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I guess it depends how the collusion actually occurs. The more 'sophisticated' voting rings can easily beat the referrer trick.

Flagging is good for demoting bad content, but not for promoting unseen stuff.

The idea here is to change very little, just relieve a little pressure - I've seen a number of posts recently about how to game HN, so it seems anecdotally to be getting worse.

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"Promoting unseen content" won't be solved by increasing the size of the front page because the amount of traffic and attention a post receives is directly proportional to the absolute ranking (anedotally, posts from my blog which hit the Top 5 got 3-5x the concurrent traffic than posts at the bottom of the front page).

Adding more entries to the front page won't help at all.

I believe you that #30 < #5. Partly because if you ever hit #5 the total amount of time you spent on front page is greater.

I'm really curious about the jump from #30 -> #31 though.

a) what's the total drop in activity? b) how much has this changed in the past year? c) is there a 'better' cutoff to choose?

I've definitely seen "hey, please look for [article X] on the Newest page of HN and upvote, thx! (link to the HN Newest page)" on social networks before.

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