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Ask HN: Why is the front page stale?
HN is one of maybe two sites that I've checked daily for the past few years (and the only site that has been stable in that role), mostly because (a) I found many stories that were relevant, interesting and exciting, and the list of stories would see a good amount of turnover—only the most popular 3 or 4 stories would remain for more than a day or two.
It seems this has changed in 2014, to the point where 10+ links on the front page remain for at least a day, sometimes 2 or 3 days. HN feels like it's lost some of its freshness.
Could this just be an effect of a wider audience (many posts on the front page get 100+ karma before they start dropping, whereas I remember 100+ felt more substantial in the past)? Is there movement towards increasing the decay to match increased user activity, to preserve the fluidity of the front page?
- markcrazyhorse 12y agoThis is how the Algorithm works: http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574 http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574
- geerlingguy 12y agoAnd from pg, it looks like the 'more current' version (at least as of 4 years go) looks like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417 I'm guessing the algorithm has changed slightly since then, but I wonder if there are some parameters that could use more tweaking to take into account what I presume would be exponential growth in the past few years?
- frankydp 12y agoI was just thinking the same thing. The stagnation seems to be more drastic since the weekend. The average age on the front page is 20hours+ right now. There is also a [dead] link on my frontpage which seems strange.
- kogir 12y agoIn this case, there's actually a bug we're tracking down. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8015140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8015140
- geerlingguy 12y agoAh, that makes sense.