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HN front page ranked using only votes from early users (2009)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jaspax 6y agoOkay, I get the idea here, but... my account is younger than that and I'm sort of miffed by the notion that my votes shouldn't count at all. Furthermore, having the cutoff date be in the past means that I could never earn that right regardless of how much I participated after that. I would be much more well-disposed to a view that only counts votes from accounts which are more than a year old, or some other criterion which reduces young and drive-by accounts, while still allowing people to eventually count as old-timers.
- wheybags 6y agoI upvoted this comment, but it doesn't count.
- ninjin 6y agoWhat I want is a news aggregator like HN but where I can control (possibly have it learnt) how to rank based on network effects. Preferably in an interpretable fashion if any machine learning gets involved. Heck, I would even be happy for it to be partially probabilistic to get me to “read across the aile” at times.
- nojito 6y agoYou can already do that. Just click hide on posts you don’t want to see. The issue with having a model that does it for you is that your going to immediately start fighting against it and its decisions.
- the_only_law 6y agoHate to be the stereotypical pedantic HN commenter, but fwiw this normally works, I believe there's an exception with Ask HN posts where clicking "hide" will not fully hide it, at least last time I tried.
- ninjin 6y agoWait, have I been on HN since 2011 without realising this? There is nothing in the FAQ at least [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html I have always avoid pushing “hide” since I assumed a new submission would pop up at the bottom and I never wanted to go beyond the top 30 as I feared I would stay on the site for a bit too long.
- estaseuropano 6y agoSo tiktok but for news?
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoSmart personalised and decentralised search with comment aggregation and sharing. It shows you what you're interested in, not what adtech, or social media barons, or VCs, think you should be reading for your own good. Or for "engagement." Something something echo chamber? Probably. But it's not as if we don't have those already.
- derekp7 6y agoI've thought about that, however I worry about it turning into what Facebook does and put you in an echo chamber (with the occasional "across the isle" item thrown in to "make you angry"). But I still like the idea, just not sure what the best implementation would be. Some ideas I've had include having multiple up/down vote buttons for different criteria -- one that says if you agree or not with the content, and another one that says if it is a well reasoned and interesting post. That way I can pull up things that people in my cohort think is a good post but also disagree with content wise. But this requires that people are reliable able to judge something fairly that goes against their view. Then I'd like to see "bubbles" that show which cohort(s) I belong to and which other ones are out there so I can choose which to read at any one time.
- SamBam 6y ago"Aisle," both of you, like in the senate chambers.
- thraway123412 6y agoIt already is an echo chamber. Except that you have zero control over the content you see, so you're stuck in someone else's echo chamber. It can be really fucking frustrating, which is why I closed my main account after 8 years.
- test1235 6y agoyou're still here tho, so why close the account?
- thraway123412 6y agoI don't really want to be here. This account will be gone too as soon as I close my browser. I won't make another one unless something very urgent comes up.
- mikepurvis 6y agoSlashdot moderation has this, with separate voting for insightful, interesting, funny, etc, and the corresponding toggles on the view side if you want to prioritize or exclude particular categories.
- nend 6y agoI always thought HN (or reddit, youtube, etc), with a Bayesian filter would be interesting. I'm sure there's a good amount of obscure content that doesn't get appreciated because it never reaches the people that would enjoy it.
- dang 6y agoThat's certainly the case but how would a Bayesian filter help?
- mstipetic 6y agoWhy do you care about a random view on a website?
- cinntaile 6y agoIt probably started as a fun gimmick rather than an actual feature people are supposed to use?
- platz 6y agoYour vote counts on the main homepage. > a view that only counts votes from accounts which are more than a year old, or some other criterion which reduces young and drive-by accounts Are you sure you know what the motiviation for accounts older than 2008 is (are you sure it's reducing young/drive-by accounts?) Have you thought about what that motivation might be?
- jaspax 6y agoI assume that it's to filter for people who have been around a long time. If there's some other specific motive, I'd love to hear what it is.
- platz 6y agoThat's the what, not the why Also, nothing has been removed, only added. You can see more of the data which was hidden before.
- tomhoward 6y agoIt was an experimental feature slapped together by pg in 2009, and has been largely forgotten about ever since. The motive then was to see if there was any difference if you filtered out newer users. There wasn't then, just as there isn't now. Its continued existence is just a historical artefact. As far as I can see it's not linked from anywhere in the UI, and is only occasionally referenced in comments. Nothing to be miffed about!
