Most-Popular Lists Breed More Popularity

online.wsj.com

13 points·estromberg··8 comments

This is one of the reasons why I don't think the front page should allow for upvotes. Only in the new section.

Interesting.

Sometimes I scan the titles and give my votes to these articles on the frontpage thus having these links saved in an easily retrievable list for later consumption.

It would be nice to have a separate bookmarking capability distinct from the ability to vote.

That's actually a really good idea. I wonder if PG considered that people might upvote without actually looking at the entry first. I only vote after I have read a piece.

Seems to me this kind of behavior grossly encourages linkbait.

edit: In fact I'd be all for preventing voting on links before following them. A nice, clean way to do it would be a bit of unobstrusive Javascript+cookies to track which stories you've been to and hide the upvote link if you haven't seen the story yet.

It's not secure but it doesn't have to. Implementing it this way has the advantage of not having any bigger load on the server and still being able to follow links to stories without contacting the HN server.

As a compromise, what if votes made from the new section were weighted to be stronger than votes from the front page?

I would have assumed that their were algorithms which recognize that an article was retrieved from the 'most popular' list and therefore not weight it as much as a 'discovered link'.

Even better, give each user a fixed set of random urls each day, and only allow voting on those.

The problem with that is that most stories are not interesting to any particular reader. I rarely even look at more than 20% of the stories, and vote on even fewer. I doubt many people read even half.

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