Separation of news and articles on Habré

90% of content on Habré is generated by regular users. Involving specialists in writing posts is 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 fasting is often inversely proportional to the difficulty of creating it. In part, it was decided to allocate "thematic" hubs. Invites and points in PPA are given 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 theme (hub) is far from 100%. Result: the authors seek to add a post to at least one thematic hub, sometimes unreasonably.
• In my opinion, “technicality” is a bit of a wrong metric to encourage. What I offer in return is below.
• Promotion does not apply to karma, rating and ensuring attention to the post.

The sharing of news and articles will solve the problem of promotion much better.

A related issue is the incomplete optimal distribution of community attention to content. Although during the existence of Habr, the situation has constantly improved. In my opinion, the moderation of the choice of hubs for the post would help well, because the authors often approach this completely irresponsibly. This problem will be more likely beyond the scope of this post, but the separation of news and articles partially solves it too.
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I repeatedly mentioned the idea of ​​separation in the comments, and wrote in support of Habr, and I even seemed to be told what they thought about the same thing, but it’s 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 little conditional, because to determine whether the post is a “news” or “article” is suggested based on the metrics of interest and utility .

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

I propose to introduce 4 buttons: interesting, not interesting, useful and useless. As you might guess, the couple is “interesting - not interesting” - the heirs “like - like or dislike”, “useful” - are the heir to add to favorites. For all existing posts, it is necessary to transfer the estimates to the new system in accordance with this inheritance. Principles are basically preserved: you can vote for interestingness only for a certain time after the appearance of the post, and you cannot change the choice, for utility, on the contrary, you can vote at any time and change the choice. Hiding a vote for interest can be left, although personally I think it is worth removing. Evaluate the utility can read-only users.

Now you can determine the criterion for the division of posts on the "news" and "articles." News - these are posts in which the activity of voting on interestingness 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:

• Sort posts. New and current news (a la Reddit: relevance depends on the rating and time of publication). New, best of all time (aka well of usefulness), relevant articles (for example, on the dynamics of the utility rating per day) and here you can shove the mechanics of the current favorites - that is, sorting by user voices. The default sorting in both sections is by relevance.
• Sort comments. At a minimum, the first level comments under 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 sound a long time ago.
• 2 blocks to the right: “Interesting” and “Useful” instead of “Best”. 2 main pages (news by default).
• Promotion You can get an invite or points in PPA for both ratings, but the thresholds for interestingness and usefulness should be exactly different. In this regard, I believe it is worth abolishing the "thematic" hubs.

Questions

- If the post does not definitely fall into one of the categories?
- Let him live in both, and obey the relevant sorting rules independently. He can claim for promotion along any path, but in fact - by utility (because the threshold is higher by interest). By the eye, on Habré 10-15% of "unspecified" posts.

- Will simultaneously vote in both ways.
- There may be some difficulties, but:

• From the lists of posts (pages of sections) you can vote only on the relevant pair.
• When a post “becomes” a news or article, i.e., 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 on it is not shown anywhere).
• Far from all users can vote for the interest (as now).

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