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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns.

Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy.

Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all.

These aren't well-developed ideas, but the point remains that the inertia of being one click away means that a huge percentage of people will never even look at /newest, never-mind up-vote interesting stories.

Please consider changes to modify the median behavior. It's within your power and would do us all good. It's worth an experiment, isn't it?

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Just splice a random /newest entry into a front page on every load.

This gets extra eyes on them and helps float good stories up. Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.

If you have ideas on how to improve the front page, a great thing to do is to send them to hn@ycombinator.com. Dan and Nick are super responsive, and you might be able to have a more productive conversation in email than on a thread.

Posting it here helps accumulating other people upvotes, which, presumably, Dan and Nick can see on their end. It also opens subject to a wider discussion, which is hardly a bad thing. Meta threads are pretty damn useful if you ask me.

I agree, and I actually like the meta-threads, but I've had much more success talking to Dan privately than I have in trying to motivate changes with public comments. I think if you're really serious about a suggestion, mailing Dan is the right way to go.

If there's one consistent thing I've read from Dan in his tenure of publicly moderating the site, it's "please mail hn@ycombinator.com about this stuff". I'm just heading him off here. :)

> Optionally mark them green, just like HN currently marks noob users.

Love this suggestion. +1

This is a great suggestion. Or the bottom 5 are newest or something like that.

I check the front page a couple of times a day but don't take the time to go any further.

This.

I use HN only for the front page and I occasionally upvote or downvote comments. I'd be totally willing to have one link from the /newest in a different color on the front-page and if it's good I would upvote it. The action could be a bit more explicit [Keep on front-page?]

Would two columns be too messy? Left one is top, right one is new?

Honestly though, having 20 green new stories at the bottom of the front page would be great and would increase my interaction with the site.

Another option is a 2-column layout (for non-mobile devices). The normal front page on the left, with the blast of new articles in the right column. Perhaps for mobile devices the new articles could go under the top stories, with some sort of obvious demarcation between them.

This seems like the best option to me.

It's even already implemented as the Hacker News UX extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-ux/chn...

I like it a lot, it would be great to have it that way by default.

good ideas here and in the responses. we will consider.

any thoughts on actually creating a discussion board/forum. because there are a fair many of those types of posts. (Show HN, questions etc.)But,there are a lot of news/off site type posts and they don't seem to go together.

somewhat related, you could use collaborative filtering. I've blogged about my thoughts and experiments with it in the past: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...

You can show some random unrated stories at the very top of the list, and then stories sorted by collaborative filtering.

In my prototyping it worked super-well.

Interesting concept. One think that popped to my mind immediately is that you need to avoid accidentally creating filter bubbles, i.e. locking everyone in their own personalized stream that shows only what they like and already agree with. It's dangerous for the mind.

Another thing is that a lot of value people like me derive from hanging out here are the random things you get to discover here - things that one wouldn't ever think about before and thus never upvote something similar. So it would be good to leave some place to splice in some random submissions that are not related to one's personal preferences.

Re filter bubbling, the scheme as envisaged actually broadens it. It shows some random unrated stories at the very top of the list so everyone is constantly exposed to things not in their filter bubble deliberately.

I heard reddit tried that once but it didn't work well for some reasons. I can't find a link to the story at the moment.

I suggested[0] the same thing a few months ago with a visual example of what I had in mind. Here it is again as a reminder: https://i.imgur.com/ZNQTn7q.png (I still think it's a great idea!).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612737

I like the idea of adding a sample of new stories to the front. It would guarantee a number of extremely low quality submissions on the front though, which might affect the overall percieved quality of HN.

It also might be a problem if simply submitting to HN guarantees a decent number of pageviews.

Perhaps new, but filtered to exclude certain sites that get a lot of attention here anyway.

I like the idea of simply appending a subset of the /new stories to the end of the front page. Make it clear they're brand new (should also be obvious from the low vote count).

I really like this idea. Just occasionally throw in some random "new" pages to users and see what gets read / upvoted. I'm sure that most users don't check the "new" page.

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