Ask HN: Are new posts getting less frequent on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are new posts getting less frequent on HN?

78 pointsedem35 comments

I've noticed lately that posts stay for a much lonfer time on the main page. Half year ago I almost never saw a post twice if I checked every 24 hours but now I do. What happened?

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The algorithms were changed at some point, that could be what you're referring to.

You can use news.ycombinator.com/classic to view the front page curated using the older algorithm(s) (For me this is actually a more relevant front page compared to the default one)

Are there any information or formulas about the new algorithms?

Information about algorithms is generally kept secret to prevent people from gaming the system. (there are some unwritten heuristics that I wish were written though, such as the inherent penalty for self-posts)

Can you elaborate on the self-posts bit?

E.g. Ask HNs.

I found this discussion about the self-post penalty from 2010:

Tell HN: Why you should submit your stuff as a blog posting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076633

As minimaxir said the algos are kept someone secret. The higher level concepts are shared in a manner to prevent people from exploiting and taking advantage of them (and I agree that they should be kept that way).

I assume this made changes to karma points as well? I remember when 1 upvote roughly equalled one karma point. It seems about half that now.

Is that why sometimes I'll see the "vote number" for a comment jump by 5 all at once?

I don't think that is related. My assumption is that might have to do with caching and when the old value gets evicted from the cache the new value just happens to be different by that much.

I've noticed:

- For a post or show/ask hn| 4 upvotes = 1 karma point

- For a comment | 1 upvote = 1 karma point

Not sure if this is typical or varies by account based on post history/vote history/above or below 500 karma/etc.

They made some changes to how upvoted stories get turned into karma points. There is some threshold of votes (I don't know what it is) that a story needs before upvotes count toward karma. I noticed this a week or two ago and inquired with the moderators.

I didn't know about the classic view. Thanks for sharing this!

Can also just use hckrnews.com which is much better in my opinion (and also retains flagged stories, which I am often interested in because I don't share the HN community's news-worthiness ideology).

+1 to hckrnews.com - I've not used the "real front page" for, well, many months (how long has hckrnews.com been around? seems like forever...!).

Thanks for clearing this up!

I was curious but not masochistic, so I used a termless custom-time-range search for the first full week of July, August, and September of 2014, 2015, and 2016:

2014: 4384, 4378, 4549 2015: 4779, 4817, 5271 2016: 5090, 5225, 4824

I don't know if full news posts are deleted for any reasons that would cause these numbers to naturally fall off over time, but this abbreviated sample doesn't suggest any downward trend.

I made a comment here where I mistakenly assumed that those were full month submissions and month-to-date for Sep 2016.

While its too early to call a trend, that Sep 2016 number does look a bit lower than expected.

Thanks. Seems like that the algorithm changed.

Don't forget there's also the (somewhat) new /front page to see all front page stories for a given day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2016-06-20

I've been experimenting with an alternative ranking based on activity (score + comments per hour) and found some interesting stories because of it.

I did notice there's definitely a very long tail of stories that get little attention.

Feel free to play with it and provide some feedback -

http://beta.frontpageping.com

With posts being visible for only a minute or so it's a miracle every time a post reach the front page.

It should be possible to down-vote posts that have reached the front page, because when they reach front-page they will get a ton of up-votes.

I have noticed that as well. It is possible that:

- Less people are actually reading, upvoting, etc

- Less people are checking the "new" page and so posts are not being promoted to the front page

- Some change in the site settings causes this

> Less people are checking the "new" page and so posts are not being promoted to the front page

I check New all the time, and find some good stuff there, most of which never gets above 3 or so points, and thus never makes it to the front page.

If you are ignoring New because you think you don't have time, I urge you to reconsider. If we all ignored the New queue, then nothing would change on the Front Page (kinda... I know there's manual promoting and stuff going on in the background, but you get what I mean).

I've noticed lately that a lot of stories that manage to make the front page, but don't end up getting discussed heavily, tend to just camp out there in the lower two-thirds of the page for hours.

Things with a lot of discussion seem to trip the flamewar detector, unless they really rake in the upvotes.

I am yet to see a flame ware here (thankfully). This community seems to be able to argue intelligibly. Or maybe I am just lucky.

See also: the controversy on a Reddit a year ago which made the same observation: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3n7tnz/why_...

This was fixed I believe, which incidentally led other issues during the Orlando shooting where /r/all was being manipulated by several subreddits, requiring another algo change: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4ny59k/lets_...

Maybe you're just checking it more often and so it appears to change less frequently?

I believe OP says they check around the same time every day and doesn't remember seeing the same comment thread stay on the front page a second day in a row. At least that is how I understood it. That is an issue - it might read a little like yesterday's news I suppose.

I keep track of the front page daily and I've noticed the trend of stories not falling off.

Maybe a bit silly but are you sure your browser isn't caching the front page, so you're seeing the same posts everytime?

Seconding, it seems a bit quieter over the last six months or year.

edit: oops wrong post. my apologies.

I think you meant to post here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12487771

yes, I knew it will happen to me one day... thank you for the heads up!

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