undefined | Better HN

0 pointsjcr9y ago0 comments

The types and quality of stories on HN are like the tides; it regularly varies. One of the goals for HN is to have a good, balanced mix of interesting stories. Due to voting, populist stuff will surface, but HN still has an appreciation for heavy-weight, time-intensive articles.

Some truly great stories get few, if any, comments. If a post requires effort or specialized knowledge to even ask good questions, then there isn't much discussion. This happens a lot when academic papers are posted since reading a paper might require a multi-hour investment, but even when there is little discussion, it's good to have heavy articles submitted. They balance out the other stuff.

If you find something great-but-overlooked in the /newest queue, then send an email to hn@ycombinator.com asking for a repost request to be sent to the original submitter. That's what I did with this article, but Dan (dang) asked me to repost it myself. Neither 'ingve' nor I care who gets the credit/karma, but a lot of people want great articles to get attention on HN.

HN is what we make it.

0 comments

logicrook9y ago

>HN is what we make it.

Exactly, and certainly there are other people who would like to see more of that in first page, but you just can't bash useful comments, so even with good intentions you can be part of the problem (talking for myself).

Thank you for this comment, and again for resubmitting this.

dang9y ago

The best thing to do about this is to find such articles and submit them. As jcr pointed out, HN has both moderation and software to try to give these than one chance at the front page. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and the other links there.) That's what happened in the present case, for example. But for this to work, users need to find the stories and post them.

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