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Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

I will celebrate the day when HN front-page is not filled with Apple drama and gossip.

The reason the frontpage has the stories it does is because they're the ones users have voted for. If you want different stories, the solution starts with you: try voting for some. You haven't voted on any of the stories currently on the frontpage.

I think a lot of people don't realize how few users are needed to get a story to the front page. A story often only needs 3-5 votes to do so, giving your one vote a large amount of power. Voting a story from 100 to 101 doesn't really matter, but voting from 3 to 4 is often the difference between the story dying and staying on the front page for several hours.

> You haven't voted on any of the stories currently on the frontpage.

You do realize you're effective saying here that you monitor the personal voting record of users, and that you're willing to disclose that record without their permission?

Also, his whole point was that he didn't vote for those stories. There may be others that he did vote for but that didn't make it to the front page because of all the apple drama.

There's a big difference between 'monitoring' the personal voting record of users and being able to look it up in the server logs to back up a claim. I doubt that pg would carelessly disclose the voting records of users without their permission (or even with it).

Actually I think it would be fascinating to view the voting records of everybody. Maybe in a log file and then numerous people could analyse the data. I'm sure some interesting patterns would emerge. Nice to go over it in 5 or 10 years time when some of the factual disagreements have been settled.

More accurately, he's effectively saying he's willing to look up the personal voting record of users who complain about the output of the voting algorithm.

Sounds like a perfectly hackerish thing to do. PG looked into whether the problem was with his algorithm or with the user. Turns out, PEBKAC.

I didn't read any negative intent to it, jacques.

The 'new' pages are a pretty dire sight (yes, I occasionally submit stuff, and even go there without submitting). One gets that Augean stables feel, but the guy who cleaned them up was a demigod.

I actually signed up here, after just reading for a few years, because I thought the site was good and I could help a bit, instead of leaving quietly when it soured.

I have two suggestions:

- Put up a minimum threshold for submitting and voting.

- Charge a fraction of a point for votes; perhaps with a daily maximum. Erode karma stashes.

Thanks for the site, and best wishes any way you play it.

A possible idea for improving that: Maybe it might make sense to allow users above a certain reputation threshold to vote stories down? Or even just limit story voting to people above a certain threshold.

What good newspapers, periodicals, etc have in common is very good editors that set the overall tone. The crowd, on the other hand tends to go for the sensational, populist and mediocre consensus. I appreciate all your efforts to evolve HN to try and avoid that though.

> You haven't voted on any of the stories currently on the frontpage.

He doesn't like any of the stories on the front page, so why is this a surprise?

I've thought of making a Greasemonkey script to accomplish just that. I spend much less time here since it's turned into a Digg-like extension of their PR machine.

This teapot just happens to be the right size, in the right place, for these tempests.

Amen Brother!

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