- Terretta 6y agoThing about things that happened before you is you can never be a person who experienced them. That said, could be implemented as a rolling decade. The term is “classic”. For cars that takes 25 years. Ten for tech seems fine.
- ianai 6y agoThat would be accounts from 2011 and before.
- app4soft 6y agoStill curious, what had happened to HN on Feb 13th, 2008? I just scrolled to its frontpage[0] and the top story was “Immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry”[1]. Any other explanations why `https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic` turned back to this date? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-02-13 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-02-13 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115094
- derivagral 6y agoOn google and wikipedia, HN's launch date is listed as "February 19, 2007". I presume this is to screen for that first ~year of accounts. Funny, since I remember lurking for years before making mine!
- kzrdude 6y agoYour vote counts in the "primary" ;). You are part of selecting stories for the main page. Overwhelmingly, "classic" voters will vote for things that are already visible on the regular main page.
- jerrre 6y agoMeta enough this post was #1 for me on HN, making it the biggest drop of between regular and Classic HN.
- zecg 6y agoMissed me by three days.
- gota 6y agoWhy was the arbitrary date of Feb 13, 2008 chosen? I think a mechanism with filter-by-date might be interesting but that date of 13 years ago is arbitrarily excluding most 30-something year olds (all but the precocious 18~low 20s that created a HN account?)
- ibraheemdev 6y agoIt isn't arbitrary, it is one year after HN was created.
- gota 6y agoThanks - I had no idea. My question is less about the particular date (an anniversary of the plaform) and more about the year, though 20008 determines more than 'classic', then, it determines 'early adopter' edit - I see your other comment about /classic being from 2009. That makes a lot of sense!
- ComodoHacker 6y agoAre there enough active and voting accounts to rate anything adequately? It's like calculating market quotes only from deals by old enough participants.
- arnaudsm 6y agoShould be renamed /gerontocracy
- watmough 6y agoBoomer edition.
- woofie11 6y agoThis sounds entirely reasonable. A bunch of web sites went the route of having a bunch of smart, reasonable people get together and make something real. When those grew, they became popular with idiots, with spamming/SEO/astroturf, and/or taken over by extremists in some direction (at which point, everyone else heads for the door). The web sites became cesspools of crap. I'm fine being excluded if that means HN continue to have high-quality content. If the pre-2008 accounts start falling off, it wouldn't be too hard to find a pool of high-quality contributors from 12 years of comments, upvotes by pre-2008'ers, etc. Indeed, I wouldn't mind having explicit tiers, even if I am in a lower one.
- the_only_law 6y agoWould love to see this for comments as well. I swear some years ago, I used to be able to find some really interesting stuff browsing the "comments" link now I'm more likely to find throwaway_xyz posting flamebait takes.
- alexizorba 6y agoI don't think it'll work for comments. But maybe, maybe their upvotes can count more than one vote. Or their downvotes (i think it will create more readable comments)
- benlumen 6y agoYep - it's an interesting twist at least. If HN continues to grow, we all know where it ends. And there's a reason we're here and not there.
- OJFord 6y agoFiltering the comments tab on karma would be good. Roughly the same as your suggestion of course, since if an early user is still commenting, they almost certainly have accrued a lot over the years, but it would also allow newer entrants that have had well enough received (or enough well received) comments to qualify.
- 6y ago
- ibraheemdev 6y agoI think a lot of the comments here are incorrectly assuming that this is a new page. The classic page was first announced by pg in 2009 [0]. He created it because: > I wanted to see if there had been any visible decrease in quality. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
- whatever1 6y agoHow is this helpful? If the HN veterans did not like the 2020 content of HN they would simply not use it. The results are just showing the particular interests of that group of people who still enjoy the site after 12 years.
- SamBam 6y agoIt's interesting for historical purposes to see if the tastes of the "old timers" are different from the tastes of the "newcomers." It would be hard to measure this directly simply by comparing the front page from 2008 to today, because different articles will have been posted on different days, so a direct comparison is imposssible. By simply seeing what old-timers vote on vs what everybody votes on, you can make a better apples-to-apples comparison. Not a perfect one, of course, because many old-timers may have quit long ago if HN had changed too drastically, and similarly their own ideas of what HN should be may have changed.
