Separation of news and articles on Habré

90% of content on Habré is generated by ordinary users. Attracting specialists to write posts in the interests of not only the community, but also the owners of the site. In this regard, Habr has a long-standing problem: the return from the post is often inversely proportional to the difficulty of its creation. Partially it was decided by the allocation of "thematic" hubs. Invites and points in PAP give only for posts in thematic hubs. However, this system has problems:

• Judging by the list of "thematic" hubs, they are more accurately described by the word "technicality". The correlation between the "technicality" of the post and the topic (hub) is far from 100%. Result: the authors strive to add a post to at least one thematic hub, sometimes unreasonably.
• In my opinion, “technicality” is a bit of a different metric that should be encouraged. What I offer in return is below.
• Promotions do not apply to karma, rating and providing attention to the post.

Separating news and articles will solve the promotion problem much better.

A related problem is the incomplete distribution of community attention to content. Though throughout the existence of Habr, the situation was constantly improving. In my opinion, moderation of the choice of hubs for the post would help well, because authors often approach this completely irresponsibly. This problem will soon be beyond the scope of this post, but the separation of news and articles partially solves it too.

I repeatedly mentioned the idea of ​​separation in the comments, and wrote in support of Habr, and they even kind of answered me that they were thinking the same thing, but things were still there. If the community supports the idea, I hope we will see some improvements on the site in this direction.


The essence of the proposal: at the level of separation of content types (posts - Q&A - events), divide posts into "news" and "articles". The names are a bit arbitrary, because determining whether a post is “news” or “article” is proposed based on metrics of interest and usefulness .

Now you can evaluate a post in 3 ways: like it , don’t like it (this is the exact definition - see the tooltip for the up and down buttons under the post), and also add the post to your favorites , but this is not taken into account by the mechanics of the site at all.

I propose introducing 4 buttons: interesting, not interesting, useful and useless.As you might guess, the couple is “interesting - not interesting” - the heirs “like - don't like”, “useful” - the heiress of adding to favorites. For all existing posts, you need to transfer the estimates to the new system in accordance with this inheritance. The principles are basically preserved: for interest, you can vote only for a certain time from the moment the post appears, and you can’t change the choice, for usefulness - on the contrary, you can vote at any time and change the choice. Hiding voting for interest can be left, although personally I think it’s worth removing. Usefulness can be read-only by users.

Now you can define the criterion for the separation of posts on the “news” and “articles”. News - these are posts in which the activity of voting by interest significantly exceeds the activity of voting for utility.

What is the profit?

You can make the "news" from the "article" a little more similar than the posts and questions in Q&A now:

• Sorting posts. New and current news (a la Reddit: relevance depends on the rating and time of publication). New, best for all time (aka storehouse of good), relevant articles (for example, on the dynamics of the rating of utility per day) and here you can stick the mechanics of the current favorites - that is, sorting by user’s votes. The default sorting in both sections is by relevance.
• Sort comments. At a minimum, comments of the first level under the articles can be sorted by rating (as well as the answers now in Q&A). However, here and without me there are a lot of ideas and suggestions that have been sounding for a long time.
• 2 blocks on the right: “Interesting” and “Useful” instead of “Best”. 2 main pages (by default - news).
• Promotions You can get an invite or points in the PSA for both ratings, but the thresholds for interest and utility should definitely be different. In this regard, I think it is worth abolishing themed thematic hubs.

Questions

- If the post does not fall into one of the categories?
- Let him live in both, and obey the appropriate sorting rules independently. He can claim promotion in any way, but in fact - in terms of utility (because the thresholds are higher in interest). By sight, on Habré 10-15% of "indefinite" posts.

- They will simultaneously vote in both ways.
- Possible minor difficulties, but:

• From the lists of posts (section pages) you can vote only for the corresponding pair.
• When a post "becomes" news or an article, that is, voting on one of the pairs prevails, which in most cases will occur within 5-10 minutes after publication, the possibility of voting on the 2nd pair is removed in principle (and the current results for it is not shown anywhere).
• Not all users can vote for interest (as now).

- Why is it "useless"?
- Because without this button, “utility” will be discredited by “50 beautiful themes for Wordpress”, “10 hidden JavaScript features” (@TheShock will not lie :), etc. In most cases, I think that there will be about 0 votes “useless ".