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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that feature is confusing. It's called a 'second chance' and explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

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Thank you! But why does it change the timestamp?

Because it's plain and simple manipulation. If it wasn't meant to manipulate the front page it wouldn't alter the timestamp.

Yes, and it also changes the timestamps of the user comments to perpetuate the illusion.

Interesting. My submit didn't have comments so I didn't notice that :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30937892

And just because it's manipulation doesn't mean it's bad (in my opinion) - it does what it intends to do and if it dies in second chance, it rots away.

Any good community discussion site that maintains for years needs various forms of "manipulation", and this is a pretty minor one.

Taking arbitrary submissions to the front page manually (without the necessary upvotes from users) and on top of that manipulating the timestamp so it looks like the submission is new and got there organically is bad.

HN already automatically takes some of the new queue and puts it on the front page (there's always a very recent few votes link on any given homepage for a logged in user) - I see no problem with this at all.

Adding an * footnoting what was done wouldn't serve much purpose.

“Bad” is subjective. Counter to your expectations, sure, but “bad” seems a bit of a simplistic take.

Nah, I like it. I'm here for interesting news & discussion, not for a demonstration of some voting algorithm.

So that people don't complain about a 2 day old post still being on the FP.

Weird. I personally consider a modified timestamp more confusing/worrying than an old post being on the front page, as the former modifies something that should be immutable, while the latter doesn't.

Edit: Semi-related issue for comparison: one time, a contact DMed me on Discord to ask where a certain event was going to be held. Before I saw the message, she found the answer through other means and thus "helpfully" deleted her message to me.

Same problem: that actually makes it more confusing because I see inconsistent state: the notification lives on in my phone, but it's no longer present in the chat history. Better to just say "never mind" than to modify history.

yeah - split the difference maybe and have the UI indicate "second chance" somehow.

but I suppose HN likes to keep things simple (even if it's a bit confusing).

I agree. Modifying timestamps for features like in this case "second chance" is a very bad practice IMHO.

The algorithm uses timestamp with a kind of gravity calculation to make it fall off the page. They maybe just didn't want to have a separate display timestamp and second chance timestamp in the codebase and it was simpler to change it when reupping a post.

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