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Randomize HN: Removing the vote threshold for getting to the front page
- capableweb 7y agoI think it works fine like it is. Things easily get on the frontpage so they can get some exposure, but they only stay there if enough people continue to vote for it. If someone flags it, it also disappears quicker. The value is not about how fast it gets to the frontpage, but about how long time it lasts there.
- surround 7y agoThis article is from 2013. Does HN currently do something like this?
- ShamelessC 7y agoYeah this is confusing to me because they imply you need a certain score to get on the front page but I'm seeing plenty of links on my front page with very few upvotes.
- thrower123 7y agoThe decay rate for front page items has always felt off to me. Quite often you'll see articles with 20-30 points and no comments camp in the middle of the front page all day, while more actively discussed items drop off.
- krapp 7y agoItems with active discussions are often implicitly penalized, because the number of comments are often greater than the number of upvotes, which is interpreted as a sign of low quality discussion or possible flamewar.
- angry_octet 7y agoPost time of day is influential for most social media. This possibly depends on if a topic is more US or Europe relevant. Different sources of the same breaking news seem to have widely divergent scores, well before the content is read.
- dang 7y agoComments don't affect story rank, with the exception of the flamewar detector mentioned in the sibling comment by krapp. It's not uncommon for certain kinds of story to get plenty of upvotes but no comments. Those stay on the front page for a while. I think that's fine; something can be interesting even though we don't have anything to say about it.
- btilly 7y agoNot to the best of my knowledge. If an article manages to get a few votes, quickly, then it gets on the front page fairly easily. (This one got there with 5 votes.) Once on the front page it snowballs. The obvious solution to that is to ask a handful of friends to vote for it. HN has a solution for that workaround by identifying vote rings and banning them, plus banning the site that was attempting to do that. So getting on the front page remains a crapshoot, even for good material.
- dang 7y ago> If an article manages to get a few votes, quickly, then it gets on the front page fairly easily. In principle yes, but HN's anti-voting-ring software often drops a lot of those votes. If you see something on /newest with a bunch of votes and it's not on the front page, that's likely why. A side-effect that we never anticipated is that some eagle-eyed HN users figured this out and started calling out the egregious cases. So we got a secondary hivemind ring-detector out of the deal.
- lhoff 7y agoThe article was updated 2019. The update is at the end of the article. According to the update HN tried it but it didn't work well.
- btilly 7y agoI like this solution, and would like to point out another way to look at it. It can be viewed as simulated annealing. A brand new article starts at a "high temperature", it has a chance of showing up randomly for a selection of people. As time goes on the temperature lowers. And it either made it or didn't. That is suppose we have a function called rand_hash that takes an article id and a user id and produces a random number between 0 and 1. Suppose that T is the time in minutes that a new article has been up. For position we treat a new article as having a vote of: votes + C * rand_hash(article, user) * e^(-k * T) Where C and k are factors that affect how much we want a random boost to be able to raise a new article, and for how long we want it boosted. Then what happens is that every person will see, mixed with the popular articles, a random selection of new ones. The new ones that are particularly interesting will organically pick up a few votes and then snowball. The new ones that aren't will disappear from the random mix.
- crtlaltdel 7y agoi had thought of using simulated annealing for a meme-based social sharing platform around 2014.the idea was after "cooling" to a point it would be removed from the stack. honestly i never developed it past that line of thought.
- dang 7y agoWhen we tested a variant of this idea, we found that it didn't work for what I guess you could call psychological reasons: readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing junk on HN's front page. By "junk" I mean stories that were placed there randomly and that weren't of high-enough quality to otherwise be credible candidates for the front page. Basically, it was an "ow my eyes", "get that shit away from me" effect. (I don't mean to demean the submissions people posted that got randomly placed in this way; it's just that words like junk and shit reflect how users reacted to the random placement thing.) HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page. This shows up in the inevitable "How is this on HN?" comments when a story somehow violates the commenter's personal contract or mental model of HN. Randomly placing candidate stories on the front page created a version of this that was like 100x worse. It violated people's model of what HN is supposed to be, in ways that the randomness exacerbated. Two lessons I drew from that experience: (1) people's relationship with HN is surprisingly personal; and (2) never jeopardize that bond. Runner-up lesson: don't introduce noise into an emotional relationship. If we had software that could measure how credible an article is as a candidate for HN's front page, I'd be willing to try this again. But I suspect that would amount to software that could measure how good an article is, and that would be the P=NP of internet news sites. I'm still convinced that a lot of the best content—i.e. submissions that would gratify intellectual curiosity and that the community would have a great time reading and discussing—languishes in obscurity in the lower echelons of /newest, so HN's front page is still far from optimal. The second-chance process has helped (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380) but I'm convinced that there are more things that we can do, mainly by building ways for the community to do them. It's important that we not build new mechanisms that just reproduce the upvote system, though.
