Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

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> One thing that does seem to have gotten persistently worse is the process of getting a good story onto the front page.

Completely agree. The Business Week cover story on new details from the Target data breach got 16 upvotes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391406

It was submitted with 5 other URLs and each got a point or two.

Another example, the excellent NyTimes story on the NSA breaching Chinese telco companies to hack Huawei got 10 points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450963

The NYTimes version was the canonical source.

There was a great WSJ report on Google adapting to the app age which was heavily shared on Twitter, 1 point on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375529

Bill Gates Rolling Stone interview, 1 point (although re-blogs of excerpts ranked):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7393830

BW on Satya Nadella managing the legacy of Ballmer's Microsoft board, 4 points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7348628

These are stories I quickly recalled from the last ~week that I enjoyed, all just happen to not register on HN.

If I go through my queue on pocket i'm certain there would be many more examples. I'd estimate less than 10% of what I now save on pocket for reading is sources from HN.

My take is that there was an influx of non-tech people wanting to find out what tech people were reading about. If you subscribe to the usual tech blogs you'll find (or would have found) that a lot of their stories are/were sources from here or are reblogs[0]. This mass of new users has now affected what is selected and how.

[0] Example, Notch tweets that they are canceling their Oculus deal. His tweet gets 8 points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469714

A Next Web story which is nothing more than the tweet embedded in a page of ads gets 823 points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469829

Ok, now you have me worried. This is a problem. We want the best stories on the front page as well as the best version of each story. We certainly don't want knockoffs.

One thing you can do when you know of a better version of a story is post its URL in the thread along with a clear explanation of why it's better. We see most of those, and often use them. (Edit: and maybe we should have a textually unique string, à la hashtags, that people can insert in such comments. Then I can write code to make sure I see them all.)

That, however, will do nothing to help HN get stories that it's missing completely, since there won't be any such thread to comment in. You seem to be saying we're missing most of those. How can we fix that?

That, however, will do nothing to help HN get stories that it's missing completely, since there won't be any such thread to comment in. You seem to be saying we're missing most of those. How can we fix that?

One idea is to change the rules so that users are allowed to resubmit stories that received fewer than four upvotes after 24 hours. Right now you risk getting banned for doing that.

It might be a bad idea since the resubmissions will push more legitimate stories out of the new submission queue more quickly, though.

Another idea is to increase the number of stories displayed on https://news.ycombinator.com/newest from 30 to 120. At this point, if your submission drops off the first page of /newest then it's pretty hopeless that it'll be seen by anyone. Showing 120 stories at once will give good content more time to get onto the front page where more people will see it.

> Another idea is to increase the number of stories displayed on https://news.ycombinator.com/newest from 30 to 120. At this point, if your submission drops off the first page of /newest then it's pretty hopeless that it'll be seen by anyone. Showing 120 stories at once will give good content more time to get onto the front page where more people will see it.

Or: show a random 30-subset of the newest 120 stories on /newest, and refresh this 30-subset per view/per time interval. Set this up to get the best of both options: at any point in time the newest 120 stories would be on /newest for someone, and there would only be 30 stories to look at for any one person. This will also give people more incentive to go check /newest once in a while, since they would, more often than now, find many more as-yet-unseen stories there each time.

Yeah. I often encounter really amazing stories, then go to post them on Hacker News only to find that they were submitted a few days ago and got little attention. This is an example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7474094 BBC: "American Dream Breeds Shame and Blame for Job Seekers"

Submitted 4 days ago, but only had 1 point until I upvoted it just now.

Part of the problem might be all these sources are widely read. I don't read through hacker news, what I can read anywhere else (or have already read). If you read business week/nytimes/bbc news anyway, your not going to read them on hacker news or upvote them. I'm much more interested in lesser know sources and well written commentry.

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