Tell HN: Clickable domains and other new features for story quality

[dang]

Here are some experimental new features to help improve story quality on HN.

We've adjusted the dupe detector to reject fewer URLs. If a story hasn't had significant attention in about the last year, reposts are ok. That's been the policy for a while, but we've brought the software closer to it. It will still reject reposts for a few hours, though, to avoid stampedes. Allowing reposts is a way of giving high-quality stories multiple chances at making the front page. Please do this tastefully and don't overdo it.

When reposting, please don't delete the earlier post. Deletion is for things that shouldn't have been posted in the first place, such as if you regret having said something publicly.

When a story is a duplicate—that is, has had significant attention on HN in the last year or so—it's helpful to post a comment linking to the previous major thread, so users and/or moderators can flag the dupe. In addition, when a URL isn't the best source for a given story, it's helpful to post a better URL in the thread. We often see those and change the posts to use them.

Both these practices are common in the HN community and make a big difference to story quality here. Thank you all! The following features are intended to make them quicker to do. We built them to make moderation easier for ourselves, but hope they'll be helpful for community moderation too.

First, you can click on a story's domain to see the previous HN submissions from that site.

Second, when you're logged in, stories on /newest and on /item pages have 'past' and 'web' links. Click on 'past' to search HN for previous stories with that title. This helps with finding duplicates. Click on 'web' go to a Google search for the story title. This helps with finding better sources and catching spam.

Finally, when a story is the first post from a site, logged-in users will see the site name in green, by analogy with the green usernames of noob accounts.

These really are experimental and if any proves unhelpful, we'll toss it. We want HN to stay simple and coherent and not just be an agglutination of features. Your feedback will mostly decide what we do, so feed away!

Edit: ok, we tossed the green sites. More people disliked than liked them, and the same information is available just by clicking on the site name anyway.

[greenyoda]

The "past" link is a nice feature, but what I'd really like to see is a way of weeding out duplicate stories before they're posted. For example, today there were 9 similar stories posted (so far) about Facebook's new "dislike" button[1], causing none of them to receive a significant numbers of upvotes. Could we have a feature in the "submit" dialog that displays similar stories in the last 24 hours and then asks the user if they really still want to submit theirs?

[1] https://new-hn.algolia.com/?experimental&sort=byDate&prefix=...

[dang]

When a story gets posted in many versions, most are knockoffs. If a knockoff has made it to HN first, I wouldn't want someone to hesitate to post a more solid article. I'm also not sure how to define "similar stories". Your link picks out the word "dislike" to search for, but that essentially encodes the answer to the hard part in the question.

I do agree that it would be good to weed out variants of the same story (or better, merge them), and we're open to working on that. But today's features are more modest—nothing more than a way of easing the manual work that many of us are already doing. Not least yourself!

[Amorymeltzer]

Second this. I feel like I've seen more dupes lately as people rush to get a hot story in. The past and web links will help for sure but it won't stop the submitter unless they're prompted.

That being said, these are all great features. More information access without being overly cluttered is a huge win for everyone.

[rahimnathwani]

What is the difference between new-hn.algolia.com/?experimental, and just regular hn.algolia.com ?

[grecy]

Any chance we can have collapsible comments without a greasemonkey script, or bookmarklet?

[grmarcil]

This is an absolutely bare-bones feature for HN. It would make the site so much more usable in general. The big case for collapsible comments relative to HN is stories where the top voted comment is only semi-related to the article (usual suspects being security, software freedom, political leaning freedom, ...) but spawns its own megathread and drowns out any hope of other discussions more germane to the original post.

[001sky]

Even if the don't collapse, It might be nice to see first level comments have some kind of distinguishing visual context...to get to another thought... eg, comment number 2,3 etc...is ofetn buried under 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.4 sub comment discusion minutia....when a top comment has 30 or 40 sub comments.

you should be able to scroll a page and pick out the top 5 original comments...even without collapsing...

[chdir]

Official word is that it'll be the "only major change to the Hacker News UI that we're committed to"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297695

[koala_advert]

This seems to be the most obvious thing they're missing. I can't stand trying to read through HN comments without a greasemonkey script.

