1. Where the author (domain) is well-known
2. Where the title is link-bait
3. Where the submitter tries to game the system
Perhaps there should be voting groups, essentially a cap on the population of voters.
Each time you hit a threshold, you randomly split the voters in two and then the articles you see only get the votes of the people in your group. So one site has multiple groups on the go at one time, all to stop the overwhelming nature of popularity drowning out the minority.
It stops block voting as all you can do is influence the group you are in rather than the community as a whole. There's a good chance on a big site you're not in the same group.
On the otherhand you could end up with groups that have wildly different front pages that don't suit your tastes. Perhaps to solve that there could even be something intelligent about it in that it switches you into groups with voting tendencies like your own, improving your perceived quality of the site.
Comments are a little troublesome, do you include them in the group voting or not? In one group a comment could be negative, while popular in another.
A random thought that occurred to me, I generally hate these regular meta threads of 'HN has got bad'.
Do you know what I saw today on HN? DHH and Joel Spolsky duking it out in the comments. Two of my favourite internet personalities arguing.
That rocked. HN is still the best place to go.
Idea: do it to HN as an A/B experiment: see how the content of the sites diverges. Actually the "/classic" url does this, sort of, by ranking articles not by total votes but by votes from users older than one year.
I wonder how strong the correlation would be.
e.g I've posted a few interesting articles that dropped off the new page
Of the stories that got more than 10 votes, how many of those (first) 10 votes came from upvotes as opposed to multiple submission.
My theory is that it frequently takes multiple submissions to get stuff in the front page so that it can be upvoted, rather than through upvotes from New. In which case the best story in the world might not do well if only one person finds it.
The big problem I see is industry gossip, within which I include: the crunchpad drama; iPhone/iPad dramas; Zuckerman's integrity; Bill Gates' integrity; Steve Jobs' integrity; Larry Ellison's integrity; today's psychoanalysis of one of our own members; even the Ring of Dark Angels/AngelGate. Now, industry gossip is relevant to people in the industry. But it's not Hacker News (at least, not according to the guidelines.)
If there is a clear perception of what HN is, and enough people resolve to flag stories that don't fit that perception, then this problem goes away. We deserve the HN we get.
Not enough people check the new page. It's impossible to get an article on the frontpage unless like four or five people upvote it in the first few minutes after submission. This is extremely unlikely, unless you have a popular title or popular username.
Once something gets on the frontpage, it gets a LOT of upvotes, and the algorithm decays its weight so slowly that it is essentially a rich get richer phenomenon.
Possible solutions:
* Front page upvotes don't count as much, since there are more views. In particular, the "weight" of an article should be the probability that someone who views the title clicks on it, combined with the probability that someone who clicks the link decides to upvote it.
* Frontpage is stochastic. Instead of being fixed, you sample articles based upon their probability (or score). Each person gets a new frontpage, in order to actually explore which articles are good. (Exploration vs. exploitation)
People are interested in what other people are doing. Techcrunch happens to be a big resource in figuring this out. Thats not necessarily a bad thing in itself.
// edit: A better "but, …" might be: "but, Facebook has an insane valuation for a reason: a lot of people seem to believe it can make a lot of money."
That is far too long. I'd like the front page to churn twice a day so it was all new in the "morning" and all new in the "afternoon".
The only suggestions that I have would be (1) to automatically load a handful of "new" submissions in a separate section of the main page (at the expense of destroying the current design and cluttering the page), or (2) giving out karma for upvoting new stories (which is ripe for exploitation by simply clicking randomly).
Also notice that the 'new' page has a 'more' link at the bottom, you could do worse than to check page 2 and 3 as well to see if anything good fell through the cracks.
Voting up articles that have not made the front page past the third page of 'new' articles is unlikely to have much effect.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1717426
It appears they're actually back now, so I've submitted it again:
This submission got more interest: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1717172
I think such an article generates more interest because it puts everything in context, and explains GOG's strategy / hoax.
The front page at the time had a post discussing what had happened - now it just links to the main site.
Funny, because a couple years back that's what would happen to anything you submitted to /r/programming. Now the noise has all moved here and it's actually easier to get Reddit to pay attention then HN.
What I like about this approach is the randomness in it where random people get random link. I also like the fact that by you aren't choosing between 30 links.. you only get one and you need to say if it's interesting or no. Also, I like the fact that it's on the front page.
So, the top 10 links could be the most yes-ed in a certain period, or the ratio yes/no ratio, or anything really.. You could also put more weight on a yes if you've got more point in HN (Simply because I usually trust their judgement.. for instance, they know when something has already been shown dozen of time)
Also, it feels a little bit more like a game to me.. each time I refresh I need to really participate to say if that special link is interesting or no.. :D
I postulate that the necessary quality level is greater now because of the sheer number of articles that get sifted through. What used to make the cut, no longer does. Or, it could be vice-versa.