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> The low scores are a bit surprising because all submissions got enough votes to make it to the front-page. The entire premise of this section is incorrect. T
by jsnell 5y ago
> The low scores are a bit surprising because all submissions got enough votes to make it to the front-page.
The entire premise of this section is incorrect. There is no such thing as "enough votes to make it the front-page". There's no single threshold, nor is the value of a single vote constant. You're going to have a lot of other effects like specific domains having score penalties, votes being ignored due to them appearing to be fraudulent / non-organic, or the votes arriving too diffuse over a long time period. (Duplicates of the same URL will count as a vote for something like 12 hours after submission, so it's quite easy for a link to get a long tail of votes even after dropping out from the first page of /new.)
I would bet that most of what they claimed made it to the front-page never did. There used to be some HN stat-tracking sites around that had the full ranking history of submissions. Joining against that data would be a lot more credible.
> To achieve this goal, the new-page should expose every submission to a certain amount of views, to estimate its eligibility for the front-page.
That is obviously unworkable. /new is a slush pile, 90% of the submissions do not deserve even a single view based on the title. The proposal ensures that people visiting /new will only see the obvious garbage that nobody else has clicked on either.
- manx 5y agoYou raised some important points. The threshold of 2 upvotes is a necessary condition to be considered for the front-page (all pages, not just rank 1-30), not a sufficient one. I have this information from dang himself. Garbage on the new-page will only be viewed, but never upvoted, so it drops quickly because of the view- and age-penalties in the formula and makes room for other submissions. But of course, this needs real-world experiments.
- jsnell 5y agoThe author's definition of "view" is "click-through". Posts that are obviously not worth clicking through based on the title / domain will get no views, and thus keep getting seeded back into the rotation.
- manx 5y agoNow I understand. You're right, that's a real disadvantage. We'll take that into account in our coming research. Thank you!