4 ms·

HN needs to post new stories on the front page to give them a chance

42 points by vaksel 17y ago

electromagnetic 17y ago
Perhaps a 'window' at the bottom of the page of the 5 newest articles would be enough to bump more stories?
- vaksel 17y ago
  I think even a single one would work(as long as it's at the top like reddit) Submissions aren't really flying here, you get one story every 2-3 minutes. Plenty of time for a few people to like a story and vote it up.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    It averages to about 1 in 5 minutes, more during the day, less during the night.
waterlesscloud 17y ago
I think the current system works fine. People who want to find new stories just have to click the "new" link. Usually 1 upvote is enough for a story less than an hour hold to get a shot.
- vaksel 17y ago
  The fact that not a single story got an upvote in a 27 minute period, shows that people just don't click the new link. And even when they do, they just don't vote it up.
  - waterlesscloud 17y ago
    No, it shows that people didn't find any of those stories worthy of upvoting.
    - vaksel 17y ago
      Really? I'd say the Sivers and the asmartbear posts would hit the front page, if they were featured there even for a second. The asmartbear post on what you need to do at a tradeshow is now at 2 points, and no where near the front page. The Sivers post on building intimacy is now at 3 points, and is also nowhere near the front page
      - waterlesscloud 17y ago
        There's only so much room on the front page. If you featured something new automatically on the front page, then something else falls off. No doubt people would then complain about that. You could make the front page longer, of course, but then I'm sure some set of people would complain about that.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      No, it means that the small subset of the people visiting the new page in that period didn't find any of those stories worthy of upvoting. But as the relationship between people submitting links and people visiting the new page slowly changes the chance of stuff getting lost gets bigger and bigger. Mahmud pointed out an excellent example of that happening and I have seen plenty of others. Go visit the last page of the 'new' section and have a look at all the stuff that was lost. It's really a pity. And plenty of 'fluff' does get upvoted.
    - pavs 17y ago
      Even though one of my sub was on that screenshot 27 minute period of time, I agree with you. HN only needs 2 votes to get something on the front page. Not all interesting topic will hit the FP, and not everything I consider interesting is also true for others. Its not perfect system, mostly because, in this case, perfect is subjective. For instance I absolutely dislike ~90% of Tech Crunch crap posted here, but I have to live with the fact that others find Tech Crunch drama interesting.
      - vaksel 17y ago
        You need 2 votes in the first 3-4 minutes or so. After that the number starts increasing. This is just pulling things out of thin air, but from the looks of it, the system increases the amounts every period. i.e. First 2 minutes? 1 upvote. 4 minutes: 2 upvotes 6 minutes: 3 upvotes 8 minutes: 4 upvotes etc
- noodle 17y ago
  agreed. i peruse the new section almost exclusively, and i upvote what i view as worthy of my upvote. people use the system as it is intended. we're just a harder bunch to please, in general.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 17y ago
Agreed. Especially with the speed at which the 'new' page scrolls by the chances of making it to the homepage are relatively slim (unless of course you want to game the system but that's not ethical). A potential way of displaying this would be to simply interleave the home and the new page.
- rglullis 17y ago
  I definitely agree about the speed things are going down on the new page. We got a post for the review of our website (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075533 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075533) and it was out of the page in less than a hour. I think that a better way to handle it would be to allow users to whitelist/blacklist users, and set up a separate "incoming" section, sorted by recency. Users that you already know, you put on the whitelist and all of their links stay on the page. Blacklisted users never go to the "incoming" section. You could also put "degrees of trust" on the whitelist and have links from users that are on the whitelist of your whitelisted users.
  - swgw 17y ago
    Agreed, something like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919917 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919917
pmichaud 17y ago
It really is a problem. Right now we're at a moment in HN history in which is possible to get a submission on the FP by dumb luck, but it's better to have a couple friends take a look and vote right away (not endorsing spamming--just saying that drawing attention to your submission during that critical few minute window makes a big difference). As HN grows, however, this will change: it will be absolutely required for you to get your friends to upvote in that critical window to have any chance of hitting the FP. That's not a good road to go down, so I think it's definitely time to adjust the way it works.
- gr366 17y ago
  I've created a poll to find out how common it is to ask friends to upvote submissions. If it really is common behavior, then maybe something does need to be done about this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075931 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075931
  - newsio 17y ago
    There's another option that should be added: People with multiple accounts.
hop 17y ago
Maybe an optional two column layout for members with upcoming on the right. Maybe a smaller font...
- swgw 17y ago
  Upcoming should be a function of recent votes. Frontpage order can then be a fx of votes (+), recent votes (+), and time decay (-). This has the benefit of creating the desired functionality without altering the interface.
diN0bot 17y ago