- modzu 6y agoi think his hypothesis which isnt tested by the classic page, is that if 90% of the old timers left hn, the 10% who remain could be those who vote similarly to the newcomers, making both pages appear similar, even though a significant group of old timers may have voted differently.
- Terretta 6y agoWhich is quite helpful. It’s my default bookmark as I prefer the mix. // This account is 2010; I had been in the earlier cohort under different account. A decade later I still find the early but still active cohort votes a mix of links I prefer.
- 1f60c 6y agoHow many of those people are still around?
- Y_Y 6y agoObviously nobody who was an adult in 2008 is still able to operate a computer or comprehend the latest tech trends. This is clearly aimed at tapping the wisdom of the savvy investors who have made a bet on vintage hn accounts as the latest digital store of wealth, indicator of wealth and conferrer of legitimacy. If you were smart then you spent the last decade picking up these heirlooms in estate sales and recovering old logins from fossilised magnetic tape.
- rob74 6y agoApparently a lot, if you compare the vote counts on the "normal" homepage with the "classic" homepage. Actually the difference is so small that I highly doubt the "2008" claim in the title - I think it's still counting accounts that are over one year old!
- asah 6y agosuggestion: instead, just rerank using weighting by age (and other factors?)
- danicgross 6y agoYou could expand the cutoff date by modeling lookalike audiences. A 2018 account that votes on similar things to a 2008 account might be admitted. This affords the moderator an easy “exploration” spigot they can tune up or down.
- mrtksn 6y agoOkay, how OP discovered this? Is there a some kind of index/glossary of HN features where we can look for? Can we do this by other criteria? I.e. another year or points? The opposite of the classic could be also interesting.
- ibraheemdev 6y ago> Is there a some kind of index/glossary of HN features where we can look for? Yes there is an un-official list of undocumented hacker news features: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- mrtksn 6y agoThat's great, thank you.
- Havoc 6y agoThat's one hell of an old cut-off
- jcpham2 6y agoIt's neat and number one for me as well; an obvious signaling Prior to only a few years ago, I considered all website comments to be throwaway and never bothered to sign up or comment. It's sortof a new exercise to share my thoughts with the group.
- yread 6y agoIt's nice to know what the greybeards find interesting. As an almost greybeard it would be interesting to see what the young'uns are upvoting
- MrGilbert 6y agodang's comment on this 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438990 Amusingly, it seems to re-surface every now and then.
- ibraheemdev 6y agoYeah, it does seem to pop up every now and then :) Many of the newer users don't know it exists until someone brings it up again.
- platz 6y agoAt first glance, on the /classic page, There is less: - pop-culture & humanities - notifications about momentary outages across the web There is more: - hard-science topics - algorithms - posts about VCs
- varjag 6y ago- Rust
- londons_explore 6y agoBut overall, the ranking is much the same, and all the differences you see might simply be because there is only a handful of votes for some pages from old-timer accounts (ie. the quantization noise is pretty big).
- platz 6y agoThat the ranking is the same seems a bit of an early assumption to make, without seeing all or more of the data.
- JW_00000 6y ago> quantization noise is pretty big Seems to be true. I have an account which is apparently from 2007, so included for the classic page. When I upvoted the article on place 29 and refreshed it jumped to 28. When I upvoted the article that was now in place 29 it jumped to place 24. Votes on the normal homepage don't seem to have anywhere near that effect.
- Terretta 6y agoIt’s enough different to prefer/bookmark/use it exclusively if that’s your bag.
- reedf1 6y agoIn addition, on the /classic page, There is less: - Up-to-date tech There is more: - Nostalgia/Parenting content ( A Calvin and Hobbes guide to parenting? )
- tnorthcutt 6y agoThis was originally announced[0] with the title HN Frontpage ranked using only votes from accounts over a year old So is there a reason to think now that the cutoff date is Feb 13, 2008, or could it be dynamically counting accounts over a year old? 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kubanczyk 6y agoEven for 2008 cutoff, the classic ranking is still remarkably similar to the main ranking. (Which stupefies me.) So why bother tuning it to be even more similar?
- jerrre 6y agothe likely cause of similarity is the "classic" users browse (and vote based on) the regular front page
- monsieurbanana 6y agoThere's nothing surprising to the ranking being similar. Old accounts don't use classic, they use the normal HN homepage like everybody else. Which means, they see the same top links as everybody else, and upvote them, like everybody else. In other words, /classic is remarkably useless. It might have been useful when it was created (11 years ago!), if a sizeable part of those old accounts would use /classic, and only /classic.
