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simonsarris

I had once suggested that the main page be woven out of a combination of popular + new, perhaps 50/50:

1. popular

2. new

3. popular

4. new

This injects a lot of noise into the front page, because most of new is noise, but it helps.

Another option is to front-load popular stories, then have 10-20 "new" items at the bottom of the page. That way the front page remains highly salient, but anyone who merely scrolls more will also see a small chunk of new. So 1-30 popular (as it is now), then 30-45 new (making the frontpage longer).

View on HN

Most new post are just too bad. (I've seen them.) People would write angry comment complaining that they are in the front page.

There is something similar, the mods cherrypick some post and they have a second chance and are shown in the front page for a small time. More details by dang in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

> Most new post are just too bad. (I've seen them.) People would write angry comment complaining that they are in the front page.

Maybe weigh them by submitter's karma.

What about the newcomers? They're people too!

True, but not everyone needs to get the same new links. Server could return random different new posts to different users.

...and it could be every 5th post, so it's not a huge burden.

> True, but not everyone needs to get the same new links.

Yea, as to create some sort of fairness in "guaranteeing" each new story a minimum number of views.

More recently there was a bit of discussion about it here as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23096578

Out of frustration of not seeing a lot of good blog posts that are submitted everyday on HN. I built a newsletter which gather all (EDIT : a lot of ) the personal blog posts which didnt reach the front page in a newsletter https://hnblogs.substack.com/ (that's curated manually every day from /newest)

From what I understand it's not every blog post, it looks to be still curated by you. Which is totally understandable, as otherwise there'd be way too many links in the email. Your newsletter helps (and I subscribe to it and am a fan), but I'd still say overall this is an unsolved problem on the modern web.

Yeah you are right, I edited my comment. It is not all of them. But I do think it is at least 50% of them. I apply an auto filter on the full list of links, and then I curate manually. In both the auto and the manual part some links are missed.

(Thank you for reading the newsletter)

Nice list. Are you upvoting them too? (One of them have only 1 point.)

[Small nitpick: You should add a space between the title of each post and the URL.]

> Are you upvoting them too ?

No I don't, upvoting doesnt really make sense when the post is older than 1 hour.

> You should add a space between the title of each post and the URL.

Fixed it! I didnt know if it annoyed anyone

In spite it doesn't make too much sense, if you like the post an upvote is nice for the submitter.

Also an additional vote may be useful to highlight it to the mods that cherrypick some post and they have a second chance to be shown in the front page for a small time. More details by dang in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

I'd like something similar to 'rising' on reddit. Currently I check page 2/3 for something not yet on front page, but that depends on HN activity I guess. It is good enough right now, but about 12 hours from now (which is my preferred morning read in my time zone) only few of them come under not yet got enough attention category. By having a separate selection, they can be browsed more easily.

They (or a 3rd party dev) could also make a two-column layout, one for popular, one for new.

I'm pretty sure Reddit has the same problem though, and only the diehard followers of a subreddit actually bother to look in new.

A two-column layout is exactly how I plan to address this in my reddit clone that I'll never, ever actually get around to writing. Not sure what to do about mobile layout, though.

Would this work for mobile device users?

I used to use an extension for Chrome that had a two-column layout as you describe and I rather liked it. However, I switched to back Firefox some years ago and I've never found a similar extension to replace it.

Or just have it work how comments do, where 1-2 new posts show up near the top of the page until they have a chance to get voted on.

Though I suppose it's a bit different for links since they can't be downvoted like comments can.

Interweaving new was tested and resulted in people thinking the algorithm was broken, due to low interaction articles on the front page.

Adding a section with “check out these new items” at the bottom of each page might be interesting IMHO :)

What about a clearly deliniated box with 5 items: 3 with 0 upvotes, 1 with <10 upvotes, and one with more than 10 but not enough to hit the frontpage.

That way there's always something interesting in the box, and everyone is encouraged to contribute to arbitrating the new posts a bit more.

edit: I guess posts that are upvoted should have a significant higher exposure, to reward them with a better chance of hitting FP, so if there's too many upvoted posts it could be 2-2-1. Oh and of course there should be a profile checkbox to turn the whole thing off, wouldn't want to impose ourselves.

As I recall, dang said they tried a more conservative version of that once (just a handful of new links), and people really didn't like it.

I love that idea. I'm working on a HN clone in Prolog and will totally implement that. But, I think you could also make something like that for HN as a Firefox extension. Or perhaps write a simple web app that provides a RSS feed of popular and new interwoven.

Another idea would be to reuse the comment algorithm, which bumps comments straight to the top when they’re created for a very brief period to see if they get any traction.

I guess that it wouldn’t necessarily have to be the top for posts.

A decade ago my friend and I built our “better digg” with a box at the top that cycled through new submissions to help those new stories gain traction. You need a downvote or skip button.

TikTok’s algorithm seems to work well for this.

What is TikTok's algorithm? I am not familiar with the app.

You test out new links with very few people and expand or demote based on the results of the first couple of testers. Pretty sure a bunch of social media, youtube, etc do something similar.

Maybe just put say two new links randomly chosen from the past x hours for every home page visit.

I don't see how this could work without a downvote button.

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