the digg effect
Ask HN: Many quality articles don't go to the front page. What is the problem?
21–30 of 45 posts
Re: Ask HN: Many quality articles don't go to the front page. What is the problem?
#22I've noticed this happening in the last 6 months. Articles of mine that spent the better part of a day on the front page of Reddit sail their way down the New page here over the course of 45 minutes, never to be seen again.
Funny, because a couple years back that's what would happen to anything you submitted to /r/programming. Now the noise has all moved here and it's actually easier to get Reddit to pay attention then HN.
Re: Ask HN: Many quality articles don't go to the front page. What is the problem?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
No more so than three years ago, when I started lurking. Or two and a half years ago, when I signed up. Or however long ago when I first commented. People are interested in what other people are doing. Techcrunch happens to be a big resource in figuring this out. Thats not necessarily a bad thing in itself.
i like to know too. but only about the innovators and leaders, not so much the 100 me-too startups that try to make the same thing but with a different name.
Don't underestimate the usefulness of knowing what people are interested in at the moment. Social networking and the like may be gimmicky, but, they don't become popular for no reason.
// edit: A better "but, …" might be: "but, Facebook has an insane valuation for a reason: a lot of people seem to believe it can make a lot of money."
Re: Ask HN: Many quality articles don't go to the front page. What is the problem?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
i like to know too. but only about the innovators and leaders, not so much the 100 me-too startups that try to make the same thing but with a different name.
Don't underestimate the usefulness of knowing what people are interested in at the moment. Social networking and the like may be gimmicky, but, they don't become popular for no reason. // edit: A better "but, …" might be: "but, Facebook has an insane valuation for a reason: a lot of people seem to believe it can make a lot of money."
I never said anything about social networking being 'gimmicky'. It's fills a human need for belonging. The kinds of articles that get my attention explain how successful startups work or how others failed.
Re: Ask HN: Many quality articles don't go to the front page. What is the problem?
#25One small improvement that might help would be to hide the articles that one has already read, keeping the front page to 30 articles. That way, after you read some articles, there will be some fresh meat on the table.
Re: Ask HN: Many quality articles don't go to the front page. What is the problem?
#26It takes 4 points currently to make the front page, if your submission does not have those 4 points by the time it scrolls off the new page it will take a small miracle for it to be brought back.
Also notice that the 'new' page has a 'more' link at the bottom, you could do worse than to check page 2 and 3 as well to see if anything good fell through the cracks.
Voting up articles that have not made the front page past the third page of 'new' articles is unlikely to have much effect.
Re: Ask HN: Many quality articles don't go to the front page. What is the problem?
#27I think it's a function of there being too many items submitted every day, and not enough people checking the "new" page. During busy times of the day, if you don't get 5-10 votes within the first 10-15 mins, you're on the 2nd page of the "new" posts area, and you're never going to make it. I'm afraid the end result is that the only posts that will end up on the front-page are: 1. Where the author (domain) is well-kn…
Another obvious cause of submissions falling too quickly off the "new" posts page is that there is only room for the latest 30 posts. Seems like we could fit another 3-5 posts on the "new" page if we removed the posts that have already hit the front page. Of course, this is only a minor band-aid that doesn't solve the root problems, as you pointed out.
Getting dead ones off the page would yield another few.
Re: Ask HN: Many quality articles don't go to the front page. What is the problem?
#28Last time I tried to submit something and it didn't go anywhere, I checked the new page and it was full of multiple submissions from the same person. Personally, I think people should be limited to one submission per day, or else multiple submissions start to cost you karma, so people had better like them or else you get punished for Spamming.
Re: Ask HN: Many quality articles don't go to the front page. What is the problem?
#29I think it's a function of there being too many items submitted every day, and not enough people checking the "new" page. During busy times of the day, if you don't get 5-10 votes within the first 10-15 mins, you're on the 2nd page of the "new" posts area, and you're never going to make it. I'm afraid the end result is that the only posts that will end up on the front-page are: 1. Where the author (domain) is well-kn…
There is a different solution to the reddit one, one that discourages block voting. Perhaps there should be voting groups, essentially a cap on the population of voters. Each time you hit a threshold, you randomly split the voters in two and then the articles you see only get the votes of the people in your group. So one site has multiple groups on the go at one time, all to stop the overwhelming nature of popularity…
Wow. I tried to build a voting-based news-to-your-personal-taste site, but never did I think of this "groups" idea. I'm intrigued.
Idea: do it to HN as an A/B experiment: see how the content of the sites diverges. Actually the "/classic" url does this, sort of, by ranking articles not by total votes but by votes from users older than one year.
Re: Ask HN: Many quality articles don't go to the front page. What is the problem?
#30I was stunned that my last submission, that the gog.com shutdown was a marketing ploy, received 0 upvotes. It was the latest development in the story that was voted #1 just two days prior:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1717426
It appears they're actually back now, so I've submitted it again: