Given that unpredictability is key to curiosity (see [1] and [2]), we're very open to ideas about how to make HN's front page more uncorrelated. A suggestion I heard recently was to downweight the most commonly submitted sites (there are lots of different ways one could do this). A common complaint is that there are too many mainstream news articles that are too samey with each other. I'm sympathetic to that too. Anyone want to make more suggestions?
I'm going to downweight this subthread itself, so it doesn't distract too much from polote's Show HN.
In my opinion, the problem is less correlation of articles on the HN front page and more correlation across news sources. A lot of stuff from the NY Times gets to the front page, for instance. What makes that really bad is that there are a lot of stories behind paywalls or that require registration. The discussion is a regurgitation of discussions elsewhere because everyone comments on the title.
I would love it if paywalled/registration required sites would get downweighted so as to encourage a discussion of the article. Another change I'd like would be programming language stories downweighted based on how many other stories on that language recently hit the front page. It's no secret that the latest fad is Rust, and while it's everyone's right to like any language they want, it certainly doesn't increase HN's value to have yet another story about a library update for [language of the week], and a general discussion about [language of the week] rather than about the post.
> I would love it if paywalled/registration required sites would get downweighted so as to encourage a discussion of the article.
That's only a problem when these sites get posted a lot.
Counterpoint: The London Review of Books had a few front page appearances here, it is a site posted quite seldom, it has spectacular articles, and because it's posted so rarely, pretty much everyone who clicks on it will still be within his number of "free articles".
One idea is to have more human curation of the content posted on /newest.
Currently users don't have much incentive to go through newest and curate/upvote. Adding some badges & special privileges (or just awarding karma) for folks who consistently help curate & discover great content would set the incentives correctly. Essentially, gamify the curation process so the load gets shared.
Ok, assume without loss of generality that we choose karma as the reward mechanism. How do we measure how much karma to give to whom? If it's just for activity on /newest, people will write bots to game it, and we'll end up worse off than before. There needs to be a way to reward doing a good job of selecting stories, but not a bad job. How do you measure a good job?
If a story that I upvoted from /newest ends up getting lots of love(=upvotes) on HN then I have done a good job.
For this to work in practice there needs to be /staging. Here's the workflow,
- Karma hungry scavengers (like me) would go to /newest and upvote some interesting stories.
- Some of these stories move to /staging where non-scavengers (yet karma hungry) reads & upvotes the interesting ones.
- After a certain threshold on /staging the story moves to HN homepage.
- If my story makes it to homepage, I should get a % of final story points (say 10%) as a karma bounty. I help community discover great content from a river and I'm directly rewarded in proportion to the quality of content (maybe only after the story crosses a certain threshold).
- People who upvote from /staging should also get a % karma bump (although lower than me).
I know we are basically creating mini-HN with /staging but I'm suggesting this approach based on your past comments about folks's emotional connection to homepage (many people only want to see quality content on homepage).
A simple approach would be to add a short "New" section at the bottom of the frontpage, which shows about 5 semi-randomly chosen submissions from the last few hours that haven't seen much engagement yet.
That would encourage more curation without much effort, but also without too much distraction for users only interested in the top.
Add a toggle to hide the section persistently and everyone should be happy.
You might set a karma ceiling for the reward system, so that it only applies to a particular band of the karma spectrum; the bot is pointless after the threshold has been reached, so there's less incentive to write it.
(I wonder sometimes what things on the site should exclude people based on high karma).
Here’s one idea. Don’t reward anything. Just find a way to remind people that newest exist and send them there more often. Perhaps by putting a link such as “HN new: Please curate new submissions” randomly in place of one normal story on the HN, some percentage of times.
We sometimes push posts to the bottom of the front page, but never random posts. Only ones that moderators and/or a small number of story reviewers think that the community might find interesting. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and the links back from there.
If everyone's vote only counted on the story they upvoted that is currently highest ranked we might see more variety in stories as simultaneous stories that share a similar audience are punished.
This would probably increase randomness though. "Awesome rust post" could fail to gain any traction because "Half decent rust post" was already on the front page sucking up the rust developer votes...
I'm going to downweight this subthread itself, so it doesn't distract too much from polote's Show HN.
[1] The best submissions are ones that you can't predict from any sequence of previous submissions. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] Curiosity abhors repetition. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...