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Ask HN: Should HN users be incentivized to use/visit newest submissions?
I’m a HN user for 10 years, and I realized that I’ve newer used nor visit « /newest » page on HN. I always use the home page, where the top 30/60 upvoted submissions are. Quality submissions can only reach visibility if HN users upvote them from /newest so I wonder if we shouldn’t be incentivized in any way to do so?
- matteotom 5y agoI think the existing incentive is by browsing /newest, you can find interesting submissions and get a quality comment in earlier, and probably get more upvotes as more people view the comments page.
- marklit 5y agoYes, it would broaden the subject matter that hits the homepage. Also, encourage people to upvote more often. There appears to be a 150:1 click to upvote ratio on stories which seems very low.
- themodelplumber 5y agoGood line of thought. Quality content tax-payers could at least know what they are missing when they reload the same home page / feed for the 10th time. Quantity has a quality, etc...
- cplli 5y agoAnother thing to consider (at least something that I sometimes do myself) is that some people may open a story to read for later (or even at the time) but never come back to upvote the post or engage in conversation.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoSo people visit new when they post a story, when I am on new I look over what is around and if there is anything I should upvote or flag if really bad obvious advertising. I guess it is probably the same for most users who submit things. As it is submissions do show up on the front page, so it must be that some are getting upvoted, so I sort of think the system works good enough, despite my many quality submissions not getting more than one upvote.
- wben 5y agoCould we sign up to be reminded to check new with a intermediate page that might be displayed occasionally? Maybe set the frequency we'd like the reminder?
- charcircuit 5y ago>Quality submissions can only reach visibility if HN users upvote them from /newest I could be wrong, but new posts should show on the main page to at least a small amount of users.
- fouc 5y agoMaybe 1 or 2 of the top 1000 /newest submissions could be randomly mixed into the homepage results on every page load
- kstenerud 5y agoEnough people visit the newest page such that that around 80% of the good stuff makes it to the front page, and about 5% of the bad stuff makes it (and then is quickly flagged to death). I think it's working fine as things are now. Our information is imperfect enough as it is, even before taking into account the huge number of people trying to game the system to get their ph3r0mones to reach the front page (seriously, the new page can get pretty dismal). Complicating it further will give diminishing returns, and even risk backwards progress.
- DoingIsLearning 5y agoAgreed, there is enough critical mass in /newest to act as a first pass filter, if there really is something interesting that falls through the cracks the moderators will put it into that second chance pool or what have you. Also generally there isn't as much hate on resubmissions/repost as for instance in reddit. So you can simple repost if you feel that you didn't submit it at the right day of the week, timezone peak time, etc.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago>and about 5% of the bad stuff makes it (and then is quickly flagged to death). I would say some really good stuff makes it among that flagged to death stuff that unfortunately is not among the things that HN does well.
- ilaksh 5y agoThat is very far off. It's not anywhere near 80%.
- raxxorrax 5y agoI sometimes use the search engine to filter popular topics from the last 24h. That often gives a good pre-selection of interesting newer topics. There is a lot that gets posted on HN and you cannot read it all. Sometimes I look at newest too, but it is a lot to read through...
- ghgr 5y agoI often come to HN for the discussions, not for the links themselves, and unfortunately that's something missing in "New". It happens quite often that the submission itself is not terribly interesting (e.g. a blog post ranting about some database engine), but nonetheless it spawns a fascinating discussion, filled with first-hand anecdotes and other insights. So when I browser "New" I usually upvote submissions that have potential to create an interesting discussion (so I upvote what I believe _other_ people will find interesting, in a Keynesian beauty contest way).
- holistio 5y agoSame here. I come to HN to sense the heartbeat of the industry. What are the opinions, the controversies, the trends, the public sentiment. It's not even the technicalities that interest me herer.
