Re:Identity as Collateral: Preserving Hacker News
by jibiki on Friday April 10, 2009 @03:04AM
(#555818)
One of the things I've noticed is that HN voters typically vote up screeds rather than evidence. For instance, there have actually been several articles about the results of real life bailouts, both successful and otherwise; these almost never seem to get as many upvotes as the "Francisco's money speech" type submissions.
But now that you mention this, maybe the problem is that it's easier to recognize articles with identical data than articles with identical ideas. So people say "oh, I've already seen an article about bailout X", but not "oh, this is just another flavor of libertarian blathering."
That would only make sense if there were too many intellectually interesting articles about politics. There aren't. The vast majority of articles on politics say nothing new at all.
A quick and dirty solution would be just to delete any articles if someone can find a link to an earlier article saying essentially the same thing. This would get rid of more than just the junk stories on politics, it would get rid of all the rehashes of the ethics of nootropic drugs, or the link between race and IQ, or whatever. We have all these topics on this site where people find it necessary to upvote thinly rewritten versions of the same dumb ideas every few months; that's what needs to be banned, posts with nothing novel except the URL.