Ask HN: Anyone else notice a higher churn rate for the front page? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone else notice a higher churn rate for the front page?

30 pointsbsaunder25 comments

It seems to me that posts on the front page have been changing much faster than usual. Perhaps submission rates have increased?

View on HN

I'm not sure, but I think it's too fast. Some worthwhile topics could be easily missed if one stays off HN for just half a day. (Even with AutoPager, after 2-3 days, most topics go off the first few pages entirely.)

Perhaps there should be some sort of 'classic' or 'long-term' article tab that people can check out.

The quality of those articles/discussions would likely be higher as well.

I've stopped now (due to lack of time) but by subscribing to the feed you should be able to catch everything that comes on the front page.

100% agree.

Its very hard to keep up. I use the RSS feed, and it seems everytime it updates (hourly) there are 5 new posts. This of course isnt always true, but it does get overwhelming to sift through to the stuff I am interested in reading, and I know good things are lost.

This seems, to me, to be just as big of a problem as the community/culture one.

It would be very interesting if we/they/pg could figure out a way for us to filter or get the best n# of stories per day (say 10, for me). Clearly, 'best' is subjective, but perhaps the most commented, longest on frontpage, or some smart combination of metrics including views, upmods, comments, etc.

You could do this by taking an integral of position over the last 72 hours. This way, "sleeper" stories that take some time to rise in popularity can also appear in the RSS feed.

http://news.ycombinator.com/best

The highest rated posts in the last N days (not sure what N is). Not very well documented, but interesting to know about.

Is there an RSS for this? I can seem to find one. Ideas?

Stories that make the top spot: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/HNWatrcoolr

Also see hacker.watrcoolr.us (feed:http://feeds2.feedburner.com/HackerWatrCoolr twitter:http://twitter.com/hackerwatrcoolr)

It's actually the highest rated links among the most recent 15k items.

Ack! It needs to be normalized by the active user population at the time of submission.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553959

Any chance of publishing several front page algorithms and letting users set a preference for one? Or even better somehow letting people suggest/test custom ones?

I agree. This may be a sign that either a restricted scope of HN needs to be enforced, or an algorithm needs to be written to correlate the interests of users. Neither is pretty, but the alternative is a saturated Hacker News.

Just before this latest change, I had been noticing stories staying on the front page for a LONG time, and this recent change restores what to me seems like the normal behavior of a few months ago.

For information, my browsing behavior on HN is to land on the front page (now several times a day), look down about one screenful on my computer, and then follow the link to the new page. I try to upvote stories on the new page soon after submission if they look like they have strong hacker interest or strong delight the mind qualities.

If you're subscribed in Google Reader, you can view details about the feed and it does show a steady incline in "items posted" over the last 30 days.

I tend to skim the front page and then hit the new section for the majority of my time, and I don't think we're running much faster than we have been. This is obviously unscientific and I have no data to back it, but from my perspective I haven't seen that many new stories.

Perhaps its an influx of new involved members who are actively voting?

I don't think the churn is a big problem yet, but I think the position of stories on the front page uses a formula similar to gravity. Upward acceleration is determined by upvotes/time and downward acceleration is determined by the time since submission. pg could always decrease the acceleration of "gravity" on the formula (to allow popular stories to stay on the front page longer) and/or decrease the "acceleration" per upvote (to prevent less popular stories from jumping to the front page so quickly).

So if this becomes a big problem, it shouldn't be too hard to fix.

I've noticed that too. Big stories (i.e. ones written by Paul Graham) used to stay up here for days, they do no longer. My guess is they increased the time factor to account for the increase in traffic.

So many exciting things happening in the world. Try and keep up :)

The churn rate is fine!!

I think it just became much easier to get frontpaged. I see a ton of stories getting front paged with 2, 3 upvotes.

I've encountered this as well - is it dependant on number of upvotes in a set time period?

That's not new at all. If anything there are fewer of them now.

i'm afraid this become like "Digg". In past, the time between stories that hit front page (in digg) is 1 to 2 hours, now it's less than 10 minutes and a new story hit it.

That's why I rarely upvote stories in HN, if we all upvote a little only Worthwhile topics that we can increase the quality.

To me, it feels more like reddit some years ago.

This happen with any community that grows large... but there's no solution to keep quality?

Take a look at the front page. The right half is blank space.

That space can be used to show two sections: popular & upcoming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com