- capableweb 5y ago> the public sentiment Mostly the same here, but I also realize HN is such a tiny slice of the public that sometimes you get a opinion it feels like is generally agreed upon because every single HN user subscribes to that idea, but when you come out in the afk world it turns out most people just don't give a shit about it.
- MarcScott 5y agoI've had an email from Dang, I think, in the past, and so has a buddy of mine. > A submission that you posted to Hacker News looks good, but hasn't had much attention so far. We put it in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page some time in the next day or so. So there are mechanisms to get new content on to the front page, but they're dependent on Dang noticing them.
- CaliforniaKarl 5y agoNot just that. I and others have noticed submissions that looked interesting but didn’t make front page, and emailed the post ID/link to the HN email address. It’s not a guarantee, but it helps good things from being missed.
- polote 5y agoNo, it works well as of today. The more new stories are upvoted the less time a good story spend on the front page ( because the front page has fixed number of links)
- aww_dang 5y agoIf you find the unfiltered new submissions interesting, that's the incentive.
- pvg 5y ago/newest is tricky because it's inherently the opposite of what most people read the front page for. What's a little worse is that there are actually disincentives to visit it - like many people, I have showdead on which is essentially harmless for comment pages because dead comments are rare. It shows all the spam in /newest so on top of looking at a stream of unfiltered submissions, you also have to look at all the spam. It's too big of an ask - you'd like to do your bit to help the site but in this case it feels like the site goes out of its way to not help you.
- WHA8m 5y agoIn contrast to /asknew which is almost spam-free. Since /asknew was introduced about half a year ago (?) I have the feeling 'Ask HN' posts do reach more often the front page. This might back up your point because people seem to go to /asknew (and leaving an upvote/comment there) more often (less spammy experience).
- pvg 5y agoIt might be the luck of the draw but I see four pre-deaded comments in /asknew now vs five in /newest. It looks about the same, again, with the caveat it might just be a coincidence. I'll also admit I'm an unrepentant, flaming hater of Ask HN, its parents, its parents' friends and the people who owe them money.
- WHA8m 5y agoCan you explain to me what a "pre-deaded comments" is? I haven't heard of that term before. Also, if you don't mind, I'd be interested to hear what you have to bring against the 'Ask HN' format :) (Edit: I don't expect a long paragraph, but maybe you could indicate a general direction)
- app4soft 5y agoNo. HN should be as it is now.
- octoberfranklin 5y agoIs there any evidence that upvotes affect frontpageification? Serious question.
- rdbell 5y agohttps://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking-algorithm-works-1d9b0cf2c08d https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-hacker-news-ranking...
- dusted 5y agoNah, I think it's fine as it is, I like that the frontpage is "slower" and that I can get all sorts of random, funny trash in /newest
- boffinism 5y agoI thought HN randomly pushed new submissions to the front page for random users, and measures how many votes they get before deciding whether to put them onto the home page for more people. There was a post about the mechanism recently. (It's why getting friends to upvote your new submissions doesn't front-page them, as those votes are ignored).
- WelcomeShorty 5y agoRather not, I like NH as it is. I do not want to get notified upon reactions, I do not want to be fed the latest, I do not want emotes wilder then :) What makes this site so compelling is the quality replies & discussions and the lack of anything blinking and shiny. Source: old man.
- mywacaday 5y agoIf I could suggest one concession in that a native dark mode be possible as an option.
- jakub_g 5y agoFYI Chrome Canary has a "dark mode for websites" in incubator. It allows you to darken every website. On mobile it works very well on HN; the desktop exp doesn't have UI affordances yet though. It's also in stable (incl. forks like Brave) behind chrome://flags -> search "dark"
- mywacaday 5y agoThat works brilliantly, thanks!
