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Under the current rules, if you zap an old post, the zap counts the same as a zap to a new post. So zapping an old post can easily bring it back to the front page.
The problem is it still seems to feel "old" or hard to interact with. I've zapped a few old posts aback to the front page, but have never succeeded in reigniting a conversation on such posts.
Do you have any ideas about how to make interacting with an old post feel more inviting?
I tried comment and zap old posts and they didn’t show up lit, not complaining. First step towards the revival of old posta, content enrichment.
Do you have any ideas about how to make interacting with an old post feel more inviting?
@siggy47 do it very well with his posts of the week, best of and this day in SN. Initiatives like that could unearth helpful discussions. I don’t know how suggestions works but it a good way to find good old posts too. Some of them are evergreen in my opinion.
but have never succeeded in reigniting a conversation on such posts.
I don't know that we've ever really talked about that in all of our many evergreenness conversations.
It's especially tough if the OP is no longer active.
There are also so other problems:
- the date is shown. This makes it feel old and even if it is on the front page, people may not want to click on it because recency/novelty bias is so strong online.
- old comments dominate replies. if you do click into the post, the most recent comment may be from a long time ago. This makes you feel like it's a dead conversation. It doesn't feel like there is a starting place.
- as a reader, you don't know if anyone is going to interact with you. as you point out, the OP may not even be active on SN any more. Making a comment may be like throwing words into the wind.
Maybe some of this is fixed if the person who zaps it back to the front page also leaves a comment (under LIT, this comment should be at the top). I've tried this a few times, but it doesn't seem to work too well.
When LIT first came out, I tried zapping interesting posts from "This Day on SN" and also tried leaving fresh comments on them. Even though many of this was dredging up pretty awesome old posts from SN's archive, I did not succeed in getting a conversation going.
I had thought it would be cool if the "This Day on SN" bot actually just zapped the top post from each day in previous years, but I don't know that people want to see that much old content on the front page.
I think most of us would like old threads to come back to life. We just aren't sure how to do it well.
When I was manually doing “This Day on Stacker News” I was zapping all of top posts and comments.
Some of the issues you mentioned might smooth out as we have more time with LIT. Comments may become more spread out over time for instance.
I think that’s it. We still need more and better resurfacing of old quality posts.
I’ve had and still have that same feeling, and I think it’s because of the constant need to create new posts about topics that just end up being self-contained. You might have a question or want to discuss something mentioned here back in 2023, but instead of going there and commenting in the hopes that someone who doesn't usually revisit old posts will reply, creating a new post often gets ignored or looks lazy. So, you just avoid it and end up stuck in a lonely search for content. It feels like the focus on new content still drives how SN works, even though they tried to change that in the last update when they introduced
lit.