Oh absolutely, this is a really neat conversation that I was hoping could happen. You mention how predictable stories are, and we all have those moments on social media sites where we're all rolling our eyes. I think it might be interesting to look at HN from something like Google Trends, wherein tracking the topics that are upvoted/downvoted. Maybe do some penalties for topics that have a large front-page success rate and upvote/downvote ratio (and throw in comment # too, same with comment length) and you could start to probably see trends for circlejerk material. We'll always have people flagging stories for duplicates or the like, but certain topics always get through by virtue of many people submitting about that topic.
The advantage to so something like Reddit is if a topic is talked about too much or not at all, you can just add a channel and grassroots it. On HN, you only have a single timeline and front-page (yes, there's searching, but people are lazy). News sites have channels but editors which controls the stream (and most restrict who can edit). I think a more algorithmic approach to provisioning up and down channels for specific topics could be neat. Not really sure where I'm ultimately going with this, kind of free-forming based off issues I've seen with internet discussions and IRL discussions and recent controversies as of late. I think it's important to look at how HN does it's news/info vs. reddit vs. twitter etc, to me it doesn't feel like we've really 'optimized' it yet for user distributed news ... or maybe I'm not hip with the latest app.
The advantage to so something like Reddit is if a topic is talked about too much or not at all, you can just add a channel and grassroots it. On HN, you only have a single timeline and front-page (yes, there's searching, but people are lazy). News sites have channels but editors which controls the stream (and most restrict who can edit). I think a more algorithmic approach to provisioning up and down channels for specific topics could be neat. Not really sure where I'm ultimately going with this, kind of free-forming based off issues I've seen with internet discussions and IRL discussions and recent controversies as of late. I think it's important to look at how HN does it's news/info vs. reddit vs. twitter etc, to me it doesn't feel like we've really 'optimized' it yet for user distributed news ... or maybe I'm not hip with the latest app.