38 ms·
Ask PG: has the hotness algorithm changed? Stories seem to stay longer…
In the past few days, I've felt that stories have stayed on the front page longer than usual.
Right now, I see a lot of stories that I saw this morning or maybe even yesterday (e.g. the Higgs boson cartoon, the Flip ship, the next Microsoft, PageRank and soccer, MVC/MOVE…). A couple have a lot of points but the Flip story for example has "only" 230 points and 27 comments but is 18 hours old. Fairly unusual it seems.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing and it could just be that there have been less visitors or something else… but I'm curious.
- dfc 14y agoDo you think it might be that there are fewer quality articles submitted? Or a greater number of stories submitted in general making it less likely that a story gains significant traction? I have no opinion one way or the other. Just curious why you think the an algo change is the explanation?
- Timothee 14y agoIt could certainly be some other factor. It's just that I can't really think of anything besides 4th of July tomorrow, but I'm not convinced that would have such an effect. Some stories are still getting a lot of upvotes, so it doesn't look like a big decrease in traffic. So to answer your question: it just that to me it doesn't feel like there's anything different except for the fact that the frontpage seems to decay story slower. But maybe I have just been less busy, thus more on HN in the past few days? :)
- gala8y 14y agoI had the same feeling, to a point where, wanting to send some link replying to a friend, I am condfident that story will still be on the first/second page. These two may help see what's happening http://hn4d.com/ http://hn4d.com/, http://hnrankings.info/ http://hnrankings.info/ For the time being, I'll skip the pleasure of investigating. Edit: I am also very often surprised that something showing in /newest feed (even 1st, 2nd page of /newest), shows on front page, too.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]