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This is a great website that should be bookmarked by everyone who cares about search traffic. It is curious though why this submission got up voted to the home

This is a great website that should be bookmarked by everyone who cares about search traffic. It is curious though why this submission got up voted to the homepage and the previous two times it was submitted that it never went anywhere...makes me wonder if there is lots of great content that never gets up voted on HN. Here is a submission from over a year ago.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5405485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5405485

jwegan 13y ago
HN very much has a hive mind. HN used to have great articles all the time. Now it feels like reddit. Every day tons of great articles slip into obscurity while HN upvotes the meme of the day (Snowden, NSA, 2048, etc).
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Seems to me that's not evidence for or against a hive mind, its evidence that, whether or not it has a hive mind at all, the aggregated preferences of the current HN user base don't align as well with your preferences as those of the user base did at one time in the past. But having a user base whose aggregated preferences disagree with yours more often than they used to is no more evidence of a hive mind than having what you perceive to be "great articles all the time" is.
  - davemel37 13y ago
    There was a submission of this two months ago as well that only got two upvotes... Do you think the community changed that much in two months? Maybe HN should take articles that get more than one up vote but die down to resurface in new several times to see if it slipped though the cracks or if it really has no value to the community.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > There was a submission of this two months ago as well that only got two upvotes... Do you think the community changed that much in two months? There's probably pretty big effects from time of day and other things on whether or not things get upvotes. That's not a "hive mind", that's just the fact that upvotes come from people coming here as they feel like doing so, not from a bunch of 24/7 staff that are paid to apply objective, consistent criteria (which would be a kind of hive mind.)
- dang 13y ago
  Every day tons of great articles slip into obscurity Can you provide examples? This is the problem we're going to work on next, after we've made some progress on comment incivility. (I'm going to demote this subthread as off-topic so it doesn't interfere with the real discussion.)
dang 13y ago
It is curious though why this submission got up voted to the homepage and the previous two times it was submitted that it never went anywhere This is easily explicable: it's the luck of the draw. There is a lot of randomness in which stories get promoted from /newest vs. fall through the cracks. We're working on an idea for reducing this randomness.

jwegan 13y ago

HN very much has a hive mind. HN used to have great articles all the time. Now it feels like reddit. Every day tons of great articles slip into obscurity while HN upvotes the meme of the day (Snowden, NSA, 2048, etc).

dragonwriter 13y ago
Seems to me that's not evidence for or against a hive mind, its evidence that, whether or not it has a hive mind at all, the aggregated preferences of the current HN user base don't align as well with your preferences as those of the user base did at one time in the past. But having a user base whose aggregated preferences disagree with yours more often than they used to is no more evidence of a hive mind than having what you perceive to be "great articles all the time" is.
- davemel37 13y ago
  There was a submission of this two months ago as well that only got two upvotes... Do you think the community changed that much in two months? Maybe HN should take articles that get more than one up vote but die down to resurface in new several times to see if it slipped though the cracks or if it really has no value to the community.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > There was a submission of this two months ago as well that only got two upvotes... Do you think the community changed that much in two months? There's probably pretty big effects from time of day and other things on whether or not things get upvotes. That's not a "hive mind", that's just the fact that upvotes come from people coming here as they feel like doing so, not from a bunch of 24/7 staff that are paid to apply objective, consistent criteria (which would be a kind of hive mind.)
dang 13y ago
Every day tons of great articles slip into obscurity Can you provide examples? This is the problem we're going to work on next, after we've made some progress on comment incivility. (I'm going to demote this subthread as off-topic so it doesn't interfere with the real discussion.)

dang 13y ago

It is curious though why this submission got up voted to the homepage and the previous two times it was submitted that it never went anywhere This is easily explicable: it's the luck of the draw. There is a lot of randomness in which stories get promoted from /newest vs. fall through the cracks. We're working on an idea for reducing this randomness.