- Terretta 6y agoI use /classic, slightly less dross. It’s gotten gradually less different through time, perhaps something to the point that others may not be using it.
- oblio 6y ago> Which stupefies me. You're surprised that the general tech population is remarkably similar to the elite tech population? :-p
- A12-B 6y agoThe only interesting difference is less posts about Facebook get upvoted.
- markkat 6y agoIt'd be very cool if you could set the classic date in your profile.
- gmac 6y agoRight — and it could perhaps default itself to the date you joined, since that's a moment when it seems likely you liked what was on offer.
- Aachen 6y agoThat does introduce the risk that people actually use this. Now, this page is a gimmick, a historical artifact. If it were actually used by more than a handful of users, that would be right alienating for new users, especially if it's a fixed date that you have to manually update.
- rax0m 6y agoTurns out "classic" had 10 of my clicked links - while the normal "new" had 5. Will use classic from now on.
- hobofan 6y agoSame difference for me, but most of the clicked links are from one day ago. It mostly just seems that the classic page has a slower turnover (due to less votes).
- v-yadli 6y agoNice idea. Could be better if this threshold is implemented into the user profile and let the user decide.
- gehsty 6y agoCan we get one the other way round?
- sebastien_b 6y agoSo, some form of elitism? Any specific explanation for ignoring 12 years of newer accounts? To me that’s potentially a whole generation of new engineers’ comments/questions/insights that are being ignored, again for no discernable reason. If there was a spam problem (or similar) I could understand, but this just seems arbitrary. Again I would just want to understand the reasoning for it, as it could be legitimate.
- exdsq 6y ago/classic is 12 years old too - pg set it up to see how the front page differed based on 1 year old accounts and all accounts.
- crazypython 6y agoAgreed, it should count votes from high-karma new individuals.
- tomhoward 6y agoIt was a quick experiment in 2009, and soon forgotten by most. It's not linked from anywhere in the site's UI. It doesn't seem intended to be used anymore, and seems to exist as a historical artefact. Certainly nothing for people to be offended by.
- sebastien_b 6y agoWas there any discussion about that experiment at the time? Again, mostly curious as to the reasoning, as this kind of thing would tend to go against fostering a community, which is what the idea behind HN seems to be.
- tomhoward 6y agoThere was this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271 Nobody seemed to have a problem with it, and quite clearly the community has grown a lot since then.
- ibraheemdev 6y agoIt would be interesting to see how many votes are cast by accounts from that range, rather than just sorting it that way and displaying votes from all users.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y agoI understand the desire to look at the input for the original users, but I think in the spirit of fun and the tradition of Star Trek TNG there should also be a view that only starts to count after the start of the first year - it could be /beard.
- 3131s 6y agoNot particularly useful because almost all the old timers are still looking at the same normal homepage that everybody else is. Counting only votes from /new would be interesting.
- DrJokepu 6y agoI remember the day I joined HN in March 2009. The entire front page was full of Erlang articles. Like, almost every single one. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently that was part of an intentional effort to scare away newcomers who weren’t “hackery” enough. I thought to myself, if these people are really this crazy about Erlang, maybe there’s something to this website after all and created an account. I have to say, I was somewhat disappointed when it turned out that it was all a ruse!
- kzrdude 6y agoThe say Steve Jobs died, every single story was about that. Not complaining, the day was treated well this way.
- graderjs 6y agoActually: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-10-05 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-10-05
- kzrdude 6y agoAlso look at https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-10-06 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-10-06
- polote 6y agoand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078988
- graderjs 6y agoWOw pretty good memory you guys! I see you were watching HN that day. I don't think I even knew what HN was then. I find it ironic, or fitting, that the 30th story on Oct 6 2011 is actually about Flash, a thing that died relatively soon after, in no small part due to Steve!
- arbitrage 6y agoso, old people?
- oblio 6y agoOld people? Let's say that the youngest you could be (without being some sort of child prodigy) interested in this content is ~8, that would make the youngest person with an account that old maybe 21 years old. That sounds super old to me :-)
- Apreche 6y agoDang, even my account isn't that old. October '09.
