Upvote to encourage more people to visit New Links on Hacker News

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

by crazypython • 5 years ago

557 90 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

nikivi• 5 years ago

Not sure how that will help but I can certainly say, much of the best content of HN as far as links go doesn't pass through the barrier of getting on the front page.

https://hckrnews.com sometimes catches those links but even then, it's nice to stroll through /new HN posts. I've been doing it for a while and it's around 600-1000 links (15 min time of the day)

crazypython3• 5 years ago

Hopefully it helps revitalize HN's links.

crazypython3• 5 years ago

I just tried https://hckrnews.com. It's nice to have a feed of posts that made it to the front page.

simonsarris• 5 years ago

I had once suggested that the main page be woven out of a combination of popular + new, perhaps 50/50:

1. popular

2. new

3. popular

4. new

This injects a lot of noise into the front page, because most of new is noise, but it helps.

Another option is to front-load popular stories, then have 10-20 "new" items at the bottom of the page. That way the front page remains highly salient, but anyone who merely scrolls more will also see a small chunk of new. So 1-30 popular (as it is now), then 30-45 new (making the frontpage longer).

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

They (or a 3rd party dev) could also make a two-column layout, one for popular, one for new.

I'm pretty sure Reddit has the same problem though, and only the diehard followers of a subreddit actually bother to look in new.

kibwen• 5 years ago

A two-column layout is exactly how I plan to address this in my reddit clone that I'll never, ever actually get around to writing. Not sure what to do about mobile layout, though.

spockz• 5 years ago

Would this work for mobile device users?

Quequau• 5 years ago

I used to use an extension for Chrome that had a two-column layout as you describe and I rather liked it. However, I switched to back Firefox some years ago and I've never found a similar extension to replace it.

Ajedi32• 5 years ago

Or just have it work how comments do, where 1-2 new posts show up near the top of the page until they have a chance to get voted on.

Though I suppose it's a bit different for links since they can't be downvoted like comments can.

gus_massa4• 5 years ago

Most new post are just too bad. (I've seen them.) People would write angry comment complaining that they are in the front page.

There is something similar, the mods cherrypick some post and they have a second chance and are shown in the front page for a small time. More details by dang in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

dna_polymerase• 5 years ago

Most new post are just too bad. (I've seen them.) People would write angry comment complaining that they are in the front page.

Maybe weigh them by submitter's karma.

koheripbal• 5 years ago

True, but not everyone needs to get the same new links. Server could return random different new posts to different users.

...and it could be every 5th post, so it's not a huge burden.

polote6• 5 years ago

More recently there was a bit of discussion about it here as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23096578

Out of frustration of not seeing a lot of good blog posts that are submitted everyday on HN. I built a newsletter which gather all (EDIT : a lot of ) the personal blog posts which didnt reach the front page in a newsletter https://hnblogs.substack.com/ (that's curated manually every day from /newest)

tinco• 5 years ago

What about a clearly deliniated box with 5 items: 3 with 0 upvotes, 1 with <10 upvotes, and one with more than 10 but not enough to hit the frontpage.

That way there's always something interesting in the box, and everyone is encouraged to contribute to arbitrating the new posts a bit more.

edit: I guess posts that are upvoted should have a significant higher exposure, to reward them with a better chance of hitting FP, so if there's too many upvoted posts it could be 2-2-1. Oh and of course there should be a profile checkbox to turn the whole thing off, wouldn't want to impose ourselves.

bachmeier2• 5 years ago

I don't see how this could work without a downvote button.

covercash• 5 years ago

A decade ago my friend and I built our “better digg” with a box at the top that cycled through new submissions to help those new stories gain traction. You need a downvote or skip button.

fassssst• 5 years ago

TikTok’s algorithm seems to work well for this.

maxrovertsb• 5 years ago

What is TikTok's algorithm? I am not familiar with the app.

johnfn• 5 years ago

Another idea would be to reuse the comment algorithm, which bumps comments straight to the top when they’re created for a very brief period to see if they get any traction.

I guess that it wouldn’t necessarily have to be the top for posts.

