3 ms·

It seems like the problem might be that there's such a short amount of time to discover good content that gets submitted. During peak times, a submission can b

It seems like the problem might be that there's such a short amount of time to discover good content that gets submitted. During peak times, a submission can be pushed off the first page of /newest within ~20 minutes. If that's a problem, then one solution might be to change the number of items displayed on the new page from 30 to 120. I wouldn't be surprised if the first page of /newest gets 5x to 10x more views than the second page. People like scrolling; people click much less frequently. So upping the number of posts shown on the new page to 120 should give better content more time to be discovered. Another idea is to tweak the new page so that the first page of /newest shows every new submission for exactly two hours. That is, page 1 would consist of submissions that are 1 minute to 2 hours old. Also, maybe some kind of reminder to check the new page every so often would help, but that's probably a bit heavy-handed.

jessriedel 13y ago
You're just explaining variance. But since no more than a handful of his 100+ posts made it to the front page, it seems pretty clear that they are not what HN selects for.
- sillysaurus3 13y ago
  Not necessarily. Variance is a powerful force. 100+ samples may sound like a lot, but it's often insufficient. My favorite book on this topic is http://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/index.html http://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/index.html, in particular the sections on statistical power.
rdl 13y ago
One of the things I sort of hate is when ~10 articles on the same topic get posted at the same time -- honestly, WaPo and NYT and CNN might not be blogspam about a press release or major news event, but there's often little need to read all of them (or rather, enough overlap that the best article would be a synthesis). HN stories being anchored by a single URL kind of makes it impossible to put all the topical articles in one big story.
gwern 13y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if the first page of /newest gets 5x to 10x more views than the second page. My guess is way way less (not that /newest gets any traffic as it is). I regularly visit /newest to contribute a bit of voting, and I don't think I've ever bothered with the second page.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  There's no point in visiting the second page. Even if you upvote something there, it's the only upvote it will get.

jessriedel 13y ago

You're just explaining variance. But since no more than a handful of his 100+ posts made it to the front page, it seems pretty clear that they are not what HN selects for.

sillysaurus3 13y ago
Not necessarily. Variance is a powerful force. 100+ samples may sound like a lot, but it's often insufficient. My favorite book on this topic is http://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/index.html http://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/index.html, in particular the sections on statistical power.

rdl 13y ago

One of the things I sort of hate is when ~10 articles on the same topic get posted at the same time -- honestly, WaPo and NYT and CNN might not be blogspam about a press release or major news event, but there's often little need to read all of them (or rather, enough overlap that the best article would be a synthesis). HN stories being anchored by a single URL kind of makes it impossible to put all the topical articles in one big story.

gwern 13y ago

> I wouldn't be surprised if the first page of /newest gets 5x to 10x more views than the second page. My guess is way way less (not that /newest gets any traffic as it is). I regularly visit /newest to contribute a bit of voting, and I don't think I've ever bothered with the second page.

waterlesscloud 13y ago
There's no point in visiting the second page. Even if you upvote something there, it's the only upvote it will get.