- wruza 7y agoHN has 30 cool slots, internets have millions. It is okay if something cool doesn’t get to the front page and that’s it. Links don’t go /news-first for the exact same reason most HN readers don’t go /newest-first.
- sillysaurusx 7y agoHow long a submission stays on the front page is almost entirely human-controlled, not vote-controlled. It's algorithmic in the sense that there are obviously different thresholds, but a human decides which bucket a submission is in. And the bucket determines how long it stays, and whether it's low or high on the front page. Then there are corner cases. Ever notice people point out in comments when an article is misleading (not just the title) and then a short time later the article gets downranked or whisked off the front page? It happens more than randomly. The point is that the simple theory of how submissions work is almost entirely mistaken. HN is a newspaper; the editorial staff decides what to print. Votes still matter in the case of getting things onto the front page, sometimes. Much of the time it's a result of the second-chance queue described in the article though. The theory that people will find 30 interesting articles for the front page each day is false. It's a huge amount of hard work. Very few do it for free. And those that do, collectively tend not to have good taste. (Some individuals do, but not random HN members as a whole.) Leaving it up to the community would result in an uninteresting front page. I think it's techie nature to want to find an algorithmic solution for something as complicated as HN curation. I fell into the same trap. But an automatic solution doesn't exist. The early history of flight proved that it was foolish to try to design a plane that would stabilize itself, as opposed to giving a pilot manual control. HN is much the same. Reddit shows that there are automated solutions, of course. But at HN scale, the problems with Reddit's approach become significant. And we only have one subreddit here.
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- dang 7y agoThat is not how HN works.
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- Dowwie 7y agoMake front page participation accessible through participation in the newest section. You have to earn the privilege of participation. Upvoting the first X items on the list, so as to just get the work done, is an issue I haven't figured out yet.
- dang 7y agoThat would be a sort of paywall, and we know how HN feels about those.
- vjktyu 7y agoHN could implement an interview style vetting. A new post is shown to a N interviewers who vote yes/no. The stddev is sqrt of number of votes. Once the number of upvotes crosses the 95 tile, the post is admitted. Once the number of downvotes crosses the 95 tile, the post is rejected. Otherwise the post stays in the undecided area until it expires.
- dang 7y agoWe actually do something like this with the story reviewing mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380.
- superkuh 7y agoThe best way to view HN is by RSS. Items come in sequentially in time but you can sort and search however you want in your reader.
- karmakaze 7y agoYou may also be interested in Hackerer.news[0] (mind the extra 'er'). It groups posts by day. Clicking on the heading switches from popular to chronological, then Ask/Show views. [0] https://gitlab.com/karmakaze/hackerer-news https://gitlab.com/karmakaze/hackerer-news
- joshschreuder 7y agoYeah I normally read via the HN 100 feed (https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/#activity-parameters https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/#activity-parameters) which picks up posts that pass 100 points. I find it to be a pretty good gate of quality submissions and I don't have to sit on the site all day... the other bonus is I catch stories that get flagkilled after that threshold that I would otherwise miss which is sometimes nice.
- lookdangerous 7y agoI don’t see the effect this piece aimed to solve as a bad thing. It’s effectively the Pareto principle and it is found in so many places.
- tartrate 7y agoI'm guessing it turns out that new posts are good because of the current front page rules.
- lukego 7y agoSpeaking as an Australian raising Swedish kids, it's going to be weird watching this with them in s couple of hours and acting like it's a natural thing to do! (Christmas is of course really about eating mangos and drinking cold beer in the sweltering Queensland sun...)
- jacquesm 7y agoThe simplest solution in my opinion would be to expand the length of the new page. Good stuff simply lives there for too short a time to gather sufficient upvotes and people rarely click through to page 2.
- Jaruzel 7y agoSeconded. I personally think it should go up to 50 posts.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]