- criddell 6y agoWelcome to HN!
- ceilingcorner 6y agoDoesn't seem to be working. I see many submissions by accounts created after that date. Is there some reason why a person downvoted this? When I visit the link, I see links submitted by accounts created in 2019.
- mikewarot 6y ago>ranked using only votes from early users The ranking, not the submissions, are from the old timers. I would love to know why downvotes happen as well.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoWhoops. I could swear the title was changed. Thanks for pointing that out!
- I_am_tiberius 6y agoThat's like only people above the age 70 elect the president of the United States.
- HugoDaniel 6y agothis is peak HN shtick, straight from the heart of startups "oldest members are $BETTER because they invested early in the idea" or some other ideological BS like that...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bborud 6y agoI really hope someone gets it into their head that they're going to analyze this and perhaps visualize the results in some lovely way. I would love to know if the difference in voting patterns can be characterised and we can learn something from it.
- Brajeshwar 6y agoI thought I was pretty early to Hackernews (August 23, 2008). I'm curious to know what I missed that happened in Feb 12/13 of 2008!
- CivBase 6y agoI just refreshed both the Primary and Classic front pages and did a quick comparison. Classic had 14 articles that were not on Primary. The first unique article for Classic showed up at #15. All of the unique articles for Classic were at least 11 hours old, with 5 of them being at least 1 day old. Primary also had 14 articles that were not on Classic (obviously). The first unique article for Primary showed up at #4. All of the unique articles for Primary were at most 12 hours old, with 4 of them being at most 1 hour old. This page may have originally been created to investigate a difference in "quality" between older and newer HN users, but it actually does a great job of highlighting the opposite to me. The Classic page is mostly the same as Primary, just slower. Older HN users seem to generally like the same things as everyone else here. I'm sure most of the pre-2009 users who don't like modern HN have moved on.
- kubanczyk 6y ago> Older HN users seem to generally like the same things as everyone else here. Probably most HN users (both older and younger) mainly vote for stuff already visible on the Primary page. A hypothesis from a parallel thread, not mine. What follows, the users mostly vote as led by the "trend setters", by whom I mean those who frequent /newest subpage.
- metalliqaz 6y agowhat is the significance of that date?
- adenozine 6y agoThere's an assumption that older accounts somehow have better or different taste, which I find incredibly questionable. I think it's more likely that they just happened across the site sooner, and happened to stick around. I'd like to see the frontpage but sorted by votes from accts with a lot of comments, or a lot of karma. That would be more revealing
- pluc 6y agoIt is supremely elitist and very marketing-y (use an impression (older users were better) over using real-world data).
- BenoitP 6y agoThe Frontpage rank I'd like to see is a PageRank. Quality is a transitive property; I want to see what is upvoted by those who are upvoted (comments as well as posts)!
- PaulHoule 6y agoWhat's remarkable to me is that the ranking is almost the same. If you used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistics) to sample possible top pages you would see #1 and #2 are pretty stable but around #10 or so you see some variation. So it's not clear to me that the oldsters have different preferences from the youngsters. When you aggregate preferences it converges to a statistical average of 'voters'; typical users like you and me are already an aggregate of preferences (there is music that i like, software i like, business i like, etc. that are basically disjoint) like the body thetan aggregates that Scientologists say we are. If you look at the top submitters on HN that are exceptional in the volume of articles they post you see their preferences are very typical and it is hard to tell a difference between the % of articles that they submit on (say) "deep learning" and that appear on HN as a whole. It's like the way that almost any stock market portfolio you make is going to converge on the SP&500 if you add more stocks and wait long enough. More salient, however, is the distribution of articles submitted in 2021 as opposed to 2008; "deep learning" was talked about hardly at all in 2008 even though Geoff Hinton was giving talks at the time where he was sketching the idea out. It is not obvious to me that oldsters have significantly-different preferences than youngsters (w.r.t. chance) and I'd put the burden of proof on those who say it exists.
- mikewarot 6y agoSince this seems to be the week for me to express unpopular opinions, as a recent (2019) user of HN, I welcome this, and have bookmarked it. Why? Because it seems to offer a much better signal to noise ratio.
- zwieback 6y agoI just checked - created my account 5 days before pg did the "classic" experiment. I'm the problem - not!
- paxys 6y agoI'd be much more interested in seeing such a ranking for comments in somewhat controversial articles.