This is totally missing the point of a major part of HN's (and other communities') value: The actual links may or may not be important, it's the community discussion that has the more value. In many cases, I find myself not even clicking on the links on HN (either the topic is too mundane or I've already seen it from another source) but go straight for comments.
This particular post is a good example: I have seen this interesting SO tidbit before but learned a few things from the HN discussion.
The results show that the 4 other links receive very low attention (3 links with 2 points, 1 with 21 points, all of them with no comments). Given the HN audience is spread across the globe with consistent interest in programming articles, I think there must be inference of posting time. Poster karma is not a big factor here because ColinWright has 33711 karma. Anyone wants to conduct such a research?
This is actually quite interesting. What it tells me is that "luck" (not timing, nor karma) is the most significant determinant whether something goes viral or not. Content comes second.
I also saw it a few weeks ago here on HN and was wondering why it is here again... At least I wasn't the only one who thought so ;-)
Sometimes I wonder how old 'news' can be and still climb up to the top of HN. Is there somewhere a search engine which can tell the author if something was on HN already? Or if it is about good websites an not about news, why nobody posted a link to google.com during the last weeks? ;-)
> Sometimes I wonder how old 'news' can be and still climb up to the top of HN. Is there somewhere a search engine which can tell the author if something was on HN already?
What value is there to the people who are finding this content interesting today in rejecting it because some other subset of the HN community saw it at some arbitrarily distant time in the past?
Reposted interesting technical content beats the hell out of Boring industry naval-gazing news story #82795 and Android vs Apple "news" intended to provoke a fanbo flamewar thread #762483101.
If you're spending so much time on HN that you not only recognize reposts but that you see them so often it bothers you enough to complain in the comments, consider doing something more productive with your time.
Comments
Ah this.. the highest voted Q on SO. Not again plz - http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Why+is+proc... (interesting case of same page diff urls bypassing HN duplicate url check though)
Go to http://stackoverflow.com/questions sort by votes and read from top if you like.
I'm a regular HN reader and I've never seen this before. I don't think it's so bad to re-post, especially since it's actually HN-quality content.
I'd second that -- the fact that it jumped to the top means there are enough people who haven't seen it before
This is totally missing the point of a major part of HN's (and other communities') value: The actual links may or may not be important, it's the community discussion that has the more value. In many cases, I find myself not even clicking on the links on HN (either the topic is too mundane or I've already seen it from another source) but go straight for comments.
This particular post is a good example: I have seen this interesting SO tidbit before but learned a few things from the HN discussion.
The results show that the 4 other links receive very low attention (3 links with 2 points, 1 with 21 points, all of them with no comments). Given the HN audience is spread across the globe with consistent interest in programming articles, I think there must be inference of posting time. Poster karma is not a big factor here because ColinWright has 33711 karma. Anyone wants to conduct such a research?
This is actually quite interesting. What it tells me is that "luck" (not timing, nor karma) is the most significant determinant whether something goes viral or not. Content comes second.
I also saw it a few weeks ago here on HN and was wondering why it is here again... At least I wasn't the only one who thought so ;-)
Sometimes I wonder how old 'news' can be and still climb up to the top of HN. Is there somewhere a search engine which can tell the author if something was on HN already? Or if it is about good websites an not about news, why nobody posted a link to google.com during the last weeks? ;-)
> Sometimes I wonder how old 'news' can be and still climb up to the top of HN. Is there somewhere a search engine which can tell the author if something was on HN already?
What value is there to the people who are finding this content interesting today in rejecting it because some other subset of the HN community saw it at some arbitrarily distant time in the past?
Reposted interesting technical content beats the hell out of Boring industry naval-gazing news story #82795 and Android vs Apple "news" intended to provoke a fanbo flamewar thread #762483101.
If you're spending so much time on HN that you not only recognize reposts but that you see them so often it bothers you enough to complain in the comments, consider doing something more productive with your time.
Wasn't there something from the 80's recently?
A week or two ago we had a text from 70's about diamonds, AFAIR. :).
It's certainly better than those countless why you should be 'hacking' stuff with XYZ or why you shouldn't.