i wish the big stories would get removed sooner so that more content could filter in. maybe it could just be personal: stories i've seen already are removed. either way, i feel like stories get big and hang around even though they're getting more and more upvotes simply for being on the front page. when i page down it's just the big stories from a couple days ago that i already read. if more new content filtered in that would be better. also, categories, or some way to filter the stories would be hot. again, i want to see more content. i do look at new, but the problem is that the step down is from 50+ comments to 0 comments, lots of filtering to no filtering. i don't want to read unfiltered, uncommented articles anymore than the next person, nor do i want good new articles to be bombed by a lack of views or the first vote being negative. perhaps we can develop a small group of people dedicated to the task, either for extra or separate karma, or simply to be part of a group doing a good job. the IBM bug-finding black suits comes to minds. this could also be a good task for n00bs to grow their karma faster, though i suspect we'd also have to work in more experienced folks in order to pass on appropriate hacker news culture.
- spydertennis 17y ago
  /i wish the big stories would get removed sooner so that more content could filter in. maybe it could just be personal: stories i've seen already are removed./ I think this is a great idea. As someone who visits multiple times a day and see most of the same content (like a lot of other people I'm sure) it would be awesome to be able to hide stories to create room for others.
  - eru 17y ago
    I agree. Though I am interested if there's a discussion going on, and if it has grown since I last visited it.
covercash 17y ago
I've been a huge fan of the 'hot or not' style quick voting for a while now. So much so, that my friend and I included it in a little test project we did a while back: http://beta.popularo.com/ http://beta.popularo.com/ The goal was to circulate new content to all users and at the same time reduce the chances of gaming the system (we were frustrated by the digg "power user" submissions). Needless to say, it sits dormant now but we're both glad reddit and digg have implemented similar features.
- ericwaller 17y ago
  Your site is getting caught in Safari's suspected malware filter. There's a out-of-place link to "Best Philadelphia Wedding Photographers" in the footer which might be related.
  - covercash 17y ago
    I'll let my friend know. It's his domain and hosted on his server. This was the first time I've visited the site in about a year and I happen to have been in Chrome when checking if it was still live, so it worked fine. I doubt he'll care or make any changes since I'm pretty sure nobody visits it anymore. Thanks for the heads up though!
ironkeith 17y ago
I've submitted 18 articles, and 9 have made it to the homepage (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ironkeith http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ironkeith). I am certainly not a power user, and I don't have a circle of friends who quickly upvote my submissions to game the system. So far as I can tell, people use the new page, and interesting articles make the home page. That said, I also think it's really important to ensure that the title you submit is properly phrased. The articles that have received the most votes have inevitably been the ones I put some time into rewording to appeal to HN users.
- vaksel 17y ago
  the stuff of yours that got voted up, is what you found online at popular sites. The reason it bypasses the death, is that other people try to submit it too, at which point it gets 1 extra upvote. I'm more speaking for the people who write their own stuff(sivers, asmartbear etc). Who spend 2-3 hours putting an interesting article together, only to have it die in the new bin. For example, I get asked all the time how I got my site to 35K visits in 2 months. And I'd love to share. But I always put it off because I know there is a 90% chance it'll never get off the new page. Why should I spend 3-5 hours putting that article together with graphs and data, if I know for a fact that there is 99% chance that it'll die. I got a site to run, I can't throw away my time like that. In fact the only articles of mine that actually made it to the front page, were those which I linked to from another relevant discussion. Those got 40-60 upvotes. But if I didn't link them from a relevant thread, they'd be stuck in the new page like all the other submissions.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    For me it's a mixed bag, some of the stuff I write that I think will be for a very small set of people does surprisingly well, other stuff that I think is more important does much worse. But just like making music, I write what I write because it helps me to put down my thoughts, how many others read it, find it useful and/or comment on it is really not that big a deal to me, though I'm always very happy when there is some kind of interaction around something I write. Usually I learn as much from the feedback and the comments as I did from doing whatever it was that I wrote about in the first place.
gojomo 17y ago
Alternate ideas: (1) Make it so that each user only sees a deterministic subset of 'new' (unless they try really hard to enable 'all'). Essentially, this means every 'new' article is seen by a random panel of users, and stays on the 'new' page longer. Tinkering with the assignment function could achieve any balance between submissions/users/views/duration-on-first-page that is preferred. (2) Segment 'new' by number-of-votes-already-received. Make the default 'new' only 1-vote stories. Only allow viewing and voting on 2-vote stories by people who have already cast a vote on a 1-vote story, and so forth. (That is, force people to pay more attention to those less-reviewed, before piling-on to already-popular stories.)
kristiandupont 17y ago
I think that Reddit's solution with a new entry at the top is good. Right now, there is a bias towards the preference of people who visit the "new" page.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

