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by johnfn
3315 days ago
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I completely agree that a large problem with news aggregator sites is that you must be there right when the news hits. Eventually in the HN algo, time always dominates score and the discussion is killed no matter how interesting it was. To be honest, I think that a change in behavior needs to come from the website, top down, rather than allowing the community to opt in to an alternate scheme that will never hit the popularity threshold necessary to work. Like a sibling mentioned, Reddit has "newest", but because it's not on by default, no one bothers to use it. I don't think that it's our attention spans that cause our browsing behaviors on aggregator sites- I think it's purely derived from the Ui/Ux of the site, and that if the site kept interesting conversations up longer, people would participate and have more than the surface-level reflexive remarks we see here. This is not just a hypothesis - we can see the alternate behavior born out on forum sites. I think it's a huge shame that HN has opted for this model (especially when it wants to be "the better news aggregator"). Think how many great conversations never happened here because the algorithm prematurely killed the thread - due to lack of upvotes or something else. |
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While sdrothrock is correct that these sites don't have much incentive to produce quality discussion, I do agree with you that there's value in seeing what gets votes as opposed to what gathers replies (not that they are necessarily mutually exclusive and not each plagued with their own problems). I wonder if it's worth trying a system that marries the two elements. Take a conventional BBS, for example. They often have a reputation system that in the best case encourage quality contributions and avoid posts only consisting of "good post, I agree." However, they can't be used to indicate from the index what discussions are worth treading. You can try highlighting the top voted comments[1] beneath or side-by-side their respective links to the OP. Then you can infer what kind of discussion is taking place. Is it a bunch of metajokes or did someone just unload a lot of expert knowledge?
For news aggregators to facilitate enduring discussion is trickier as the nature of news is to remain current. Maybe if a link would otherwise decay but discussion is ongoing, the news entry on the index could take a backseat to its most 'active' threads. Indented new lines underneath the post that link to those threads, "The conversation is still going. Click to expand" or something like that.
[1] Perhaps highlighting only a number of posts proportional to the total number of comments or only the posts above a minimum score that is proportional to the total number of comments (just so you don't get highlighted for being one of the first responders). It's also probably important to not be able to vote on the post from a preview, so people have to click into the thread and hopefully read it and possibly contribute.