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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Two articles on this were at the top of the front page. Since we don't need two, we buried https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9693370 as a dupe. That's not entirely fair, since the other link contains Zenefits' response, but anyone who wants to can go read it. Since we have to pick one it seems best to keep the third-party article.

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De-duping like this seems unnecessary. I'd prefer to see do-nothing bias. No explanations or artificial manipulation needed. Just let the threads compete. Like life.

I understand the concept, but HN has never worked that way, and if it did the results would be so bad that I believe (though I realize it won't convince you) that even you would recoil in horror. It would also kill HN pretty quickly in all the ways we care about, though I suppose the numbers would go up.

Take, for example, any Apple product announcement. The front page is filled with "Apple Open Sources Swift" articles from 100 different sources before things settle down. I can remember when I first started reading through HN and it didn't seem like anyone was performing that job... so they took hours or days to go away. Now we have only one thread within minutes.

Thank you.

Fair enough. In this case, they did seem a bit different and, as you note, there were some important comments in the killed thread.

If the stories had really been the same we would have merged the threads and left a "comments moved to..." post in the other one. But I was worried that the delta was a bit too great to deprive those comments of their original context. That particular dilemma doesn't come up all that often, which is good because we don't have a good solution to it.

Thank you for the transparency of your decision. It's always welcome from the community.

Agree and even better would be that type of information under the story header so anyone who was following the thread knows that it has been closed and the reason as well.

That's something we've discussed at length and will probably implement someday. It's pretty challenging, though, to do it the way we want, and other stuff has to get rolled out first.

Quick and dirty would be to manually update and append "Thread Closed [n]" to the header with a message like this:

ADP Begins to Roll Out a Zenefits Competitor; Thread Closed [n]

Where "n" is simply a number that is listed elsewhere that describes the reason for closing. Note that can scale to any number of reasons or explanations either existing or new as if it's a footnote.

I was actually really concerned when I saw the other one had been buried, and was worried HN was going to turn into a "do not slam our companies" love-fest. I'm glad you're being so transparent, and even happier about the fact that legitimate controversy still gets to be played out and discussed.

Thanks.

Transparent? Barely.

The link is still gone from the main site (only available in a comment) and its removal was justified by "we have to pick one".

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