Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#21

Post by techiferous »

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…

"It probably did not get the attention you thought it deserved because the title is just not interesting."

True. However, I don't like the trend of voting up stories because they have interesting titles. It leads to stories about iPhone developers losing out to stories about civil liberties in airports (that has nothing at all to do with hacking).

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#22

Post by csomar »

ugh wrote: post #20
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…

If there is 500 eyeballs per hour for the new page and 30 new submissions, each one get on average 25-30 visits (a user hits a link or two).

If we reduce new submissions 5 or 6 times, each story will get 150-200 hits and thus more coverage, enough to get it to the front page if it worths the FP.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#23

Post by 3pt14159 »

dzlobin wrote: post #9
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 people could game the votes more easily by submitting in groups, rather then voting in groups.

Then you build a system that detects voting rings and other irregularities like too many votes from a certain geographic location without that geographic location being mentioned in the title (protects Hacker News Nights)

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#24

Post by bootload »

"... The Submissions System is Broken ..."

Yes it's broken but HN has always been broken to some degree ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/398269769

But is the core functionality broken? Not really. These type of problems are edge cases, a PIA, but not killer bugs. For pg, I imagine HN is sort of a positive side effect of developing Arc & YC. Fixing this kind of broken but working feature, the downside.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#25

Post by idoh »

There's only 30 slots on the front page at any given time, so something has to give. I'd rather miss good stories than have a part of the front page which is consistently junk.

For what it's worth reddit tried the same strategy but they deprecated the feature.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#26

Post by happybuy »

vaksel wrote: post #16

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.

Yes I agree. I've found that the reddit system has a lot better chance of bubbling up interesting articles irrespective of who submitted it.

Unfortunately, from my experience, HN has become a bit of an echo chamber in the sense that certain posters have a lot better chance of having their articles noticed than the majority; irrespective of the relative value of the individual articles.

I don't have data to support; but with the current system it feels like HN is increasingly pushing users into two extremes - new users (who have an extremely difficult time of getting anything noticed) and longterm posters (those who whatever they post gets noticed and promoted). Long-term this is not conducive to a healthy, growing community.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#27

Post by adambyrtek »

photon_off wrote: post #7

If you really believe your story is FP-worthy and it doesn't make it the first time around, I suggest you delete the original post and resubmit it a few hours later.

I wouldn't recommend that, it can be seen as spamming. Not to mention that everybody thinks his story is FP-worthy.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#28

Post by J3L2404 »

photon_off wrote: post #7

If you really believe your story is FP-worthy and it doesn't make it the first time around, I suggest you delete the original post and resubmit it a few hours later.

Or resubmit from deeper fathoms of the omnivorous echoplex.

Although... HN never rewards reposters, I mean never. If it has already been submitted from a different site it won't get a single upvote, ever. Well maybe not ever, but extremely rarely, but that's because the community is not very fragmented.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#29

Post by gregable »

Someone posted on HN a couple weeks back about the story ranking algorithm. PG mentioned that there were some hidden tweaks, but the basic idea was a function of number of votes and age of the article since submission (a "gravitational" term of sorts which drops stories over time).

This type of algorithm explicitly penalizes stories with a pattern like that which you mention. If a post gets little interest initially but later becomes very interesting, it can't possibly do well in the ranking algorithm.

It would be more realistic if the ranking algorithm took into account the age of the votes more than the age of the article. Recent votes can pop an old article back to the front page, but not if that article had a ton of old votes as the "center of mass" (average age) of the votes would still be pretty old.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#30

Post by eof »

I don't really support 1, it's just too easy to abuse.

edit: the ideas about a threshold (even just two or three for now) of resubmissions to put a sub 5-vote submission back on the new list sounds like a good idea that's significantly less likely to be abused.

Post reply on HN