What changes do you think should be made to enhance the quality of content and get more people to vote?
Load random new stories on the homepage (top 2 or 3 spots) with markup that makes it clear that this is a new story
Tell HN: An Observation
41–50 of 93 posts
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that would have the unintended side-effect of making the site much more attractive to spammers because they'd be almost guaranteed some homepage exposure.
Would it really? Since the signal:noise ratio on the /new page is pretty darn good right now, I don't think that featuring one of the new submissions on the homepage would change that much. Also: this proposal would only lead to more impressions for the spammer if the homepage received more than 30x the traffic of the new submissions page. That may be the case, but how would a spammer know that?
Try looking at the newpage with 'showdead' set to 'on'.
Right now I count 8 'dead' links, but it's not rare at all (especially when it's quiet) to see 15 or more.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
It occurred to me over the last week or two that most all of the startup and pet project work I've been doing over the past decade has all boiled down to presenting complex and thought-provoking data to the user in the most simple way possible. Every little piece of user interface, web application, or technology that sits between the brain and a simple version of the decisions it needs to make each day is a cognitive…
This is going to sound very cryptic, but I hope it comes across, you are a solution looking for a problem. I think it's only a matter of time before you find your groove, I see it happening all over HN, people that try one thing after another and suddenly it clicks, they find their thing and from there on it's upwards. Don't give up, the 'making complex stuff simple' thing you've got is absolutely a key in all this.…
What is the difference between ww and something like justin.tv?
I am fairly addicted to ww(particularly, the pet deer).
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#44how about for the first page display a random subset of N pages worth of new submits, for a small N? Nobody scrolls past N pages anyway.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#45Around this time of day the submissions on the new page go by so fast that only the most juicy stuff makes it to the front page. 4 votes before you scroll off the new page or your article might as well be dead, it's very rare (but it does happen) to see anything get traction afterwards. And of course you didn't write about a scandal in progress or something like that. If you write just for the interaction with HN I c…
Thanks Jacques. As usual, we agree. Sometimes I wonder why I reply to your comments at all, since we agree so much. :) I think what bugged me was the lack of drive-by readers. HN is pretty much the only site I submit to. I have no aspirations of blogging as a business. I blog because I want to, and I'd blog if nobody came by. So heck with the score or the front-page status. And no, it doesn't bug me that a large perc…
I think as Jacques suggests, the problem is sheer number of submissions, combined with the way the new page seems to work by showing everything: stuff thus scrolls off the bottom much faster than it used to.
It’s unclear what could be done to counteract this.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is going to sound very cryptic, but I hope it comes across, you are a solution looking for a problem. I think it's only a matter of time before you find your groove, I see it happening all over HN, people that try one thing after another and suddenly it clicks, they find their thing and from there on it's upwards. Don't give up, the 'making complex stuff simple' thing you've got is absolutely a key in all this.…
What is the difference between ww and something like justin.tv? I am fairly addicted to ww(particularly, the pet deer).
Funding and execution I guess.
WW.com was bootstrapped out of my previous company (consultancy / software licenses).
Justin.tv is a lot slicker and it seems they are doing way better than we are in terms of traffic and user satisfaction, but we're working quite hard at the moment to turn the tide on that. WW.com to me feels as though it has a stronger community element to it.
WW is actually quite a bit older than justin.tv (we started in 1998 as 'camarades', but because the name was pretty hard to spell it got changed), we missed a few chances, had some spectacular bad luck but on the whole I'm feeling better about it today than I have felt in the last 5 years.
I don't think the Justin.tv guys have too much to worry about for the time being, but we're definitely planning a very serious effort to make a go of it.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
As for the original topic of your submission, minimalistic interfaces, I'm all for it. I predict the death of the submit button in the next 2 years.
It occurred to me over the last week or two that most all of the startup and pet project work I've been doing over the past decade has all boiled down to presenting complex and thought-provoking data to the user in the most simple way possible. Every little piece of user interface, web application, or technology that sits between the brain and a simple version of the decisions it needs to make each day is a cognitive…
There have been some great posts/discussions at the blog The Online Photographer in the last week about this, proximately prompted by the new Fuji digital rangefinder just announced at Photokina:
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...
and then less directly:
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogra...
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#48HN does not need to be re-jiggered or re-invented or re..., just make an effort to check the new page and upvote the articles you like. I always do because I like to see quality, or my assessment of it, make it to the front page and have other users chime in. Let the experiments happen on the plethora of clone sites.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#49I'm not helping the community if I visit the new page and don't vote on anything.
I don't vote on anything because I don't want to 'save' all of the threads I find slightly interesting. Saving is only for things I want come back to later.
Re: Tell HN: An Observation
#50I'm guilty of this. Reason behind is that I click on links and discussion threads via newsyc20 on twitter whenever something of interest pops up.