[DanBC]

One of the problems of collapsible threads is that it reduces the amount of people who are prepared to flag and downvote comments that shouldn't be here.

[ClintEhrlich]

I'd like to suggest a very basic fix that will help new users.

People need to know about rules before they can reliably follow them. And Hacker News makes that surprisingly hard for new people.

Above the submit button, there is a line that says: "If you haven't already, would you mind reading about HN's approach to comments?"

I wanted to make sure I followed the rules, so I clicked the hyperlink and began reading a new page. It began, "Hacker News is a bit different from other community sites, so we'd appreciate it if you'd take a minute to read the site guidelines."

I thought that was the page that I had just clicked through to, so I continued reading. And it seemed like I was right: I learned about the rules against crap links, rudeness, etc.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. The first link took me to the 'welcome page' — which provides some guidelines for using the site, but not all of the rules. If you want to learn the rest of the rules, you have to know to click on another hyperlink to reach the site guidelines page. I found this counter-intuitive, and I doubt I'm the only one.

If you want people to learn the rules, please consider placing them beneath the existing text on the welcome page, so everyone will realize they exist. Or, at minimum, place a link to the guidelines page directly above the submit button, instead of just sending people back to the welcome page. And maybe add a "Rules" tab to the top navigation bar.

Thanks for your help!

[dang]

Ok, we changed the text of both https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and the "would you mind" blurb to make it clear that the HN guidelines are an additional thing to read.

[minimaxir]

Very good improvements!

However, the green-URL-for-noob-domains may be problematic. The green is used to give an indication for potentially low-quality content, but public startup/project launches would all fall under the noob-domain heading.

[dang]

> The green is used to give an indication for potentially low-quality content.

I wouldn't say that at all! It's just interesting to know what's new.

We've been displaying new sites in green to moderators for a while now. When a high-quality story comes from a brand new (to HN) site, that's interesting. The converse, too: it's interesting when you can see that an obscure site isn't new to HN (because it's not green). Often someone posted it like 6 years ago and it got no upvotes; or sometimes there was actually a major thread. Now you can click on the domain to find out. HN has a rich history that's fun to explore.

Edit: I'll give you, though, that green sites and green usernames have higher variance. The good ones are really good (think of the author of a story showing up in the thread to discuss it), while the bad ones are more likely to be spam. I think it's fine to call attention to it in either case.

[nkurz]

Maybe add a link to 'cached' in addition to 'web'? You could either do your own caching when the link is submitted, or use a service. The link will be useful immediately if the site goes down over load, and keeping an archive will keep the comments comprehensible for future readers if/when the link erodes.

[jkimmel]

I really like this idea from a historical preservation perspective.

HN comments contain a lot of a value in aggregate, and it would be a shame to lose necessary context to exploit this value due to simple link-rot.

However, I can see issues arising with paywalled links. The HN cache would likely display a rather useless paywall for many of the most popular stories. Navigating around the paywall by technical means may present an IP issue.

[dang]

We worked on something like this for a while last year (code name "the archivist") with the intention of making Readability-style versions of stories with plain text, major images and no cruft. The purpose of the experiment was to see if it would speed up moderation. If we kept it, we hoped to share it with everybody (where by "hoped" I mean "would have unless we couldn't"). In the end, we didn't keep it because it didn't speed up moderation and it is one of those problems that turns out to be increasingly nontrivial the closer you get.

If we did anything like it again, I'd still hope to share it with everybody, but perhaps not by adding a third link. I already feel bad for adding two.

[brento]

I guess I need to comment more so I can at least get to 30. :)

[snake117]

So far I like the feature that new links are posted in green. That will give new sites the opportunity to standout against the larger, common sites posted (like bbc, wired, nautilus, etc). I just hope some users won't take advantage and scurry around for new sites to take advantage of this new feature.

Thanks for the changes. I'll definitely send feedback along the way.

