5 ms·

I 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 te

by btilly 7y ago

I 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 ago
i 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 ago
When 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.
- btilly 7y ago
  Interesting. I am glad that you tested it. I would suggest as a followup that you allow people to opt in to getting a mix of new stories. My suggestion would be that "people are automatically opted in, and every new story comes with a link to opt back out". I do understand if that version scares you though. I suspect that only a vocal minority of people will have a strong negative reaction. And if objectors have a painless way to solve the problem, you shouldn't get many complaints.
  - rtpg 7y ago
    Seconding the opt-in. Even marking it as a random entry such would be a decent way for people to work within this system without much complaining. I mean ultimately this is the “new” page but a bit more streamlined
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    Isn't 'opting in' just going to /newest? You can already do that.
    - btilly 7y ago
      No, it is getting a couple from /newest when you're on the main page.
- pvg 7y ago
  One thing that might make /newest a little more user-friendly would be an option to have a showdead just for it. I have global showdead on and often it means staring at a /newest full of autokilled spam. showdead in /newest just keeps me out of /newest.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    This is a good tweak. In fact: there's an argument that showdead doesn't fit /newest at all; aren't the people reading it deliberately not discriminating that way?

by btilly 7y ago

crtlaltdel 7y ago

i 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 ago

When 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.

btilly 7y ago
Interesting. I am glad that you tested it. I would suggest as a followup that you allow people to opt in to getting a mix of new stories. My suggestion would be that "people are automatically opted in, and every new story comes with a link to opt back out". I do understand if that version scares you though. I suspect that only a vocal minority of people will have a strong negative reaction. And if objectors have a painless way to solve the problem, you shouldn't get many complaints.
- rtpg 7y ago
  Seconding the opt-in. Even marking it as a random entry such would be a decent way for people to work within this system without much complaining. I mean ultimately this is the “new” page but a bit more streamlined
- cortesoft 7y ago
  Isn't 'opting in' just going to /newest? You can already do that.
  - btilly 7y ago
    No, it is getting a couple from /newest when you're on the main page.
pvg 7y ago
One thing that might make /newest a little more user-friendly would be an option to have a showdead just for it. I have global showdead on and often it means staring at a /newest full of autokilled spam. showdead in /newest just keeps me out of /newest.
- tptacek 7y ago
  This is a good tweak. In fact: there's an argument that showdead doesn't fit /newest at all; aren't the people reading it deliberately not discriminating that way?