Valid concerns, to be sure. In my case, I'm trying hard to get away from "outrage"-type posts, and it would be nice to have a better way to filter these out. Currently, I pretty much just drop sites entirely once this sort of thing starts.
Here usually the idea is to link previous post only when they have a lot of discussion, or some small but very important discussion.
It sucks when you post something and someone else post it again and get more traction, but it's difficult to avoid. The alternative is to block the post forever, that is also bad. The mods are trying to do something about it, but I guess it will not be soon, you probably have to wait a few years ...
(It seams easy, but it's a hard problem. The easy checks probably have very bad corner cases, and in these cases they make the changes slowly, very slowly. Don't hold your breath.)
Noted, and thanks for the suggestion.(though not sure how to get that working). I wish I could delete older posts, but I cannot.
The very nature of the subject is such that it will never be popular ( actually it will be deeply unpopular) and will only strike a chord with a tiny number of people who will happen to see it. I'm not sure how I will get around this. Got to give it some thought...
I have seen many product forums where threads go on and on, and useful information is buried in a avalanche of noise.
On the other hand, censorship/terms-of-service removal is a grey area and by removing the information you're removing the ability of readers to make judgement calls for themselves.
Really, it would be nice if there was a way to filter/optimize the noise of normal forum spew into just the useful bits, while still having context/links to the original ginormous piles. Seems to get the best of both worlds.
well duplicate posting lowers the signal/noise ratio too.
how about, maybe, deleting the duplicate posting instead of bothering people that contributes with genuine personal opinions based on first-hand experience?
I was being sincere. Sarcasm doesn't play well here, beyond even the standard problems of written communication.
I thought maybe post deduplication "expires", and links are let through for discussion again x-weeks later. I also noticed dang posts these "previously discussed" links often, if not preempted by other users. I don't know whether to upvote or downvote those because it contributes to the convo but indirectly and with low-effort. Therefore I figure an automation might be worth the hassle.
I cant speak of rules but you might be able to bypass that filter by modifying the URL in some way, add some non-existent query variable or something...
Still, if months have passed, it's more relevant now and you think the discussion about it can be improved I don't see nothing wrong in posting it again.
I am well aware that it is complicated. When a controversial thread is reported, a rather large number of variables are referenced by your mind - some of these you are aware of, some of them you are not.
But at the end of the day, in the aggregate, either there is zero slant (by topic) whatsoever, or there is greater than zero. Based on my anecdotal observations over a long period of time, my perception is that there are indeed certain topics that are less welcome than others, and the assurances I've read, while plausible, do not seem adequate. If we were able to see a log of removed topics it may be more reassuring.
I'd rather HN had more freedom of topic discussion at least occasionally as an experiment, and then perhaps we could see if some modifications to guidelines (perhaps just on those threads) could keep things a bit more civilized. If no site is willing to put some effort into finding a workable approach to this problem, it seems reasonable that the world is just going to keep becoming more polarized as people spend more time at sites that are designed from scratch to be information bubbles.
i'd be happy to filter those out somehow... :)
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