[kaolinite]

I'm not sure how the UI for this would work, and perhaps it's best left as an idea for a browser extension, but I like the idea of showing a selection of the five or so most recently submitted stories on the homepage, separate from the main articles. It wouldn't be enabled by default, only when an option is selected in the user profile.

I never visit the new section of HN. I really wish I did but I always forget about it. However, if there was a little section for new articles on the homepage (perhaps at the bottom or the side of the page in a box) I'd definitely check some out and upvote the interesting articles.

[mdaniel]

You wouldn't even need a browser extension in Chrome, as it supports "greasemonkey" style user scripts natively: any `.user.js` file you drag onto the "chrome://extensions" page is converted to an anonymous Chrome extension automagicly. YMMV with other browsers, if course.

[brudgers]

I have the feeling that creating a new domain is going to be a way of growth hacking one's story toward the HN front page. Green is a big bump in a world of greys.

[dang]

Fluff tends to get flagged off the front page pretty quickly, so it may not turn out to be a problem. But if that does start to happen, please let us know. We can turn it off, or maybe turn it off on the front page.

I'm surprised that the green sites turned out to be controversial because I have found them helpful as a moderator and a reader, but in retrospect I can see why a visually noticeable change would be. We're not attached to this feature.

[jacobolus]

I don’t mind the use of green (as compared to some other color) to indicate 'new site', but could you tone it down a little bit, or give users the option to disable it? On an otherwise neutral page, the green stands out and is quite distracting.

Maybe use something like #6a8966 (http://www.colorpicker.com/6a8966)?

[dang]

I agree that the classic noob green is a little loud, but wow, your eyes are way sharper than mine, or we're using different devices, or both.

Maybe we can tone it down a bit though.

[voltagex_]

Crap, time to update https://github.com/voltagex/hackernews-paywalltag

[Laaw]

Can this be built into HN? If not, why not?

[waterlesscloud]

Clicking the domain to see other submissions from that site is the best feature HN has added in years.

[kawera]

Very good improvements, thanks.

I think the dupe detection would be even more useful if done during submission.

[dang]

The dupe detection software, of course, does run during submission. Clicking on a search link is something that humans have to do, though. That's for catching duplicates that escape simple URL matching.

Writing software to identify which URLs are really about the same thing and which URLs are not is a nontrivial problem. I'd love to work on solving that in the general-enough case to be useful for HN, but we shouldn't let that stop us from doing incremental things to make life easier in the short run.

[Osiris]

What about a way to merge stories that are duplicates but with slightly different URLs that didn't get caught in the filter? Perhaps comments from all the articles could get merged together under the post with the most upvotes.

[dang]

We do exactly that when users find the duplicates and link to them from the thread, as well as when we find the duplicates ourselves.

Making higher-octane software that can automate more of this has been on our list for a while, but it's hard to know when we'll get to that.

[codezero]

Minor feedback, if you look at "past" for a domain that's a YC company that often posts jobs to HN, the results are littered with those postings rather than other content from the site which may be more relevant.

[dang]

Good catch. Let me see if we can exclude job posts. Do you have a good example you could link to?

Edit: this should be fixed now. Is it?

[chmaynard]

New feature idea: At some point, merge duplicate posts and their comments into a single master post. Create forwarding links as needed.

[JeffreyKaine]

What does everyone think about links opening in a new tab rather than the parent tab? I'll often find myself getting off on a wikipedia tangent (or some similar learning loop) and HN will be several back buttons back. I now open every link in a new tab manually to solve for this problem.

[shortlived]

Any chance of changing the table background color from #f6f6ef to something that has sharper contrast with white page background? I look at comment distance with this border to find new top level comments, but it's hard when one is white and one is light grey.

[hyperpallium]

Dup detection didn't seem to be working a couple days ago. Bug or just the changeover? Details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211499

[dang]

It was a short-lived bug we introduced while working on this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10216280

Hence the 'avoid stampedes' part I mentioned above.

[coldpie]

Pretty please fix the url parsing so it doesn't include the angle bracket after a link, like this URL <http://google.com/> embeded in a sentence.