And yet other people complain if I put links to previous submissions without saying whether they have discussions or not. I think there is value in the cross-linking even if the other submissions don't have discussion. That makes it necessary to remark on whether there is any or not.
Perhaps I'm trying to make HN something it isn't. Perhaps it would be better to consider it like twitter and simply ignore the past discussion and submissions. If that were the case I, for one, wouldn't hang around any longer, because the "new" stuff feels more and more just like the old stuff re-submitted or re-hashed.
Without back references I feel that people wouldn't be as keen to find genuinely new material. As it is, there seems to be more "news" than "hacker news".
I like that the past discussion and submissions are considered- but I'm not sure that the cross-posting is actually discouraging the posting of material that isn't genuinely new? Seems like it tends to encourage discussion in the new thread, rather than having everyone first read the old stuff and then only mention any new thoughts or things which might be more relevant now in the new thread.
That something hasn't been previously discussed is more a function of it being new, most of the time. I'd love to encourage people to post things which are not necessarily new but have never been discussed on HN...that'd be ideal. Otherwise, it's more likely that only time-sensitive items will truly be "new" in this sense to HN discussions.
What's a good example of "hacker news" vs. merely "news"?
Perhaps I'm trying to make HN something it isn't. Perhaps it would be better to consider it like twitter and simply ignore the past discussion and submissions. If that were the case I, for one, wouldn't hang around any longer, because the "new" stuff feels more and more just like the old stuff re-submitted or re-hashed.
Without back references I feel that people wouldn't be as keen to find genuinely new material. As it is, there seems to be more "news" than "hacker news".