- jillesvangurp 5y agoI've never succeeded in getting even a single upvote on links I submit. I've stopped bothering, there seems to be no point. It's not the quality of the links either. It just doesn't have a high chance of getting through. I've actually seen links that I submitted land to the front page a day or so later when somebody else resubmitted them. You basically need to get lucky with the right people actually looking at the new section in the few minutes it will be on there. After that it's gone. One interesting enhancement that would help with that and that also addresses the problem of duplicates is to simply count duplicate link submissions as an upvote on the original. Most popular links have numerous duplicates before and after that did not make it. Some links actually make it to the front page multiple times. So use the link as a Unique Resource Locator and treat them like the ids they are.
- matsemann 5y ago> One interesting enhancement that would help with that and that also addresses the problem of duplicates is to simply count duplicate link submissions as an upvote on the original. It does, for a time (a few hours?) after the original submission. But when you repost a link two hours later on a submission that didn't get any traction, that upvote is meaningless and a new submission with a new chance of traction might have been better.
- Thorrez 5y agoHuh, I thought HN actually prevented you from resubmitting the same URL for a certain period of time (at least a few weeks). I always thought people added some query parameter or something to get around that restriction to resubmit.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoNot if other people resubmit them.
- Thorrez 5y agoI just tested it. I picked something[1] off of /newest that was 4 hours old, and created a new submission with that as the link and the same title. It seemed like it submitted, but on closer look, HN had actually just taken me to the old post. The poster was still the previous person, the time was still the previous submission time. Funnily though, it actually upvoted it. I hadn't upvoted it before, but submitting it caused me to automatically upvote the other person's post. I guess I could try it with different ages if you want. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185632
- matsemann 5y agoI almost have a different issue. I feel like I miss big news here, even though I check in multiple times a day. When using the "past" menu item, there's stuff on top there I never saw on top on HN. Does thing stay shorter on top than they did before? Didn't feel it was such a problem a few years back.
- capableweb 5y agoI felt the same way, until I found out about /lists (https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists) and subsequently /best (https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best). Best is literally the best part of HN for me as it moves slower and contains the "Highest-voted recent links". Give best a try, and I'm sure you'll feel like you miss less.
- almostarockstar 5y ago/active is the best for this I feel.
- lockyc 5y agoI use and highly recommended https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ for this very reason. Chronological list of what’s hit the front page, and seems to have a pretty decent threshold
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoYou might not be visiting New but someone is. And/or enough ppl are submitting naturally new stuff to cause stuff to float up. It works pretty well for notable and fresh things (and then even old stale rehashed stuff that the new-watchers constantly upvote also pushing it onto the rest of our radars)
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoIf you're worried about missing quality new stories because they skyrocket or maybe don't hit front as fast etc, and you're on Twitter there's some handy bots collecting posts at thresholds like 20 and 50 upvotes over the course of a day that are handy for what's good https://twitter.com/betterhn20 https://twitter.com/betterhn20 https://twitter.com/betterhn50 https://twitter.com/betterhn50 https://twitter.com/newsyc100 https://twitter.com/newsyc100
- bschne 5y agoI wonder if you could come up with some incentive scheme where if you upvote something you get karma or a different set of points based on a) how early you were to the party, and b) how many upvotes things gain after you, sort of like the internet community version of a Keynesian beauty contest, or a prediction market. This is obviously a bit convoluted and not really hashed out, but I got curious how the incentive scheme might look like.
- dexen 5y agoRecommend against incentivizing visiting the newest submission - it would increase effectiveness of submitting content over the effectiveness of community moderation. That kind of change would empower the outsiders over the community, presumably resulting in decrease of relevance and gradual erosion of HN's local culture.
- Anonymous4272 5y agoThe current way HN works is fine for news and links etc, but for discussions i personally believe an imageboard style will work better (based on the number of replies against time), though that means that certain threads that become arguments will also be on the front page.
- randycupertino 5y agoI think requiring a starter comment for submissions would be helpful and up the quality of submissions. Not sure if HN has ever tried that?
- teh_klev 5y agoI don't think requiring but at least allow the option to explain why you posted the link. I sometimes do that with a first comment just in case it's not obvious, and maybe that's enough.