> Just show most of the items from the last hour on the new page.
Someone else suggested this recently, and we've heard it before, too. We're game to try it as an experiment.
What's the best way to measure whether it works?
Someone else suggested this recently, and we've heard it before, too. We're game to try it as an experiment.
What's the best way to measure whether it works?
That is, we know it's that "articles that should be on the front page get overlooked"—but votes are the main metric we have for what should be on the front page. How can we tell an article that fell off /new because it was bad from one that fell off because nobody saw it?
One way of evaluating this would be to exercise editorial discretion, pick out articles you (or some set of people) believe are good and compare how they progress with different versions of the page. However, this is rather labor intensive and risks biasing the experiment based on who picks the articles out.
I can't think of other approaches off-hand. Coming up with a concrete statement of the problem would probably help here.
Upvotes alone don't determine HN's front page. If they did, HN would be dominated by controversy, gossip, and fashion—those get the most reflexive upvotes, and there are more reflexive upvotes than reflective ones. Coutervailing mechanisms include flagging and moderation.
The fundamental difficulty is that HN cares most about quality and one can't easily measure that or automate it. Human curation is needed, plus humans don't always agree about what counts as high-quality.
Anyone who wants to know about our current approach to this problem should read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866140 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134.
If, as it seems, there's no objective standard for quality (since it can't be measured or defined) then maybe subjective filters are the way to go.
On the question of how objective vs. subjective HN's notion of quality is, I don't think it's completely subjective. Everyone has their personal tastes, but HN's standards are reasonably well-established too. So I still think we may be able to come up with a story curating mechanism to supplement upvoting that is open to any user who wants to put in the effort. The big question, again, is how to score the effort. It can't be just "vote for whatever you like," because we already have that.