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Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

news.ycombinator.com

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Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#1

Post by tomerico »

6 days ago I submitted the following story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1785497

It's a blog entry of an iPhone developer, sharing an interesting story on his marketing attempts of his app. He shared actual sale number, amount of effort, and a tactic he used which actually got him featured on the app store. This story got even more interesting after I submitted it, because he became so successful to hit #1 best seller in the US app store for a moment, and now he is #5.

When I submitted the story, it didn't get noticed, and quickly went past the first page of new submission without a single up vote. This is of course natural. As there are many stories being submitted.

The problem is - you will notice it has 6 up votes now - this means that 5 additional people has tried to submit this story to share with everybody in the past 6 days. But the system completely ignore this fact, and the story doesn't even have a chance to hit the front page again - just because it missed the chance once...

There are many possible solutions, I can offer at least 2:

1 When a story that didn't hit the front page get resubmitted, it hit the new submission page again, as it was just submitted.

2 A small part of the front page will be dedicated for the 5 latest submission, this way new stories will have thousands of views, and will have more chance to not get ignored.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#2

Post by mikerhoads »

Option 1 would result in a lot of reposts getting back to the front page and option 2 would be bothersome or redundant for users that frequent the new submissions page.

I don't know how the current algorithm works but there has to be some exchange rate between independent submissions over a relatively short period of time (multiple days) to upvotes over a shorter period of time (multiple hours). I assume this is already part of the process and that your specific example falls outside of what the algorithm considers to be significant.

EDIT: Clarification

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#3

Post by zacharycohn »

My initial response to this was that maybe it could get resubmitted with the boosted number of upvotes, so it would have a slight edge over new stories being submitted at that time. In addition, you could have this only effect stories with less than 10 upvotes, to prevent people from griefing the system. (spam submitting the same link over and over/necroposting old content with lots of upvotes by reposting it and giving it just a +1 for your resubmit).

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#4

Post by timmorgan »

mikerhoads wrote: post #2

Option 1 would result in a lot of reposts getting back to the front page and option 2 would be bothersome or redundant for users that frequent the new submissions page. I don't know how the current algorithm works but there has to be some exchange rate between independent submissions over a relatively short period of time (multiple days) to upvotes over a shorter period of time (multiple hours). I assume this is alre…

Wrt option 2, the new submissions page already contains stories that are currently on the front page, so it's already a bit redundant. Doesn't bother me that much.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#8

Post by CWuestefeld »

This is compounded by the speed by which new articles scroll by in the "New" view. Right now the oldest New article on page #1 is 58 minutes. This means that I can't honestly upvote more than, say, 2 articles out of that list (since I wouldn't have time to read them).

It seems like the mechanism that puts new articles in front of people is at least part of the problem. Since they go by so quickly these days, maybe different sets of readers could get different "samples" of the New list, allowing those items to be around longer (but seen by fewer people). Since the HN readership is growing, I think it might be fair to rely on the statistical sampling this would provide.

Re: Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken

#10

Post by jedbrown »

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.
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