Would it have been more effective? HN hates blogposts that reiterate a piece of news, and since the blog post would be only a paragraph long I would expect it to be replaced with the source video as soon as a mod sees it.
A huge chunk of HN stuff is blog posts. Plus if there's nothing to say about the thing than isn't more than a messageboard comment then there's not much reason it shouldn't just be a messageboard comment.
It's definitely less 'effective' at dominating the discussion with a single comment but that's more or less the point.
A huge chunk of HN stuff is substantial blog posts talking about their own things.
Things get called blogspam all the time, and a three sentence post linking to a video will definitely get called blogspam.
And the goal isn't to "dominate the discussion". Nobody else wants to submit this video. Nobody is being shouted over. The goal is to start a discussion about a specific thing, and making a comment on an otherwise boring link is not actually very good at starting a discussion.
The thing has to be interesting/substantial/big enough to carry a discussion. That's pretty much the functional difference between a comment and an HN story. 'Every comment should be allowed to also be a story' doesn't seem like a practical way to have a site that distinguishes between stories and comments.
Big enough to carry a discussion doesn't mean you have an entire blog post ready to write all by yourself.
In general my complaint is that it's hard to link to a specific section or piece of information inside a larger article.
So letting comments become stories willy-nilly is not my suggestion. This is about having an external story, but no good way to point at it.
And a submission like this can't just be a comment because there's no story for it to be a comment on. The video would not otherwise have been submitted.
And yes the option of "submission plus comment" exists but again that's a bad way to start a discussion when the submission has nothing obviously interesting about it. And it makes the experience even worse for someone that tries to read/watch the entire submission before looking at the comments, when most of the submission is pretty boring and the submitter only wanted to submit one portion.
I mean, this is all very theoretical so perhaps you can come up with an example of something that would be a good story but isn't actually just a comment. Because this submission? Just a comment. Nearly all of them are and primarily revolve not around the difficulty of linking some subsection of a story but around the importance the poster assigns to their commentary.
when the submission has nothing obviously interesting
Again, the argument here is 'what I have to say about an uninteresting thing is interesting enough to be its own HN story'. You can see how this is tricky, right? Like, the point of the site is not uninteresting things. The trivial solution is 'find something interesting to post'.
> Like, the point of the site is not uninteresting things. The trivial solution is 'find something interesting to post'.
Sometimes interesting things are inside larger uninteresting things.
Imagine if you could only link to a domain. Half the submissions people make would become far more difficult to make.
> Again, the argument here is 'what I have to say about an uninteresting thing is interesting enough to be its own HN story'.
It's not. The argument is "this section is interesting enough to be a submission, but it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to find it in this large article/video". The pure form of this has no commentary, just linking to a very very specific part.
This exact submission isn't the purest example since it's more of a caption, but I've seen many pure examples where someone wants to submit a specific section without even a single word of extra explanation. The kind of thing you could do with text fragment links but only in some browsers and only for text.
This submission was just a comment, is what I mean. It wasn't really an HN story.
Sometimes interesting things are inside larger uninteresting things.
Sure but those are almost never interesting enough to be HN stories. There are ways to turn them into HN stories but that's done by adding interestingness. Playing logic games about what is and isn't a comment really isn't adding interestingness, it's simply claiming one can rule-lawyer one's way to interestingness and it seems sort of obvious one can't?
It's not. The argument is "this section is interesting enough to be a submission, but it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to find it in this large article/video".
Well, it is, because those things are rarely actually interesting. Like, you have to demonstrate interestingness not just claim it. And this practice is effectively elevating a claim - my claim to interestingness in someone else's uninteresting thing is so important, it deserves its own title. It's a serious special pleading and you could make the case for it with examples but as far as I can tell, there aren't many or any.
The pure form of this has no commentary
I'm not sure what the 'pure form' is, we're talking about people making up their own titles, i.e. turning their comment into the most important comment.
Incidentally, there is a site dedicated to not-having a distinction between 'comment' and 'story' and the exchange of snippets of things - twitter. It works pretty well for that use case.
> This submission was just a comment, is what I mean. It wasn't really an HN story.
