How do you use HN?

This could also just be that most people who may have voted have already checked the comments and don't come back.

Perhaps I should have suggested a "new highly-rated comments!" indicator as a useful feature. It doesn't seem like I can go back and edit my response, though, without taking the whole quiz again, and I don't want to skew results.

I agree it could be better though, and I like the idea of putting them in a highlighted section rather than randomly sprinkling them in the middle of the page where they don't stand out.

I've had posts that crossed the 5 vote threshold and didn't make it to the front page.

Hacker News should be hackable (and it's ironic that it's not). The only way to evolve a better system is though lot's of empirical experiments. But because you need a large userbase to do a proper experiment, we've been limited to a dozen or so experiments to-date (HN, reddit, slashdot, etc). Making HN hackable would eliminate this chicken and egg problem. See how much experimentation the Netflix Challenge enabled. Hacker News of all places should enable creative hackers, math studs and inspired experimenters to test their ideas.

For this to happen Hacker News needs to make vote data available in the public API, or if that is a no-go, go with another option such as accepting experimental code to run in a sandbox and and allowing it to present an alternate front page and comment rankings. I'd prefer votes becoming public for other reasons though.

HN and all its users, and even Paul Graham, know that a better solution for promoting quality knowledge sharing and healthy discourse is needed. What better way to come up with a better way than to let its userbase of hackers hack away at it? If Hacker News were hackable, there would be a blossoming of alternate front pages and comment ranking, and users would vote with their feet, err... clicks.

The HN FAQ[1] says:

"Please don't delete and repost the same story, though. Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

There definitely needs to be a more fluid/integrated means to discover new stories. The home page could be split down the middle, showing new stories to the right, or there could be a more feature-rich (and visible/accessible/usable/seductive/natural/etc) "upvote" page that allows searching, browsing, and filtering through submissions to discover ones to vote on. There could also be a slight weighting of votes (though not much) to create a bias toward more reliable (or longstanding) voters, or to infer which submissions the currently viewing user is likely to upvote. The bias likely has to be slight, as one part of the game is to show the global/absolute top stories, while also getting in stories the specific user is likely to find "upvote worthy."

Also, randomly surfacing new submissions to get a sampling of up or down votes seems essential. This would allow a greater spread/certainty when a submission does make it to the front page, and would also be fairer to promising submissions (they won't die prematurely due to lack of opportunity to be upvoted). It would also minimize gaming of the system and the relevance of "time of day."

Also, the gravity concept is good (so stories eventually die), but it's a bit too absolute/aggressive. There should also be normalization by total number of impressions and up/down votes, such that raw volume doesn't overwhelm quality with lower volume. That is, even if confidence intervals are used (which I don't really like), then up/down votes are an estimate of overall up/down vote percentages, which is what's relevant (the submissions most likely to be upvoted (meaning "best") are what should be shown first). Also, maybe volume matters somewhat (many votes implying a lot of interest), but it's better to separate this out and factor it in independently.

For example, each signed in user that clicks on a link has a probability/likelihood they'll vote, so that could convert their impressions into an expectation which could then be compared to reality (how many upvotes are actually recorded). The higher the upvotes (compared to what was expected), the better the submission. This can then be combined with the other scoring methods (and slight personalization-- maybe a certain percentage of front page entries are personalized and the rest based on absolute rankings, rather than having everything be personalized, or breaking them up into separate sections) to stabilize, refine, and make more accurate submission ranking/sorting.

There isn't a problem with a downvote button. And there isn't even a problem with it being abused (it being abused negatively affecting rankings is a sign the ranking algorithm is poor). The problem is with downvotes not being properly factored in (and weighed up or down depending on the source of the vote, and the user viewing the resulting front page articles). In fact, adding a downvote button would make it easier to rank new submissions (and it's also straightforward to filter (or normalize) out abusers of upvotes or downvotes).

Also, maybe passive actions could be factored in (or things could be added that would serve as good "signals" for "front page worthiness") to increase the overall number of votes, such that a handful of users don't control what makes it to the front page and to allow each article score to be more reliable/accurate.

HN claims that it is the algorithm 'detecting' and flagging controversial threads but they've never posted their methodology there and it doesn't explain how some posts artificially leap up the rankings.

It is common knowledge that hn ask people to resubmit some stories, why is it those stories always hit the front-page the second time around?

Hn is a curated news source. It's better for being that way but it is presented as being driven by algorithm.

Sometimes it is better not to see the man behind the curtain.

I think you've drastically underestimated the ability of people to abuse systems like that.

even the invite system is transparent.

I thought that was very impressive.

For some reason I forgot and thought I was using HNES for that. Sorry to whoever is analyzing this data, this is why you get bad data: people (read: me) are dumb.

- adding to the timeframes I've been here 4 years and know there are people here much longer

- breakdown of how much people read show, comments, new, etc. I do front page 2 to 3 times a day but only do show, comments about once a week. New is only when I have some extra time to burn off, so about two times a week (and mostly on the weekends).

- Breakdown on commenting. I try not to comment unless I'm going to add value to the comments. But if I have a comment when I ask a question I make more of an effort to get back to get the answer.

- Add a question about how often do you go back to old threads you were interested in.

- Add a question about how much you use search. A few times a month I search on things that interest me (Lua, Robots, Rockets, Raspberry Pi, etc) to see if there was something I missed.

Interested to see what the results are