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Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#11

Post by sp4rki »

It probably did not get the attention you thought it deserved because the title is just not interesting. If you think the content is worth the time, take some of your time to give it a better title so people are attracted to the article.

This does nothing for me: "IPhone's Trainyard developer share his story on how he got featured"

But change it to something like: "From 0 to 450k, an App Store Success Story - With Charts and Numbers!"

And I bet the story ends up in the home page. I'm going to drink my own koolaid and submit the story with such a title to see what happens ;)

Edit: I mean, look at what you did here, you posted this message with a title that people noticed and boom, you now have people looking in to the article that wouldn't have already.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#12

Post by ScottWhigham »

Hate that I missed that as I think Trainyard is a great app...

I have a few observations about how I use HN and maybe there are others using it the same way.

-- First, the "Tell HN:" or "Ask HN:" is a real attention getter for me. The first post didn't have it and, because of that, it was easy for me to skip it in the submissions

-- Second, I rarely visit the home page or even the "New" page and instead I opt for the "Classic" page (the page featuring submissions that have been upvoted by a person who has been on here for 365+ days

-- Third, your quote that the post 6 votes because "5 additional people has tried to submit this story" isn't exactly accurate. It has 7 votes now - I just upvoted it.

-- Lastly, what time did you submit it? There is clearly a bias towards certain times here.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#13

Post by ig1 »

jedbrown wrote: post #10
nkurz wrote: post #5

I like number 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724516 I think that a resubmission should have more weight than an upvote.

Then there would just be a bookmarklet to upvote by resubmitting in which case anyone who cared about their upvote would click "resubmit" instead.

I don't think people care about their upvotes that much.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#14

Post by csomar »

1. This will just lead to more spam. Submit, re-submit...

2. Won't work. They are recognized as new stories and they change quickly. Nobody wants to waste his time with "possibly" uninteresting stories.

The solution is to prohibit people with less than a karma threshold, are new, didn't contribute a lot in the discussions from submitting stories. Also, limit other members to 1 story per day, this will give equal chances to all HN users.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#15

Post by rlpb »

sp4rki wrote: post #11

It probably did not get the attention you thought it deserved because the title is just not interesting. If you think the content is worth the time, take some of your time to give it a better title so people are attracted to the article. This does nothing for me: "IPhone's Trainyard developer share his story on how he got featured" But change it to something like: "From 0 to 450k, an App Store Success Story - With Ch…

This just leads to another problem though: the first submitter can bury a story by submitting a poor headline.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#16

Post by vaksel »

i think the reddit system of featuring one new story on the front page would be good. Show a story to a 100 users...if it doesn't get an upvote...retire it, if it does show it to another 100...if a story doesn't get 5 upvotes...retire it.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#17

Post by btilly »

Here is yet another way to tackle this.

If an article is voted for first the first time after time X of not being voted for, it goes back on the new page as of the time of that vote. I don't know the aging algorithm that is used on the main page, but make it be one where the age of the article doesn't matter, but the age of the votes for it do.

This would also handle the case where someone dives through the new submissions page and votes for an article that was posted several hours ago.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#18

Post by [deleted] »

csomar wrote: post #14

1. This will just lead to more spam. Submit, re-submit... 2. Won't work. They are recognized as new stories and they change quickly. Nobody wants to waste his time with "possibly" uninteresting stories. The solution is to prohibit people with less than a karma threshold, are new, didn't contribute a lot in the discussions from submitting stories. Also, limit other members to 1 story per day, this will give equal chan…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#20

Post by ugh »

csomar wrote: post #14

1. This will just lead to more spam. Submit, re-submit... 2. Won't work. They are recognized as new stories and they change quickly. Nobody wants to waste his time with "possibly" uninteresting stories. The solution is to prohibit people with less than a karma threshold, are new, didn't contribute a lot in the discussions from submitting stories. Also, limit other members to 1 story per day, this will give equal chan…

That rule change is not about stopping someone like tomerico from submitting stories (he has a lot of karma and submits only sporadically), it’s about reducing the volume of stories on the “New” page and giving them more exposure, right?

I was already about to write a retort because at first I didn’t understand the mechanism by which this rule change would improve HN. Reducing the volume on the “New” page seems like a good idea, though.

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