3 ms·
Ask HN: Why does a small collection of sites make the Front Page so often?
This is a list of sites I put together off the top of my head that are always appearing on the HN Front Page:
techcrunch
engadget
nytimes
theAtlantic
forbes
techdirt
bbc.co.uk
extremetech
wired
arstechnika
These are all great sites, often with newsworthy content but the problem I have is they are all likely to be on many people's list of regularly visited sites, just like HN.
This also makes it easier to farm Karma by continually submitting links to any breaking stories on these sites.
My suggestion is that any links to these, and similar, sites need to have a "drag" factor attached so that they need for example 3x or 2.5x the comments to progress at the pace of a less "popular" site. The drag factor would increase to some maximum as the sites get submitted more often.
This way a really interesting story from a site with a high drag factor will still make the front page but we would get a chance to also see interesting stories from a much wider selection of sites.
- stephengillie 15y agoThe rumor I've heard is that some of these sites, like extremetech (and physorg and sciencedaily and pandodaily) use bots to auto-submit everything. The assumption I'd make about the rest is that they hire college students to pretend they're bots that auto-submit everything.