Yes, I think this is an important article for Americans to read, and it hasn't yet received any significant discussion on the site. Specifically, I changed the URL to resubmit it. The change to the title was to increase clarity as to the content, and incidental to the resubmission.
That usually means the community isn't interested. Just because you believe it should be on the front page is not a justification for posting duplicates :)
Your argument assumes that once a story has appeared once or twice, the community has probably seen enough of it for lack of votes to count as a consensus. That's a natural assumption, but false: it overestimates how much attention /newest gets and underestimates the impact of randomness.
When I became public as moderator I heard from a lot of users (e.g. [1]) that the biggest problem with HN was high-quality stories not making it to the front page. At first I was skeptical. I was looking at /newest a lot as a moderator and hadn't been noticing much good stuff on the cutting room floor. But the users saying this were good, observant HNers, and I kept hearing it, and it got me worried. So I started looking at /newest more systematically, and then I was shocked. Not only were many high-quality stories being overlooked, probably most of the finest submissions—the out-of-the-way, intellectually interesting, totally unexpected submissions that make for the best of HN—were getting ignored. I'm still not sure how I could have missed that; I must have been looking at /newest at least as much as anybody.
Since last summer, we've put a lot of effort into addressing this. One simple thing we did was clarify that a few reposts are ok if a story hasn't had significant attention yet [2]. That's why it's ok that nkurz reposted this one.
ScottBurson hit the nail on the head, I think: giving good stories multiple cracks at the bat is one way to counteract the randomness of what gets traction here. Sometimes people abuse it, e.g. by reposting things that don't belong on HN or by being overly promotional, but those are fairly easy problems to solve and their cost is much smaller than the benefit of having more substantive stories—especially those out-of-the-way gems—on the front page.
The above isn't an opinion about the current article, which I haven't read, but it's clear that nkurz reposted it for the right reason, which is that he thinks it's intellectually interesting and well-written. That's the kind of thing we want users to do.
Thought on "New": splitting the load among more users would be useful.
There's so much submission to the queue that if you show everything to everyone, good quality posts simply slide off the page too quickly to be reviewed.
An alternative would be to set some sort of threshold below which submissions aren't seen by all site visitors, but are instead revealed to only a subset. That subset increases as votes come in. You're basically increasing the probability that any one story will be seen by someone. Set levels such that a submission is on the "New" page for some suitable period of time (an hour, six hours, twelve, 24, whatever seems pragmatically reasonable), during which someone ought to see it.
Alternatively: eliminate the "New" page entirely and populate the front page directly with distinguished new submissions, again though, each presented to only a subset of visitors.
Do these reposts have to be by different people, or can the original submitter of a story that goes nowhere resubmit it a couple more times over the next day or so to try to get lucky?
But this runs in direct opposition to the title-matching rejection algorithm that is in place. (If posters preserve an article title properly, their attempts to repost are intercepted and redirected to the predecessor.)
If it is intended that duplicates be allowed, then perhaps the discussion threads for such duplicates should be merged together, rather than getting such posters in the habit of not honoring original titles.
There's no title-matching algorithm. The duplicate detector only considers URLs.
Beyond that, I'm not sure I get your point. It's definitely intended that reposts be allowed if (and only if) a story hasn't had attention in about a year. You have to change the URL slightly to make the repost work, and that's by design. Merging threads doesn't solve the problem we're talking about here, where the previous post didn't get much attention, since you'd be merging into a dead thread. The problem merging solves is the opposite one, when you have several active threads on the same story, and we do merge threads when we see that.
Better dupe detection is on our list to work on, but it's a harder problem than it sounds and I don't know when we'll get to it.
Just because you believe it should be on the front page is not a justification for posting duplicates
I think it is, actually. I've seen stories take three or four tries to hit the front page -- at which point they get quite a lot of attention; there's no doubt they were HN material.
I think all frequent HN readers should contribute some time curating new stories -- don't spend all your time on the front page. If more people did this, maybe good stories wouldn't need multiple postings so often -- making the front page would be less accidental.
Indeed. I'd like to see a split view on the home page - top articles on the left, new on the right. Probably bad UX but often times I come here and look at what's directly in my line of sight - clicking on a different section of the site is usually not my primary use case on HN.
I don't know, if you're worried about clutter, leave upvote as an arrow and everything else in a "Actions" dropdown.
It's really unfortunate they're not seperate - just now I "saved" a comment I KNOW I'll want to refer to later...went to my "saved" comments page and it's FULL (of everything I've ever upvoted obviously - I just now clued in that that's how you "save" a comment, although I already knew for articles).
Short answer: too much content, really horrible UI/UX for most browsers.
I use bookmarks for frequently visited sites, and a few select references. Using them for content management... really doesn't work particularly well.
Instead I actually download and save stuff I realliy want (and am actively looking for better tools to manage and organize that, though Zotero and Calibre are a start). I'd been using Readability somewhat, but it gets really inconvenient after a few hundred items (I've got 1000+ now).
At least with site-specific curation you've got stuff saved in some sort of context, though, frankly, that doesn't much work either.
It's a long-standing frustration of mine. Though it was actually kind of refreshing to read Vannevar Bush's Memex document a few days back which basically expressed the same concern from 1945.
I think separate buttons would be nice. The set of stories and comments I want to be able to refer back to is a relatively small fraction of the set I want to upvote.
Of course it also means another database table, or equivalent, in the back end.
It's not hard to save the data. What I don't see yet is a good interface for it. We're not going to pile on links for each new feature—that's obviously wrong for HN.
Edit: I have an idea. We could add a 'save' link, but only at the top of a story or comment's individual /item page. To save a story or comment, you'd click on its timestamp to go to its individual page, then click 'save'. This is exactly how comment flagging works now. It would add no complexity to story pages and very little to thread pages.
By that rationale, you can make Hacker News better by removing voting altogether. Get rid of those two arrows and the needless complexity of karma. Only you can save us from ourselves, dang.
"That usually means the community isn't interested. "
Maybe, could also be because the newest stack is broken. Submissions are furiously added, yet few stories are selected off the stack, leaving new submissions to drop off and disappear. Good on you @nkurz for re-posting.
>>That usually means the community isn't interested.
No it doesn't. Stories rarely stay on the front page for more than 24 hours. This means that it's very easy to miss great articles if you don't visit HN for a day or two.
Also, there should be a distinction between "I'm flagging because this content does not belong or is spam" versus "I'm flagging because this is the 8th copy of it in the 50 most recent postings."
"Yes, I think this is an important article for Americans to read, and it hasn't yet received any significant discussion on the site."
Problem being, if it is, in fact, worthy of discussion here, there are three different discussion threads for this article... and a given reader is unlikely to see more than one.
For example, your extensive comment on copy #2 goes unseen by those reading comments for this copy only... as most readers would.
