Ask HN: Does HN move too fast for 'Ask HN'? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does HN move too fast for 'Ask HN'?

51 pointsJ-dawg11 comments

'Ask HN' questions have only a few minutes to gain traction before they fall off the front page of 'new', otherwise they never make it to 'ask' and basically disappear.

I feel like this sink-or-swim system works just fine for regular posts, but for 'Ask HN' posts it can be frustrating to see them disappear so quickly. Especially when you consider that more time is invested into asking a question than posting a link.

Should 'Ask HN' posts be allowed to stick around a little longer somehow? One solution would be to give them their own separate 'new' page.

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My understanding is that "Ask HN" questions have a different "gravity" and sink more slowly. That said, I suspect that the average quality of an "Ask HN" question is not much better than the average non-spam submission...maybe worse since meta-discussions are fairly common and lead to dull comments like mine here.

Even non-meta questions can be rather lazy...I mean a couple of throw away sentences that don't provide much context suggest that it's probably not that important.

For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11160872

Versus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11149361

While I don't think of "Ask HN" as StackOverflow, there's something to the response "What <code> have you tried?" and the idea that a two sentence question doesn't necessarily deserve a long detailed comprehensive answer.

While I agree they do get lost quickly, there is an "ask" link in the header. I check there every so often, but maybe I am in the minority.

Only questions that are upvoted make it to "ask".

I suspect that is because submissions with both a link and editorial content get classified as "Ask HN" by default and that tends to correlate with PR type submissions.

But really, the only sure fire way to surface good overlooked content is through the "New" page.

Ask HN is probably my favorite part of HN and I check it every time I visit. I wish it was more active. I love hearing the opinions of all of you smart people.

The overall quality of Ask HN questions is pretty hit or miss compared with other submissions in the News section. Often times there are Ask HN questions with no context, that border on spam, really aren't asking a question, or would be better served on Stack Overflow.

so I guess what I"m saying is that I'm not particularly surprised by its speed, because a lot of the stories submitted to deserve to decline quickly

Will this Ask HN become its own self fulfilling prophecy?

Ha, I expect so!

EDIT: I guess I lose either way, if it makes it to the 'ask' page it will disprove its own argument!

>One solution would be to give them their own separate 'new' page.

It's not exactly that but https://news.ycombinator.com/ask exists.

There could be an equivalent like

https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew

I'm not sure why some of these pages aren't linked from the main page.

Yes, absolutely 100% yes.

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