I've been crossposting a bunch since k00b rolled it out and I appreciate everyone who's dropped some crossposts in my various territories. The real potential of crossposting has yet to be tapped though. We're going to need two innovations to get it totally unlocked.
1) Crossposting existing posts
There's a trove of great posts on Stacker News that could have fit in several territories at the time they were posted, or would fit great in new territories that didn't exist then. We need to be able to unearth those gems by crossposting them into the other territories where they fit.
This will require allowing stackers other than the original creator to crosspost, which will require working out the right revenue splits.
Also, should great crossposting factor into rewards? Probably, but it's not obvious how exactly.
2) Allow old posts to become top posts (again)
Finding and paying to share old great posts will happen more often if there's an expectation that those posts will be zapped. Currently, people are reluctant to zap old posts because there's no reward incentive for doing so.
@SimpleStacker proposed a simple formula that would base top posts on which posts were zapped during the day, rather than which were both posted and zapped within the day. I'm not entirely sure how to handle the early zapping part with that, although for crossposts it could be the first zap after crossposting.
Is there anything else we can do to make crossposting better?
On (1), the tricky bit, among the many tricky bits, is I don't want other people crossposting the post about my dead cat to ~lol. So we'd need some kind of approval flow. In truth, I think only the OP should be allowed to add new territories to their content.
Mobile UI needs work too: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/pull/2750
As for (2), I want to make it less exclusive to recent zaps and more about recent proof-of-sacrifice. Boosts and comment zaps should resurface old posts too.
Another thing I want is for great comments to surface among mediocre posts. I'm not sure how to structure it just yet, but if there's a great comment buried in a thread, I want it to appear alongside posts in
hotand have it look the same as post with the titleUndisciplined's comment on 'Crossposting is great but I want more'and clicking it will take you to the comment in the thread.The permission part occurred to me. Maybe there could be an approval step, like I get a notification that someone wants to crosspost an old post of mine. Of course, then we couldn't crosspost anything from defunct accounts.
The other thing that occurred to me is that there's nothing stopping anyone from posting a link to someone else's old post in whatever territory, so maybe there's not much point in being super precious about our posts.
This is not a cross posting problem, but it's related: I often come across links or projects that I think are really interesting and I want to do a write up of them. But then i find that someone already posted a link to the project AND that it barely got any attention (often 0 comments and just a few sats).
My solution has been to refer to the OP in the first few lines of my post, but proceed with posting the dupe. Usually I also forward zaps to the OP. This flow isn't bad, in my mind.
Just being able to add a cross post to a different territory may not be the most useful thing when you could repost it in the desired additional territory with some added context.
(2) solves it... you can just zap the amount necessary to get it to the front page, which would be the same as for a new post.
The only advantage new posts will now have is that they are discoverable via
RecentMay want to measure
topby post date too though. I don't care if someone zapped some 5 months old post with 1M sats today if I want to know top posts of today; that's whathotis for. If I want to know what the best posts from the last year were I can change the selector intop?Topis by default timebound, though. I think the default forTopis one dayYes, so currently
topposts for day by zaprank shows me what was posted today. It is different fromhotbecause zaprank doesn't diminish. So for example when there are a lot of posts inhot(like this week) thentop(day)helps me find what I may have missed during the time I was coding instead of reading SN while I was imagining that my LLM was coding.Yeah, this would essentially make it so the rewards system was based on something more like zapping hot content (zapped a lot that day) rather than top (created and zapped a lot that day).
I also want to be able to search for the top content created during specific periods.
It solves but also deprives us of @Scoresby's commentary. That's not a welfare improving trade, if you ask me.
I am very hopeful that this is something SN ends up doing. being able to zap old content to the front page would be so cool!
That's definitely the right way to handle it if you want to add on to the original.
Part of my motivation here is coming from owning territories and thinking of them as content repositories. There are lots of posts in ~Politics_And_Law, for instance, that would have fit in ~econ and I'd like to be able to add them to our collection.
I like what you are talking about in (1) since there are a ton of old posts that I have done that apply to a number of territories now and if people stumble across them and want to share them I wouldnt mind.
I think in your settings if they could do something like the NSFW option that lets you opt in or opt out of allowing your posts to be cross posted would be a pretty good option.
Hi @k00b, I want to weigh in on this discussion again, because I did actually notice something. Last I checked, posts from muted territories will be hidden even when they are cross-posted with non-muted territories.
