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Show HN: When is good time to submit a story on HN?
- svmegatron 15y agoCool! Can you put the graph and the text on a single page, and make them both bigger?
- AlexC04 15y agoyeah - that was way too small for me. I had to zoom a lot. For a small project like this it's sort of a "who cares" decision, but I'd hate for that size to be a design "norm".
- lpolovets 15y agoCool idea, although it might turn into a Catch-22: once people know what the best times to submit are, those will no longer be the best times to submit. =) You should label and explain the axes and sliders. I have no idea what the numbers mean, or what the "pickup ratio" is. Also, instead of linking "bad" below the chart, you should make it bold and link the word "submit" instead. I thought clicking on "bad" would take me to an explanation, not the HN submit page.
- iambot 15y agoI agree with the emphasis (link) on "bad"/"good" being confising, and agree with moving the link to "submit", and actually having an explination behind bad/good. Still nice despite the catch22 though.
- marquis 15y agoI think it's more related to North American lunch breaks and end-of-the-day? I'm on HN now because I take Fridays off for research, but otherwise not much time during the week except for breaks and after hours. I'm not sure how that will change knowing something we all know..
- cookiecaper 15y ago>You should label and explain the axes and sliders. I have no idea what the numbers mean, or what the "pickup ratio" is. Left-click on the graph.
- lpolovets 15y agoThanks.. I saw that mentioned in another comment as well. When I first went to the site I didn't see any affordances indicating that that graph was clickable.
- mmahemoff 15y agoThat would be a good thing for HN, albeit to the detriment of the app in question and its early adopters. But even if there was less ability to "game"/"hack" the system, a public service like this is necessary to ensure that situation remains.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- klochner 15y agoNot a catch-22, it's a game, in the game-theoretic sense. You're choosing a best-response to everyone else's selected post time. Publishing this post data should make the system approach equilibrium more quickly, where in equilibrium the best post time should be fairly evenly distributed.
- iambot 15y agothats pretty cool, as far as using/hackin HN for the best possible result (if thats what one is aiming for). One this that got me though, in terms of usablity, is that me being at GMT+0 it was hard to determine if the far right of the graph was current or lagging? but I'll definitely be checking this out in the future for launch planning etc.
- iambot 15y agoCould the author identify him/herself? I think this is brilliant, and would like to web-stalk/follow whom ever created this. In a purely selfish-selfimprovement manner. :)
- zeratul 15y agoThank you very, very much. I will implement all your suggestions over the weekend. I was trying to make the app work with mobile devices, hence, skimpy use of the real estate. - If you click on the graph you get the definitions. - If you click at the title you get the visual analysis of the data (http://hnpickup.appspot.com/hnpickup_ratio_visual_analysis.png http://hnpickup.appspot.com/hnpickup_ratio_visual_analysis.p...) - if you click at the link below graph is sends you to HN. - the time is calculated on the client side and it should be Your local time - let me know if it's not the case (JSON data has UTC epoch time, though) And yes: it is a catch-22 ;-) EDIT: I don't like clutter on a web page. You can put a lot of information on what is what but you just need it ONE time, then it should go away. Maybe someday I will find a jquery plugin that will do the trick.
- iambot 15y agoBrilliant work, dont suppose you'd reveal (if you have one), your @twitter handle?
- pgroves 15y agoIt's a nice visualization. One more suggestion: Do label the time zone. even if it correctly detects the user's time zone, that's unexpected on the internet. Plus you don't label 'current' time... for all I know it's a Time Zone ahead but only updates once an hour. Anyway, all confusion goes away with a label. Edit: Took out references to my personal time zone
- Matt_Cutts 15y agoEven better, draw a vertical line on the x-offset location of the graph that represents the current time. That will let everyone calibrate to their own time zone intuitively.
- dfc 15y agoYou should put the blurb detailing the formulas under the graph.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- wukkuan 15y agoVery interesting! However, I can't find any indication of what time zone you're displaying. Is it my time zone, GMT+0, or something else?
- tszming 15y agoThe text on the graph is hardly readable on Windows/Chrome
- JonnieCache 15y agoI've always just checked the age of the story at the bottom of the new page, but this is a big step forward. Nice work.
- yread 15y agoHmm this story seems to be posted in a good time. Coincidence?