Why not? "Apple backs X standard" sounds like enough for an HN story to me.
> Sure but those are almost never interesting enough to be HN stories. There are ways to turn them into HN stories but that's done by adding interestingness.
It happens often enough. Lots of news articles talk about multiple things. Sometimes you even get multiple unrelated stories in the same article. Isolating one story shouldn't be a weird thing.
You didn't reply to my question of "what if you could only link a domain" but I think that comparison is important. Sometimes URLs aren't granular enough.
> Playing logic games
I'm not playing logic games.
> Like, you have to demonstrate interestingness not just claim it.
That's what voting is for. But first is has to be a submission, and also people are supposed to be able to get a hint of what's interesting from the title.
> my claim to interestingness in someone else's uninteresting thing is so important, it deserves its own title. It's a serious special pleading
Again, the "entire domain" thing. Finding an interesting thing inside an uninteresting thing that deserves its own title happens constantly. The difference is that most of the time there's a URL you can use, but sometimes there isn't a URL you can use.
> I'm not sure what the 'pure form' is, we're talking about people making up their own titles, i.e. turning their comment into the most important comment.
The purest form is someone using a direct quote from the article, with no words of their own. Maybe they're even using a heading directly from the article. Then behind that is someone giving a very basic description for something that doesn't have its own title. Because article sections often don't have their own titles.
In the former case they are completely objectively not making a "most important comment". In the latter case, they're doing the best they can, it's not like HN blocks submissions that don't have a preexisting title.
> Incidentally, there is a site dedicated to not-having a distinction between 'comment' and 'story' and the exchange of snippets of things - twitter. It works pretty well for that use case.
And sometimes people submit tweets to HN. HN is supposed to be for anything interesting, no matter the length.
The goal here is not to confuse comments and stories. "Here is a thing I found, here is what it is in a few words, nothing further." is something I would call a valid story.
Why not? "Apple backs X standard" sounds like enough for an HN story to me
Every story sounds interesting to someone. Again, the burden of adding interestingness is on the author/poster. Could this supposed Apple support for some obscure standard most people haven't heard of be interesting? Sure. Is it interesting to merely state? No. Seems pretty straightforward.
You didn't reply to my question of "what if you could only link a domain"
I don't understand the question, I guess. The granularity of URLs happens to fit the granularity of HN stories. These things are connected and sometimes the granularity does get broken and the results are often iffy - e.g. posts of individual tweets, posts of random github issues, etc. Such posts are sometimes good but often bad because they don't actually form interesting stories that produce curious conversation. 'What if you could only link domains' just feels like a different version of 'what if HN was just twitter'. And, incidentally, HN does have conventions against certain types of 'domain' linking - if you link a domain that's a collection of things, it will get modded down and you'll be told to pick something from the collection and post that instead of the whole thing.
I'm not playing logic games.
I am!
That's what voting is for.
No, voting is just a part of that. There's a lot of convention/culture and there is very much a convention against letting people shape the conversation with their own gloss on other people's stuff. That's what commenting is for and what titling is not for.
Finding an interesting thing inside an uninteresting thing that deserves its own title happens constantly.
Well, you'll have to find some examples because the ones that come up are almost always of not-interesting things or interestingness special-pleadings.
In the former case they are completely objectively not making a "most important comment".
Of course they are, especially when they are selecting a non-representative part of the article which is quite a lot of the time - in fact, by the process you are describing, by definition. You don't get to tell other users what is important in an article that isn't yours from the privileged position of a title. You don't get to mega-comment, basically. This isn't some law of physics or the only way to run a messageboard but it's hardly some unreasonable mystery of HN. Lots of subreddits and other forums operate similarly, for similar reasons.
And sometimes people submit tweets to HN. HN is supposed to be for anything interesting, no matter the length.
Well, not so sure about no matter the length and people do submit tweets to HN and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't, I touched on this above. They're the wrong granularity, there are titling problems, dupeyness problems (there are infinite tweets about the same thing), etc. Tweets do kind of break the classic 'link aggregator' design assumptions. That's not the fault of tweets or the tweeters or the posters of tweets to HN but it's definitely a thing.
