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I guess i'll hijack this thread to ask anybody else if they have noticed a slip in quality of front page? I used to check HN first thing and read 50%+ of frontp
by nikcub 13y ago
I guess i'll hijack this thread to ask anybody else if they have noticed a slip in quality of front page? I used to check HN first thing and read 50%+ of frontpage stories, now I barely click one or two.
When there is something interesting, I've often read it elsewhere, or its an Ars re-hash of a story from yesterday. When I submit stories I find interesting and HN-worthy, I find them at 3-4 points having been submitted 12 hours ago.
My perception is that the HN frontpage is being gamed more by social marketing teams, journalists who work for re-spamming blogs and growth hackers. The types of stories are more soft news, marketing from co's etc. than much more hard-tech.
As an aside, right now the homepage is unusually good - must be because it's a weekend and the social media hackers are at home.
- pg 13y agoActually we're pretty sure there is less of that now than a couple years ago, because Daniel has written some amazingly effective software for detecting it.
- angry-hacker 13y agoHow does it work in general terms?
- grinich 13y agoThere are two rules for success: 1. Never reveal everything you know.
- tptacek 13y agoIt's not as good as it has been in the (far) past, but it's better than it was at its nadir, when the front page was saturated by stories from a few obviously baiting sites on a very few topics. One thing that does seem to have gotten persistently worse is the process of getting a good story onto the front page. Mediocre stories with immediate or simple appeal do seem to be doing a better job of outcompeting Rilke than they ever have in the past. It's a good site for halfway-decent posts about Golang or CSS compilers. Thankfully, it's become less hospitable for nakedly ambitious Bitcoin cheerleading or comically inept copyright law analyses. It would be great if the site could come up with some way to let the kinds of posts 'gruseom's submission log models get some space on the front page, but it would be bad if that attempt reverted us back to the worst of the Venturebeat and Techdirt days.
- Jd 13y agoHas there ever been a point when Rilke would make the front page? The only comparable moment I remember was when Tarkovsky made the front page for a bit, but that was an extraordinary aberration.
- dang 13y agoRilke has always had a small chance of making the front page. I think I've gotten Dostoevsky on there once or twice, and a few others.
- nikcub 13y ago> One thing that does seem to have gotten persistently worse is the process of getting a good story onto the front page. Completely agree. The Business Week cover story on new details from the Target data breach got 16 upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391406 It was submitted with 5 other URLs and each got a point or two. Another example, the excellent NyTimes story on the NSA breaching Chinese telco companies to hack Huawei got 10 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450963 The NYTimes version was the canonical source. There was a great WSJ report on Google adapting to the app age which was heavily shared on Twitter, 1 point on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375529 Bill Gates Rolling Stone interview, 1 point (although re-blogs of excerpts ranked): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7393830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7393830 BW on Satya Nadella managing the legacy of Ballmer's Microsoft board, 4 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7348628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7348628 These are stories I quickly recalled from the last ~week that I enjoyed, all just happen to not register on HN. If I go through my queue on pocket i'm certain there would be many more examples. I'd estimate less than 10% of what I now save on pocket for reading is sources from HN. My take is that there was an influx of non-tech people wanting to find out what tech people were reading about. If you subscribe to the usual tech blogs you'll find (or would have found) that a lot of their stories are/were sources from here or are reblogs[0]. This mass of new users has now affected what is selected and how. [0] Example, Notch tweets that they are canceling their Oculus deal. His tweet gets 8 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469714 A Next Web story which is nothing more than the tweet embedded in a page of ads gets 823 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469829
- DanBC 13y agoThere are some sources which are used that perhaps shouldn't be. Sadly lots get posted from those sources and people up ote them so there's not much to be done. As always, visit /new and upvote the great stuff and flag the flagable stuff. If you notice weird vote patterns a short email with links usually gets results.
- corresation 13y agoSites like HN can't escape Parkinson's law of triviality: Complex or mixed-conclusion content will naturally get drown out by easily "understood" (at least in the perception of the reader) and debated material. Titles play a large part as well, as they allow people to support or reject a notion without the effort of even following the link. This isn't meant to be grumpy or conspiratorial, nor is it negative about HN, it's just the way these things often work. HN does not measure or demand that you follow a link to click the arrow (nor does it require it for "flag", which is a used in practice to downvote). It doesn't maintain a history of recently visited items to ease voting on content you may have read earlier in the day. These naturally lend themselves to cheap votes.
- dang 13y agoHN has always been rather intensively curated. You may be right about the statistical trend, but conscious intervention can and does reverse this "entropy" somewhat in our limited context. The question is how we can do this better. Fascinatingly, the number of stories posted to HN has not been increasing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446750 It's a mistake to interpret that as saying anything about the site's growth. In fact, it's a good thing. The number of substantive HN-appropriate stories in the world is not growing by leaps and bounds; neither, therefore, should our story stream. We want quality, not quantity. There's a lot we can do about story quality, because the front page is so limited, there are many fewer stories than comments, and because we manage the front page for quality in ways we would never manage the threads. However, there's no way we can scan the universe of stories to find all the best ones. We rely on /newest to be our universe of stories. If /newest is broken, we'll fix it. But we're going to focus on the problem of bad comments first.
- kevando 13y agoI'm happy to see these are the priorities. To emphasize comments > submissions, my HN app for android opens all articles directly to the comments. it takes 2 clicks to see the submitted link.
- dang 13y agoI did not have the impression that it has gotten worse recently, but it's hard to know. I take your opinion seriously, though. I'd appreciate your help in identifying posts that are "[gaming] by social marketing teams, journalists who work for re-spamming blogs, and growth hackers". It's my job, and my fervent desire, to make the front page inhospitable to such dreck. HN has been in an arms race for a long time against artificially promoted content, and we (mostly PG) have developed a lot of defenses against it over the years--a large part of why HN is still standing. I've written software to combat such gaming and I intend to write more. One thing I'm pretty sure of, though, is that the problem of bad stories is easier than the problem of bad comments, and it is the latter that poses the greater risk to HN just now. Incidentally, this past week was a good one for the HN front page. These two threads, in particular, were IMO as good as any in recent memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7480278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7480278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7483323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7483323
- nikcub 13y agoThanks - I will send along any examples I find. A suggestion might be to have another way to signal that a story is being artificially boosted besides 'flag'. For instance, a 'report' button where a brief description could also be attached (ex. 'This person posted this link to Facebook and asked their friends to upvote it'). The second part is good stories not ranking (see comment above), which doesn't have a straightforward solution, although it might sort itself out with softer, re-blog, and promoted stories being moved out of the way.
- Snail_Commando 13y agoMy comment may be lost into the aether. But if anyone is out there, I think Hacker News could really use a story merge feature. That would significantly reduce noise around "major" events, and likely prevent second order noise as people try to piggy back on with tangentially related "analysis".
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- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoI have this feeling too. Data analysis would reveal the truth. hint
- dang 13y agoNot without a fitness function for measuring "quality".
- OGC 13y agoWelcome to the internet.
- joshdance 13y agoI don't think it is quality slip as much as scope increase. Now there are more topics on the homepage that will not interest everyone.