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I always thought that instead of just encouraging people to check the /newest page, wouldn't it be more effective to just make the front page be a split view be
by lewisl9029 11y ago
I always thought that instead of just encouraging people to check the /newest page, wouldn't it be more effective to just make the front page be a split view between /newest and /new (the current front page)?
- dang 11y agoCouple problems: that would be a dramatic change to the front page; and evidence suggests that people would eventually just tune out the /newest part. We tested randomly placing stories from /newest onto the front page, but it didn't work—the median story is far too poor in quality. It basically just mixed junk into the front page, arguably the worst thing one could do to the front page. If we had rolled that out to everyone as a feature, the main effect would have been a spike in "why is this on Hacker News" comments.
- lewisl9029 11y agoI still feel it'd be worthwhile to experiment with having the /newest content displayed explicitly as a section on the front page. There's no risk of people confusing /newest content as regular front page content this way. It's definitely true that some people will eventually tune out the /newest section in this setup, but those are probably the same people who wouldn't have checked /newest regularly anyways. However, for those who wouldn't mind checking out /newest once in a while, this would remove a great deal of the friction (I realize that clicking the new link isn't a lot of friction to begin with, but every bit helps).