42 points by vaksel 17y ago

electromagnetic 17y ago

Perhaps a 'window' at the bottom of the page of the 5 newest articles would be enough to bump more stories?

vaksel 17y ago
I think even a single one would work(as long as it's at the top like reddit) Submissions aren't really flying here, you get one story every 2-3 minutes. Plenty of time for a few people to like a story and vote it up.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  It averages to about 1 in 5 minutes, more during the day, less during the night.

waterlesscloud 17y ago

I think the current system works fine. People who want to find new stories just have to click the "new" link. Usually 1 upvote is enough for a story less than an hour hold to get a shot.

vaksel 17y ago
The fact that not a single story got an upvote in a 27 minute period, shows that people just don't click the new link. And even when they do, they just don't vote it up.
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  No, it shows that people didn't find any of those stories worthy of upvoting.
  - vaksel 17y ago
    Really? I'd say the Sivers and the asmartbear posts would hit the front page, if they were featured there even for a second. The asmartbear post on what you need to do at a tradeshow is now at 2 points, and no where near the front page. The Sivers post on building intimacy is now at 3 points, and is also nowhere near the front page
    - waterlesscloud 17y ago
      There's only so much room on the front page. If you featured something new automatically on the front page, then something else falls off. No doubt people would then complain about that. You could make the front page longer, of course, but then I'm sure some set of people would complain about that.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    No, it means that the small subset of the people visiting the new page in that period didn't find any of those stories worthy of upvoting. But as the relationship between people submitting links and people visiting the new page slowly changes the chance of stuff getting lost gets bigger and bigger. Mahmud pointed out an excellent example of that happening and I have seen plenty of others. Go visit the last page of the 'new' section and have a look at all the stuff that was lost. It's really a pity. And plenty of 'fluff' does get upvoted.
  - pavs 17y ago
    Even though one of my sub was on that screenshot 27 minute period of time, I agree with you. HN only needs 2 votes to get something on the front page. Not all interesting topic will hit the FP, and not everything I consider interesting is also true for others. Its not perfect system, mostly because, in this case, perfect is subjective. For instance I absolutely dislike ~90% of Tech Crunch crap posted here, but I have to live with the fact that others find Tech Crunch drama interesting.
    - vaksel 17y ago
      You need 2 votes in the first 3-4 minutes or so. After that the number starts increasing. This is just pulling things out of thin air, but from the looks of it, the system increases the amounts every period. i.e. First 2 minutes? 1 upvote. 4 minutes: 2 upvotes 6 minutes: 3 upvotes 8 minutes: 4 upvotes etc
noodle 17y ago
agreed. i peruse the new section almost exclusively, and i upvote what i view as worthy of my upvote. people use the system as it is intended. we're just a harder bunch to please, in general.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

jacquesm 17y ago

Agreed. Especially with the speed at which the 'new' page scrolls by the chances of making it to the homepage are relatively slim (unless of course you want to game the system but that's not ethical). A potential way of displaying this would be to simply interleave the home and the new page.

rglullis 17y ago
I definitely agree about the speed things are going down on the new page. We got a post for the review of our website (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075533 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075533) and it was out of the page in less than a hour. I think that a better way to handle it would be to allow users to whitelist/blacklist users, and set up a separate "incoming" section, sorted by recency. Users that you already know, you put on the whitelist and all of their links stay on the page. Blacklisted users never go to the "incoming" section. You could also put "degrees of trust" on the whitelist and have links from users that are on the whitelist of your whitelisted users.
- swgw 17y ago
  Agreed, something like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919917 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919917

pmichaud 17y ago

It really is a problem. Right now we're at a moment in HN history in which is possible to get a submission on the FP by dumb luck, but it's better to have a couple friends take a look and vote right away (not endorsing spamming--just saying that drawing attention to your submission during that critical few minute window makes a big difference). As HN grows, however, this will change: it will be absolutely required for you to get your friends to upvote in that critical window to have any chance of hitting the FP. That's not a good road to go down, so I think it's definitely time to adjust the way it works.

gr366 17y ago
I've created a poll to find out how common it is to ask friends to upvote submissions. If it really is common behavior, then maybe something does need to be done about this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075931 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075931
- newsio 17y ago
  There's another option that should be added: People with multiple accounts.

hop 17y ago

Maybe an optional two column layout for members with upcoming on the right. Maybe a smaller font...

swgw 17y ago
Upcoming should be a function of recent votes. Frontpage order can then be a fx of votes (+), recent votes (+), and time decay (-). This has the benefit of creating the desired functionality without altering the interface.

