Hacker News Guidelines

IMO the guidelines could use some updates. For example, there are some unwritten conventions that could be formalized:

1) Search for duplicates before you submit a link.

2) If the submission is not from the current year, append (YEAR) at the end of the title.

3) It should be clarified that the guidelines about comments apply to linked article authors too. "Be kind. Don't be snarky." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."

4) There's dang's own idiosyncratic, controversial, unwritten exception to "Please submit the original source", i.e., unless it's a corporate PR.

[EDIT:] Three different replies have said to append [pdf] and [video] to submissions, but that's already in the guidelines. "If you submit a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title."

AFAIK (I saw dang state this a few times in his comments) it is fine to submit duplicates to HN assuming enough time has passed (a year?). He'll even reach into the second change pool and re-submit submissions that did not gain much traction the first time around, I think. So I think your first rule isn't really something that is much enforced on HN. (Which I think is a good thing.)

and add warnings for non-text posts [pdf] [video] etc

Besides (YEAR) there also seems to be the convention of [pdf] and less strongly [video]. The latter two use square brackets instead of parentheses.

That's actually in the guidelines already: "If you submit a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title."

I'm pretty sure that submitting a duplicate link is automatically turned into an upvote on the original

I hadn't heard about the 2nd chance pool until I submitted an article and he emailed me to say he was going to 2nd chance it.

That was a really neat mod intervention I wasn't expecting but really appreciated.

That's in the FAQ: "If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

only if the url is an exact match, which often it isn't.

>There's dang's own idiosyncratic, controversial, unwritten exception to "Please submit the original source", i.e., unless it's a corporate PR.

I said it before and I'll say it again: this is a bad rule. People can read through the corporate bullshit themselves instead of having some "journalist" tell them what to think of it.

It’s more of a guideline than an ironclad rule, though. Two different sources might have different takes on the same thing and it is not rare to have more than one story about the same subject on the front page, for good reasons. The community (and the mods) seem to be very effective at filtering real duplicates.

To me, those all seem more like places where the community usually intervenes to the degree it matters. [1]

While the guidelines seem more there to help the community as a whole stay out of potholes, sinkholes, and black holes.

But that’s me and I can see why people might have a different point of view on this. This is a model I use, not an argument.

[1] editing headlines being an exception.

I also wish there was a guideline that only content available on the Internet can be submitted. We are too often being used for promotion by sites with pay walls. Nothing wrong with a paywall, but it should be either-or: you should not be able to get HN to promote you, unless your content is accessible.

I'm pretty sure that it isn't.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.backblaze.com%2F...

Every dupe I've submitted has automatically de-duped to an existing post that someone already submitted - probably because it's the same URL?

Oh, indeed, it's been a while since I read it. Then I would like to add the guideline "Read the posting, before you comment."

As a complementary to 2), if the submission is a video or a PDF append [video], [pdf] respectively at the end of the title.

Same URL plus (1) the previous post got significant attention and (2) it was within the last year or so.

Yes but only if (1) the previous post got significant attention and (2) it was within the last year or so. Otherwise we let reposts through, because we want good stories to get multiple chances at attention, and because it's good for the culture when classic articles cycle through once in a while. Just not too often.

Usually I see the dupe and not the original.

Comments pointing out dupes are irrelevant noise.

A lot of stuff also gets posted which is behind a paywall. I've learned to tune these out for the most part just from the domain name but I still don't see the point.

The news reporter doesn't tell you what to think, they do the research - talk to competitors' CEOs, talk to independent experts, bring up that lawsuit and interview leading attorneys in the field, research prior comments and actions, ask followup questions to the CEO of the corporation who issued the press release, etc etc - and then share it with you.

No one has time to do that themself, and the CEOs, attorneys, experts, etc. won't return your calls anyway (they can't return everyone's calls).

Opinion writers are the one who tell you what to think. IMHO, few of them are better than blogger.

Paywalled stories are OK if there are straightforward workarounds, which are almost always surfaced on the thread. Stories that people simply can't read without subscribing are off-topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Interesting, I'd always thought the paywall workarounds were a terms of use violation.

Another case where looking through dang's moderation comments is helpful.

The duplicates-detection code is deliberately porous: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650172>

But overwhelming the front page with multiple takes on a story (e.g., the Tver aircraft downing yesterday) would be tiresome, and even multiple takes on what's essentially the same story over a span of a few days or weeks can get tedious.

The critical qualifying exception is "significant new information": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8406835>

This has been somewhat increasingly problematic over the past month or so as well-known existing workarounds seem to be increasingly problematic or failing.

Around 15% or more of HN front-page submissions are to paywalled and/or general news sites.

(I've classified the latter in my analysis of historic HN front-page activity, I haven't gone through to specifically note paywalled sites.)

And tightening paywalls can have a large impact on submissions. After the New York Times strengthened its paywall in 2019, HN front-page submissions fell to about 25% of their previous level.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251>