Something that seems kinda unique to this community and the moderation is allowing and encouraging things to be posted again.
A lot of projects get posted and there's a reply that mentions the 2 or 3 other times in the past it was posted, with links to the comments. I thinks that's one way to deal with longer term topics and updates--allow reposts over time and new discussion, with links to the past discussions if folks are curious to dig
deeper into the history.
IMHO not much really needs to change, I think how reposts and such are handled right now is great.
It's super tricky because how do you decide what constitutes a 'topic'?
For example, are all the various ChatGPT threads related? What about coverage of an event (e.g. there are six or seven threads regarding the recent earthquake in Turkiye—all empty apart from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672314 —however I've seen it where basically the same story is being carried across several outlets and discussions are on the same topics, just one post gets more traction than the other).
It's easy enough to link articles which refer to the same exact source and mark duplicates, but harder to link posts which rely on different sources to cover the exact same topic.
> IMHO not much really needs to change, I think how reposts and such are handled right now is great.
This is where I am at. The notion that HN posts die off relatively quickly (i.e. within ~48h) is potentially a very important part of what gives them the quality they have today.
If every post was eternal and duplicates were always closed, you'd wind up with effectively perma-stickied comments in these god threads that become the law for that topic until the end of time.
Exactly, it's a huge chore to keep those kind of mega threads up to date and relevant too. And you get a lot of bikeshedding on other topics with people complaing that this should be in the mega thread, etc.
A lot of projects get posted and there's a reply that mentions the 2 or 3 other times in the past it was posted, with links to the comments. I thinks that's one way to deal with longer term topics and updates--allow reposts over time and new discussion, with links to the past discussions if folks are curious to dig deeper into the history.
IMHO not much really needs to change, I think how reposts and such are handled right now is great.