuts the text off at 40 characters. So If the title contains the most accurate info in the first 40 characters it even works in the RSS feeds (reader) with readers truncating the rest of the message. The other problem I noticed with the RSS feed is the transporting you to the direct link, not the news.yc feed which as the original link in the title. So rule of thumb: good title in 40 char http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/587744795/
It's unfortunate that some RSS readers limit the amount of displayed text, e.g. Firefox's menu items.
As for the RSS linking to the external article, the feed has both that URL and a "comments" URL. Some RSS readers appear not to show or give access to the comments URL, others do. For those that give both, I choose the comments one first to get more of a clue as to whether anyone bothered to comment.
There are posts elsewhere about some RSS readers ignoring the comments URL and what if anything can be done.
