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Comment by alain94040 | Hacker News Reader

We all agree that merit should be the ultimate judge. And I have experienced it myself: great posts I submit will rise on their own, not so good ones will linger.

However: without the initial boost of making it to the home page, great posts tend to die off and don't even get a chance to win on merit.

Some data to confirm my point: my submissions typically either get 1 vote (mine), no matter how good they are, or get from 10 to 30 votes, based on their merit. There is no middle ground.

So I find it a little bit naive to believe that merit alone will win the day. On the other hand, as everyone else said, I don't want HN to turn into guild of ringers...

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It does seem to me that those vital first 10 minutes disproportionately affect a submission's life expectancy.

Perhaps solutions should be aimed at slowing down the churn rate on the "new" page, then? What if everybody were limited to submitting, say, one article per day?

How about a different "channel" for posts that ask for a feedback from the HN community on particular project? Like all those posts that announce a new site or a new open source library that some HN member has built. I think loss in such posts getting buried is much higher than the loss when other posts that say, just link to an interesting articles etc. get buried. Feedback from highly technical community like HN can be invaluable for an individual hacker but it's not always possible to get it. I personally experienced the importance of first 10 minutes rule when I submitted post about a small JS library that I had developed asking for feedback couple of days back. I probably submitted it at wrong time (holiday, late at night) so it never made to "visible" pages.

If we had a new channel exclusively for things you've actually built it would be difficult to game it as you would have to actually put in efforts to built the thing in the first place. It would also be more in line with the HN ethos, for hackers by hackers :)

On the other hand, (Or on the same hand; I'm not sure if it matters,) If having a single 'luck' vote is the minimum is required for getting a story a fair hearing and everyone compensated by getting their friends to vote, then two votes would quickly become the minimum. If this is really a problem (and it seems like it might be) then new mechanisms for getting new entries exposure would be the proper solution.

Maybe we can mix in new submissions with top rated ones on the front page.

The few times I have tried submitting (what I thought were) really interesting links, I have found that they were already submitted, perhaps a day ago, or a week ago, or even many months ago, but I never spotted them - they had died with a handful of upvotes and a single comment at best.

I have a proposal. What if you could enter the URL of your blog(s), and that way any self-submitted content would start at 2. This would encourage more people from HN to write and answer comments, and would hopefully make the site better overall.

And probably you wouldn't be allowed to do this until 30 days after creating a new account, or else there would be some minimum karma. Or perhaps your blog needs at least 100 karma on its own before the URL is accepted. Either way, I think it would generally make the community better if some variant of this were enabled.

I find the most interesting content (to me) comes from sources I don't already read and follow. If a blog comes up twice or more on HN, I'll have subscribed already (assuming it's full feed and is only updated occasionally - blog interestingness is inversely proportional to posting frequency IMHO).

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