"Here is a thing I found, here is what it is in a few words, nothing further.
Then you use one of the many workarounds discussed. All these worlds are yours, except Makeupyourowntitleuropa. To make the argument for attempted landing there, there'd have to be at least some evidence that HN is missing out on interesting (URLless?) things due to its oppressive title regime.
> Then you use one of the many workarounds discussed.
There are two workarounds. Both are bad.
Making a blog post good enough to be a story requires a huge amount of effort, and is not a fair requirement as an alternative to simply submitting. (And a quick, simple blog post wouldn't be acceptable by HN standards.)
Making a submission with a URL that doesn't go the right place, with a comment that points out the thing, only works when the more generic URL is actually interesting enough on its own. And even then it might be worse off for bundling too much together.
"Halide 2.12: All The Latest iOS 17 Photography Features" is not very interesting on its own. "Support HDR images in your app" is not interesting on its own. With the way you're talking about keeping up standards, surely you don't want more bad URLs submitted.
> All these worlds are yours, except Makeupyourowntitleuropa.
I don't want to allow any more making up of titles than you normally get when the specific thing you're submitting doesn't have a title. Just a bit more flexibility on choosing the "specific thing". A rule that it has to be a direct quote would also be much better than the status quo. Anything to avoid a submission of one specific thing turning into a submission of a broader and 90% unrelated thing.
> at least some evidence
Jesus Christ. You keep acting like this never happens when there's an example right in front of us. That's at least "some" evidence, come on.
Even if you think the title was unacceptable, surely you'll agree that neither of these two URLs is good for submitting the thing that OP found and a good chunk of 50 people found interesting.
> Anything to avoid a submission of one specific thing turning into a submission of a broader and 90% unrelated thing.
Using a post title edit to focus a submission of a broader link — such as an Apple WWDC video about HDR still images support — onto just the piece that you find interesting — that Apple supports an ISO standard — is precisely what is unacceptable to do.
That is the exact editorial behavior that HN specifically prohibits in title edits when submitting. The reasons for this have already been explained at length by dang in hundreds of comments over the years, and the guidelines are written specifically to prohibit the behavior you’re arguing in favor of. Trying to argue against that guideline will get you nowhere in the comments on a low-quality title edit submission, and I won’t be rehashing those reasons with you. If you wish to continue participating in HN, you’ll need to get used to disappointment on title edits, or take your concerns to the site moderators in email: hn@ycombinator.com.
I stand by my original point. My top-level comment on this post is intended to show what could have been submitted, as a blog post about this issue, to HN. We could have had an informative post that provided the relevant news, the supporting context, and even the 2022 presentation about why the standard exists at all.
Pretend they didn't make up their own title. Pretend it was a direct quote. Does that help at all?
And this link was not going to be submitted otherwise, so focusing on that part didn't steal the spotlight from anyone else.
I really don't agree that the guideline was written to make certain kinds of post impossible. I think it was written to avoid people stealing the spotlight, and it's a little bit too broad for that goal.
> We could have had an informative post that provided the relevant news, the supporting context, and even the 2022 presentation about why the standard exists at all.
Cool. But you shouldn't have to do that. It would be interesting if every post had to be an informative user-written blog post, but as argued earlier HN is not that site.
You need to take your arguments to the site operators, not to me. Email them your view, highlight this thread, and ask them to reconsider. They may or may not agree, it might take a few days, but at least you’ll get a reply.
Or don’t: HN users and mods will continue flagging and reverting editorial title edits by whatever definition the mods are currently using that is unacceptable to you, and nothing will change.
Personally, I’d take the chance of persuading them by sending an email, over the certainty of having my opinion disregarded by not sending an email at all. Up to you, though.
Providing context, backstory, and the link to the presentation slides from 2022 that explained why this standard is being created at all would have made for an excellent blog post — much more than just the Apple developer video alone. It’s a wasted opportunity.
Okay, but you could say that about a ton of submissions, that detailed backstory would make an excellent blog post. Writing that up shouldn't be mandatory to post an interesting thing that's stuck inside a larger article/video.