diN0bot 17y ago

i wish the big stories would get removed sooner so that more content could filter in. maybe it could just be personal: stories i've seen already are removed. either way, i feel like stories get big and hang around even though they're getting more and more upvotes simply for being on the front page. when i page down it's just the big stories from a couple days ago that i already read. if more new content filtered in that would be better. also, categories, or some way to filter the stories would be hot. again, i want to see more content. i do look at new, but the problem is that the step down is from 50+ comments to 0 comments, lots of filtering to no filtering. i don't want to read unfiltered, uncommented articles anymore than the next person, nor do i want good new articles to be bombed by a lack of views or the first vote being negative. perhaps we can develop a small group of people dedicated to the task, either for extra or separate karma, or simply to be part of a group doing a good job. the IBM bug-finding black suits comes to minds. this could also be a good task for n00bs to grow their karma faster, though i suspect we'd also have to work in more experienced folks in order to pass on appropriate hacker news culture.

spydertennis 17y ago
/i wish the big stories would get removed sooner so that more content could filter in. maybe it could just be personal: stories i've seen already are removed./ I think this is a great idea. As someone who visits multiple times a day and see most of the same content (like a lot of other people I'm sure) it would be awesome to be able to hide stories to create room for others.
- eru 17y ago
  I agree. Though I am interested if there's a discussion going on, and if it has grown since I last visited it.

covercash 17y ago

I've been a huge fan of the 'hot or not' style quick voting for a while now. So much so, that my friend and I included it in a little test project we did a while back: http://beta.popularo.com/ http://beta.popularo.com/ The goal was to circulate new content to all users and at the same time reduce the chances of gaming the system (we were frustrated by the digg "power user" submissions). Needless to say, it sits dormant now but we're both glad reddit and digg have implemented similar features.

ericwaller 17y ago
Your site is getting caught in Safari's suspected malware filter. There's a out-of-place link to "Best Philadelphia Wedding Photographers" in the footer which might be related.
- covercash 17y ago
  I'll let my friend know. It's his domain and hosted on his server. This was the first time I've visited the site in about a year and I happen to have been in Chrome when checking if it was still live, so it worked fine. I doubt he'll care or make any changes since I'm pretty sure nobody visits it anymore. Thanks for the heads up though!

ironkeith 17y ago

I've submitted 18 articles, and 9 have made it to the homepage (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ironkeith http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ironkeith). I am certainly not a power user, and I don't have a circle of friends who quickly upvote my submissions to game the system. So far as I can tell, people use the new page, and interesting articles make the home page. That said, I also think it's really important to ensure that the title you submit is properly phrased. The articles that have received the most votes have inevitably been the ones I put some time into rewording to appeal to HN users.

vaksel 17y ago
the stuff of yours that got voted up, is what you found online at popular sites. The reason it bypasses the death, is that other people try to submit it too, at which point it gets 1 extra upvote. I'm more speaking for the people who write their own stuff(sivers, asmartbear etc). Who spend 2-3 hours putting an interesting article together, only to have it die in the new bin. For example, I get asked all the time how I got my site to 35K visits in 2 months. And I'd love to share. But I always put it off because I know there is a 90% chance it'll never get off the new page. Why should I spend 3-5 hours putting that article together with graphs and data, if I know for a fact that there is 99% chance that it'll die. I got a site to run, I can't throw away my time like that. In fact the only articles of mine that actually made it to the front page, were those which I linked to from another relevant discussion. Those got 40-60 upvotes. But if I didn't link them from a relevant thread, they'd be stuck in the new page like all the other submissions.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  For me it's a mixed bag, some of the stuff I write that I think will be for a very small set of people does surprisingly well, other stuff that I think is more important does much worse. But just like making music, I write what I write because it helps me to put down my thoughts, how many others read it, find it useful and/or comment on it is really not that big a deal to me, though I'm always very happy when there is some kind of interaction around something I write. Usually I learn as much from the feedback and the comments as I did from doing whatever it was that I wrote about in the first place.

gojomo 17y ago

Alternate ideas: (1) Make it so that each user only sees a deterministic subset of 'new' (unless they try really hard to enable 'all'). Essentially, this means every 'new' article is seen by a random panel of users, and stays on the 'new' page longer. Tinkering with the assignment function could achieve any balance between submissions/users/views/duration-on-first-page that is preferred. (2) Segment 'new' by number-of-votes-already-received. Make the default 'new' only 1-vote stories. Only allow viewing and voting on 2-vote stories by people who have already cast a vote on a 1-vote story, and so forth. (That is, force people to pay more attention to those less-reviewed, before piling-on to already-popular stories.)

kristiandupont 17y ago

I think that Reddit's solution with a new entry at the top is good. Right now, there is a bias towards the preference of people who visit the "new" page.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]