Would it be possible to make this configurable?
e.g. say you generally don't want to read ~the_stacker_muse and you mute it. Well, then you would have missed this great post last night, #1415515. (unless, I think, if you had subscribed to @SimpleStacker or ~bitcoin. But then you will get flooded with notifications.) If there were a switch to 'show cross-posted items from muted territories,' then you can enable being able to see this post in this case.
We can change it so that the post is muted only if all the territories are muted. I'll make a note of it
Thanks!
Getting the good comments to surface in posts would be fantastic! I have no idea how that would be structured but that would be a fantastic addition!
The whole idea of reposting old content is the best. I see a lot of old stuff here that is still relevant and current, but the comments die because of this rewards issue. Sometimes it's not even that old—just a few months back—and it's already dead here. This rewards incentive generates new content, but it's mostly reheated stuff, it has no substance.
@elvismercury really kickstarted the push for this with his discussions of evergreenness, which were apparently inspired by his own conversations with the legendary @nemo.
For (2), if you zap an old post and it resurfaces to the top and gets more zaps, wouldn't you be rewarded for zapping it earlier than those others? It should be noted that with the proposed formula, post age doesn't matter at all, so old posts and new posts are on equal footing for
Hotdepending on how recently they were zapped and by how much.For (1), I feel like the juice is not worth the squeeze. Maybe a better way is to allow "mirror" posts. Like, say I want to tag an old post with ~econ. Instead of just adding the tag to the post, I create a mirror of the post in the ~econ territory. It's a new post, but it just links to the old post.
I don't like that version of (1) because the comment threads will be separated and the statistics for the combined post will be split up, making the content less discoverable, and the mirror poster will get full credit, as though it were their own content.
And, yeah, for (2) I had previously thought about starting the new clock with the first zap that launched the post back into top status. That's not quite right, though, because if someone else zapped it a few minutes before me but not enough to cross that threshold they wouldn't get credit for being earlier and they should.
I disagree with (1), simply because it invites abuse. e.g. I will cross some controversial post into ~AI and make the comment fee 100 sats, then imma be milking a shitton of sats. I already find the accumulation of cost on the comments somewhat annoying.
That's a good point. I think comment fees should be set by the original poster, rather than by territory.
I think that that can be abused too - like with the good old X/reddit trick to call someone names and then block them, but in this case set massive comment fee.
I guess, but I don't really care if anyone does that.
Ultimately, it seems right to me that the poster should be allowed to set the entry price to the discussion, just like the territory owner sets the entry price to their space.
It’d be cool if the first version, which could also serve as a lighthouse, let us edit our old posts and add territories.
I recall us talking about allowing post edits but with an editing fee that increases over time.
Personally, I don't really like the idea of people going back and changing the record after the fact.
My idea is to just let us edit (just add?) the territories, not the content itself.
Gotcha. Yes, I think that would be the most obvious first step, and perhaps the only step k00b ultimately wants to take.
I don't understand your "lighthouse" metaphor.
As for editing old posts: remember that SN timestamps them after the editing timer expires. Allowing a new edit window means the site extrudes an arbitrarily willowy tree of timestamps, rather than the slightly neater graph it currencly creates. It's manageable although adds complexity that might not be preferable to simply replacing the chore of editing an old version with the opportunity to release a new edition.
It’s a pilot to test the waters for what’s next. A total blueprint to follow!
I appreciate both lines of thinking
I quite like it as it is and I'm not sure any changes this early in would amount to any material improvement.
Everyone has their own use case for Stacker News. That's part of what makes it so cool.
Agree completely and I'm definitely open to being proven wrong.
Actually, one small quip on UI.
Should the post screen explain a little about how territories work, or is that too much hand-holding?
I also think it would be cool to consider representing territories under post in a way that doesn't make them look just like categories/tags, but I'm not sure about how that can be done. Territories are akin to categories, but clearly they represent much more.
I understand crossposting from POV of interest and more visibility on different territories. But SN users want to crosspost for one thing only: assmiliking more.
So I propose that crossposts will not count for rewards from all territorues but just one.
Yes. Remove all rewards.
Maybe my thinking is naive but if we comment on old posts, couldn’t our chances of getting more rewards under comment zapping be enhanced if we don’t take into account how long ago the original posts were created