I prefer /newest. I'd rather see stuff unfiltered. Plus you can comment on stuff without 150 other comments. so it feels like your comments are heard.
Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes
31–40 of 105 posts
Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just splice a random /newest entry into a front page on every load. This gets extra eyes on them and helps float good stories up. Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.
If you have ideas on how to improve the front page, a great thing to do is to send them to hn@ycombinator.com. Dan and Nick are super responsive, and you might be able to have a more productive conversation in email than on a thread.
Posting it here helps accumulating other people upvotes, which, presumably, Dan and Nick can see on their end. It also opens subject to a wider discussion, which is hardly a bad thing. Meta threads are pretty damn useful if you ask me.
Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're never going to get a totally straight answer, because things like voting ring detectors rely in practice on obscurity; if you knew the exact details, it would be much easier to game the system.
Makes it rather hard to debug or avoid posting in a bad way.
Yes it does. You take the good with the bad. You can always ask hn@ycombinator.com about your submission; if it gets a bunch of upvotes but winds up 30 pages down the site, that's a pretty good indicator that something happened.
Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes
#34Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns. Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy. Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all. These aren't well-developed…
good ideas here and in the responses. we will consider.
any thoughts on actually creating a discussion board/forum. because there are a fair many of those types of posts. (Show HN, questions etc.)But,there are a lot of news/off site type posts and they don't seem to go together.
Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have ideas on how to improve the front page, a great thing to do is to send them to hn@ycombinator.com. Dan and Nick are super responsive, and you might be able to have a more productive conversation in email than on a thread.
Posting it here helps accumulating other people upvotes, which, presumably, Dan and Nick can see on their end. It also opens subject to a wider discussion, which is hardly a bad thing. Meta threads are pretty damn useful if you ask me.
I agree, and I actually like the meta-threads, but I've had much more success talking to Dan privately than I have in trying to motivate changes with public comments. I think if you're really serious about a suggestion, mailing Dan is the right way to go.
If there's one consistent thing I've read from Dan in his tenure of publicly moderating the site, it's "please mail hn@ycombinator.com about this stuff". I'm just heading him off here. :)
Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes
#36Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns. Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy. Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all. These aren't well-developed…
good ideas here and in the responses. we will consider.
somewhat related, you could use collaborative filtering. I've blogged about my thoughts and experiments with it in the past: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...
You can show some random unrated stories at the very top of the list, and then stories sorted by collaborative filtering.
In my prototyping it worked super-well.
Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes
#37Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns. Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy. Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all. These aren't well-developed…
Another option is a 2-column layout (for non-mobile devices). The normal front page on the left, with the blast of new articles in the right column. Perhaps for mobile devices the new articles could go under the top stories, with some sort of obvious demarcation between them.
This seems like the best option to me.
Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes
#38Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns. Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy. Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all. These aren't well-developed…
Just splice a random /newest entry into a front page on every load. This gets extra eyes on them and helps float good stories up. Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.
> Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.
Love this suggestion. +1
Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes it rather hard to debug or avoid posting in a bad way.
Yes it does. You take the good with the bad. You can always ask hn@ycombinator.com about your submission; if it gets a bunch of upvotes but winds up 30 pages down the site, that's a pretty good indicator that something happened.
Yep. I think that's just kind of an unavoidable side-effect of the service offered. It'd be interesting to know the statistics of what sort of stuff gets blocked.
Re: Tell HN: Don't ask for upvotes
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that would mean that stories with only one point never get seen, and hence never get up-voted, and hence nothing gets to the 2-point page. It seems necessary that people should read "newest" and up-vote things they think are of value.
I agree. I usually read the (unfiltered) newest page, but sometime this is useful to find a story that was submitted 12 hours ago and only got 2 points. Perhaps the problem is that there are 928 stories submitted in the last 24 hours.
I use HN Search to find interesting stories I might have missed in the last 24 hours. Often these 1 or 2 point stories are very interesting and merely got lost in the stream.