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Ask HN: How to give submission a second chance?

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Re: Ask HN: How to give submission a second chance?

#11

Post by jawns »

Not too long ago, I was thinking about a "second chance lottery" for Hacker News submissions that never gained the traction they deserved.

Wouldn't it be kinda neat to have a webapp that locates all of the HN submissions with just 1 lonely point from the past day, and picks one at random to feature prominently?

Along similar lines, last week I whipped up a little tool called Momentum that lets you "pre-promote" links that you plan to submit to HN, so that people who think a link is interesting can plan to up-vote it when it's actually submitted:

http://momentum.pressbin.com

Ironically, I submitted Momentum to HN ... and it never gained traction.

Re: Ask HN: How to give submission a second chance?

#12

Post by bvi »

bensummers wrote: post #3

I don't bother submitting stuff any more because: 1) There's too much noise on the new page. 2) It matters which at what time of day you submit an article. 3) There's too much chance about whether it'll been seen or not. 4) Someone else will post it with a slightly different URL (see above), and that's the one which will be noticed. I am, of course, very grateful for everyone else who posts stuff. There's usually a g…

I'm really hoping pg is working on something as we speak about the SNR (based on his thread a few days ago asking for feedback).

Personally, I think a separate section is needed just for HN'ers to showcase/demo/launch their startups or projects - "Show HN" threads, for the most part, have even less chance of getting eyeballs especially if they're self-posts; plus, there's the whole luck/timing thing as well. Or instead of a separate section, perhaps they should be given more weight, considering...isn't that what HN is all about in the first place?

Re: Ask HN: How to give submission a second chance?

#13

Post by bensummers »

ouchies wrote: post #10
derefr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And better even yet, allow you to spend more karma points to give it a higher initial score. And still better, when a thread gets archived (when the comment thread becomes read-only; happens after some N days), add its current score delta (the number of points it has now, minus the number it had when you initially invested yours) back into the user's karma, times some coefficient (possibly just 1.) And finally, allow…

I like the sound of this game, much more interesting than just reading techy news all day. What do we get when we win? Is it better than the knowledge I currently get? Something like kudos from people I'll never meet? remove tongue from cheek Seriously, why? This would seem to me to be the perfect way to breed people who care more about karma than content... and they're the problem, IMHO.

Seems to me that all the people who have lots of karma don't care about it, and just got it as a side effect of contributing. Now they're all[1] leaving, or participating less.

[1] For some definition of 'all'.

Re: Ask HN: How to give submission a second chance?

#14

Post by triviatise »

dailykos has a similar problem, huge number of posts so some good ones never get traction. Someone respected (maybe markos) will post an article each day that will list a few particularly good articles that may have never gotten traction.

I think that you can give trusted members in the community more weight when voting. Determination shouldnt be done in an automated way.

Re: Ask HN: How to give submission a second chance?

#15

Post by kirchhoff »

bensummers wrote: post #3

I don't bother submitting stuff any more because: 1) There's too much noise on the new page. 2) It matters which at what time of day you submit an article. 3) There's too much chance about whether it'll been seen or not. 4) Someone else will post it with a slightly different URL (see above), and that's the one which will be noticed. I am, of course, very grateful for everyone else who posts stuff. There's usually a g…

I submitted a project of mine a while back, but it never gained traction, attracting fewer than 50 visits from HN. It was later picked up by TechCrunch, so objectively it couldn't have been that uninteresting.

I second the suggestion for a separate section for the "Show HN" posts, as it would give each post a better chance of being seen by those willing to provide feedback.

Re: Ask HN: How to give submission a second chance?

#17

Post by psg »

I think utilizing another method besides "votes" could help increase traction for more submissions. For example, if I could easily discover users who share my interests, I'd love to receive an update (RSS) whenever that user submitted, voted, commented, etc. on an article. Instead of receiving a stream of content that may not interest me (I therefore only scan the page), I would know the content I'm seeing is somehow pre-vetted (at a minimum, by the submitter).

Ironically, I've felt this way for a while and created a website to test this theory.

Re: Ask HN: How to give submission a second chance?

#18

Post by stevenj »

Perhaps people could put a list of submissions (links) they thought were good, but went largely unnoticed by HN, in their profiles.

For example, it could look like this:

My overlooked submissions list, from newest to oldest (last updated: xx.xx.xxxx):

1. Article Name (http://domain.com)

2.

3.

4.

5.

Re: Ask HN: How to give submission a second chance?

#19

Post by petercooper »

And even when things are noticed and voted up, flagging seems to have a significant effect. There are plenty of examples of items with 10-20 votes that are mysteriously several pages deep just an hour after submission despite those with fewer votes and longer times coming sooner.
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