[Ask] How come some post/link are garnering zero interest? | Hacker News Reader

[Ask] How come some post/link are garnering zero interest?

2 pointstouristtam4 comments

Is there a deep flaw in the logic in which HN is presenting the submission? Or did the HN population completely uninterested in websecurity?

A colleague of my pointed to this article from the dropbox's techblog about CSRF [1]. But a search through HN returned no discussion about it despite have been posted 3 times in the last couple of month. Interestingly enough another post from another website [2] on the same topic, got the exact same attention.

[1] https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2017/03/preventing-cross-site-attacks-using-same-site-cookies/ [2] https://www.netsparker.com/blog/web-security/same-site-cookie-attribute-prevent-cross-site-request-forgery/

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It is, and always has been, sporadic and random. The post gets submitted, it stays on the "Newest" page until it gets pushed off. If the title looks interesting people might click through, if the article is interesting people might upvote it.

Something might get posted 5 or 10 times before it suddenly gets attention and makes it to the Front Page, other things never get attention, despite the submitter thinking it's obviously of interest.

It has always been thus.

It used to be that repeat submissions were simply forbidden. Now it's more nuanced, and they are allowed if (a) it's been a while, and (b) the initial submission got no discussion. I'm not sure it's made things better. Certainly some items that might have been missed are now getting attention - eventually - but there are now more and more repeats of things that I personally think are of marginal - or even zero - interest.

<fx: shrug>

You've been here long enough that I'd expect you know the algorithms. Can you suggest an improvement? Can you even be more precise about exactly what you think the problem is?

I have read the few analyze regarding the correlation between post attention and date and time of posting. But it feels that in the last year a new cohort of users have been posting article straying away from specialized site/blog and posted more about mainstrain news site. It looks almost like the quality has move down a notch compared to the previous couple of years. This could be due to fatigue on my part

I don't see an easy fix to make up for this and I fear a system of tagging/reputation as this seems to have a tendency to add to the injury more than resolving anything. But maybe some restriction on source for submission might help in preventing the drowning of hacker/techy news related submission by general news report about some newish technology. It might be interesting to discuss a new article about technology from the new york time (submission #14076413), even though the generalism of the article is quite far remote from the hacker mentality, but seeing 6 article in the first 3 pages from the BBC (which skime through the technology) is a bit much (example are submission #14087475, #14085966 and #14075757 for the first couple of pages).

I guess the only suggestion I would have is the ability to choose which source a user should be able to filter out.

As ColinWright said, it is fairly random. A problem is that content from news sites, or things that multiple sites report on, is often submitted by multiple users, which drowns out individual submissions. (Many people can't even be bothered to check if there has been a discussion before, so a rule change regarding the posting frequency would only be effective if it started to be strongly enforced)

(Also, usual reminder: early votes count a lot, so if you want to influence what's sucessful, look at and vote on /new more often)

I hope you are not advising me to create an army of bot to game the system when I find a news that I like. :p

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