| HN Mirror

A moderator downweighted it because there was a DuckDB thread on the front page for 16 hours just a couple days ago:

DuckDB – An in-process SQL OLAP database management system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34741195 - Feb 2023 (99 comments)

HN operates on the basis of not having too much repetition on the front page. As seen at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34746724, there have also been lots of other DuckDB threads in recent months.

I realize a new release is rightly significant to the people working on the product and/or who are users of the product, and it would have been better for the major thread not to just be a generic post about the project. However, that distinction isn't as salient from a HN discussion point of view, because either way, the thread will fill up with comments about the product in general. You can see that quite clearly in the current thread. The important criterion from an HN point of view is "is this submission different enough to support a substantially different discussion", and in this case the answer is no, so the moderation call was correct.

It's quite impossible to learn about every major release of every major product from HN—frontpage space is the scarcest resource we have [1]. The front page could consist of nothing else and you still couldn't learn about them all from HN alone. Nor is that the purpose of the site; the purpose is intellectual curiosity [2]. Curiosity doesn't do well with repetition [2], so the median curious reader isn't served by having two big threads about the same product within days. Of course, we all have at least one project where we would love to see that, but it's a different choice in everyone's case and we have to try to serve everybody.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...