- brlewis 15y agoCurrently "gravity" pulls stories down as a function of time. If time were replaced by a counter that increments with each story upvote across HN, gravity would be normalized for activity and timing would matter less.
- wavephorm 15y agoa counter that increments with each story upvote Probably should increment based on each story submitted.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ma2rten 15y agoI think it should increase on each story viewed.
- brlewis 15y agoAn increase in the number of stories submitted already makes it harder for an individual story to get on the front page, since it rolls off the New page faster. I think I know why you didn't like the story-upvote count, since sometimes there might not be any good stories available to upvote. But keep in mind that if story upvotes are the new "time", then "time" slows down for the existing front-page stories as much as it does for the new submissions.
- tripzilch 15y agoYou mean instead of "seconds since this story was posted" it should use "number of stories posted since" ? Sounds like a pretty good plan. Though as other people mention you could also add pageviews in the mix, as well as "number of comments since". I'd say a nice linear combination of all three, softmaxed between some limits, added to the number of seconds. The latter bit because you wouldn't want things to go crazy when a huge amount of pageviews or things are posted. But it's a good idea. Especially since I'm in a non-American timezone, which means that if I want a story to be seen I need to take into account US office hours as well, and your suggestion might sort of take the timezone effect out of it.
- nocivus 15y agoThis post will balance things out, i think...
- revorad 15y agoGraph nanny says "Label your axes, damnit!"
- zeratul 15y agoI know, I know. It's amazing how many times I broke this rule. I do better in future. Somehow I think there should be a different design rules for labeling "persistent" (?) graphs, i.e. graphs that you look at regularly. If you look at a graph couple times a day you need to know the meaning of axes only one time. After that, the labels are waste of the real estate. I will look at the vital signs equipment to see how it's done.
- revorad 15y agoThe point of labelling graphs, much like commenting code, is communication with others and your future self.
- zeratul 15y agoThis is invaluable comment. Changes my whole perspective on how to represent the data. If I could I would use all my karma here. Thank you EDIT: My mentor always says "graph or table has to stand on it's own" but that does not resonate with me. The "commenting code" analogy does.
- nandemo 15y agoI still don't know what does the vertical axis represent. Normalized points? At what time?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- phil 15y agoThis doesn't make any sense. We can upvote a story 1,000s of times but eventually gravity will win and it will fall to the bottom of the front page. And when it does, it will skew the hell out of that graph.
- danso 15y agoCool idea. Theres a possible significant blindspot. The best time to submit a story appears to be 8:30 pm, but that may be because a higher number of stories that were popular during the workday (which is probably when HN gets the most traffic) have been pulled down by gravity enough that newer stories have a better chance of getting in. But don't those new stories peak during a time that presumably, HN's traffic is at a low? And can peaking at 10PM be enough to carry a story through to the top of the next day's new popular stories? TLDR: Does being popular in the off-hours offset by the presumably lower traffic to HN?
- joshuarrrr 15y agoI think you have to consider that not all submissions are equal. Some stories are likely to shoot to the top of the front page regardless of their competition. For those, you would want the post to peak when there are the most readers, which requires posting during competitive slots. But for more run-of-the-mill submissions, posting during a time of less competition is probably a bonus.
- ck2 15y agoSome might say this is the "more" link but there is probably room for a "news you missed" feed/service that looks at articles that got some links or comments but either never made it to the front page or fell off too quickly.
- tingletech 15y agoare you aware of http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ ?
- Mz 15y agoNot sure how close this is, but there is also: http://rrrewind.com/ http://rrrewind.com/
- ma2rten 15y agoI actually had the same idea once. I am glad you got around to implement it, so I don't have to ;). I also thought about making other stats, to answer questions like "How much does it matter which user submitted the post?", "Which words in the title influence if a story gets upvoted?", "Which sites have the most high quality (upvoted) content?"
- mrpollo 15y agoIn my experience, Friday Night PST has always worked out great for stories I post
- kennywinker 15y agoI would love to see this for reddit (all of reddit, and for specific subreddits as well).
- koenigdavidmj 15y agoShouldn't a story should get more activity because people think that it is interesting/insightful/useful, not because it showed up at the right time?
- fuzzythinker 15y agoNo separation of stats for day of the week?
- sycren 15y agoWhat timezone is this?