The criterion is simple: a small number of reposts is ok when an article is solid and hasn't had significant attention on HN. We want good stories to have multiple cracks at the bat, or sheer randomness would prevent many from ever getting seen.
If you pay close enough attention to HN that those two previous submissions counted as already having seen the story, you're way beyond the 99th percentile!
That's why we leave the dupe detector so porous. HN's goal isn't to build a database of unique urls—it's to have the most interesting front page possible.
This system is easy to abuse, so we ask people not to abuse it. For example, don't delete things and then repost them. But I don't see abusive reposting as a huge problem on HN right now. We catch most of it, and alert users catch nearly all the rest.
Edit: I should mention that we're going to be releasing a new approach to /newest that addresses the tendency of good stories to lose their chance at the front page too quickly. Exactly when we release it depends on how much code I get to write in the next month or two.
It seems like you guys (dang and .. I forgot the other one's name) added a feature to tag "meta" comments so they appear all the way down the bottom of a comment thread?
Because that's clever. I really like that solution, because "meta" comments usually do not deserve the downvotes they can get to move them away from the top part of the discussion.
I'm generally quite impressed by the new and improved job you are doing at moderating HN. I don't pay close enough attention to tell if it's improved the quality of discussion so far (it probably did, definitely did not get worse). I can say, however, the changes you made and especially the openness about most things, really improved the atmosphere and general feeling of "fairness" of this place. And that counts for a lot! Well done :)
BTW did that whole /pending experiment go anywhere? That page is always empty to me. I'm still not very sold on the idea, but just wondering.
Thanks! To answer your questions: yes, we flag some subthreads as off-topic (especially when they become weird local optima that would otherwise sit at the top), and no, we haven't turned pending comments on. We decided to try other experiments instead (such as changes to downvoting, which we've posted about quite a bit) and reserve pending comments as a last resort.
> It seems like you guys ... added a feature
> to tag "meta" comments so they appear all
> the way down the bottom of a comment thread?
I have no personal knowledge of this, but I suspect other people have flagged the comments, and that's what's caused them to sink. No other mechanism would be required.
That's why we leave the dupe detector so porous. HN's goal isn't to build a database of unique urls—it's to have the most interesting front page possible.
This system is easy to abuse, so we ask people not to abuse it. For example, don't delete things and then repost them. But I don't see abusive reposting as a huge problem on HN right now. We catch most of it, and alert users catch nearly all the rest.
Edit: I should mention that we're going to be releasing a new approach to /newest that addresses the tendency of good stories to lose their chance at the front page too quickly. Exactly when we release it depends on how much code I get to write in the next month or two.