Wowfunhappy• 5 years ago

As I recall, dang said they tried a more conservative version of that once (just a handful of new links), and people really didn't like it.

wodenokoto• 5 years ago

Interweaving new was tested and resulted in people thinking the algorithm was broken, due to low interaction articles on the front page.

Adding a section with “check out these new items” at the bottom of each page might be interesting IMHO :)

asicsp• 5 years ago

I'd like something similar to 'rising' on reddit. Currently I check page 2/3 for something not yet on front page, but that depends on HN activity I guess. It is good enough right now, but about 12 hours from now (which is my preferred morning read in my time zone) only few of them come under not yet got enough attention category. By having a separate selection, they can be browsed more easily.

city412• 5 years ago

Maybe just put say two new links randomly chosen from the past x hours for every home page visit.

hjek2• 5 years ago

I love that idea. I'm working on a HN clone in Prolog and will totally implement that. But, I think you could also make something like that for HN as a Firefox extension. Or perhaps write a simple web app that provides a RSS feed of popular and new interwoven.

ghoshbishakh• 5 years ago

The new section should be at the bottom of the main page. Simply scroll to see new items.

Finnucane• 5 years ago

Is it just me? When I go to HN it seems to default to new.

tomashubelbauer• 5 years ago

This happened to me on my phone and it was driving me crazy for a few days until I noticed the browser switched the HP for the New page in the Popular section above the bookmarks. Maybe a variant of this is happening for you.

pavlov• 5 years ago

How about displaying one random new item at the top of the front page, clearly separated from the popular list?

That would give each new item enough of a visibility sample that interesting stuff gets seen.

pbronez• 5 years ago

heh just like search ads... "before we show you what you came here for, please review these items which benefit us"

Still a reasonable suggestion. I like the idea of making "new" items part of the default view so they get more review. If this is done, they should be visually separated from the popular stuff, just like ads need to be clear.

verdverm• 5 years ago

I've found many solid links in new that never make the front page. Going through them can be a time sink.

djlewald• 5 years ago

could maybe do something like tweetdeck and have new listed adjacent to the main page...

usr11062• 5 years ago

I visit "New" occasionally but I find it often disappointing because it is full of flagged submissions. Many of them seem reasonable submissions (not on TV, not click bait), so I keep wondering why they are flagged. Not sure if some people flag duplicates, but finding out whether it is duplicate takes quite a while, especially on a phone.

gus_massa4• 5 years ago

Most of the [dead] post are just spam. Some are just off topic. If you see one that is not spam, you can vouch them, and if it is really great you can write an email to the mods. (It's a manual process, so only write about the very good post.)

There are some corner case, like people that make very simple technical post like "How to sort a list in Python using the standard sort function", and submit every day one of them. A good discussion about different sorting algorithms is nice, but a two lines post about [1 4 2 3].sort is not.

It would be nice if you link 2 or 3 examples.

monopoledance3• 5 years ago

And anything political that doesn't meet the hivemind's right-leaning, libertarian political mindset. At least those who downvote and flag posts and comments, tend to effectively cancel particular views a lot.

Pretty sad state of affairs, as the hivemind remains a political bias, as new users don't have the same rights to manage visibility. Even on Reddit the Hivemind can't kill a comment completely. IMO comments/posts should never fall below 1 karma points, karma shouldn't be visible, just affect ranking, and comments only be removed by moderators, with an explanation, which community rule was broken.

ddevault• 5 years ago

Flagging is entirely broken on Hacker News, which is a problem I've pointed out to the moderators before. It's basically a super-downvote and allows people to censor opinions that they don't like. Comparing with downvotes:

- Flags work on comments and posts, but you can only downvote comments.

- Flags work on replies to your comments; downvotes don't.

- A few flags will remove a comment entirely, downvotes can only make it grey.

- A few flags will remove a post entirely, and even with showdead enabled you have to see it in /new or at the last page of /hot, then choose to vouch for it to rescue it. This almost never happens. A flagged post is basically a death sentence for that post.

- You get flags at 31 karma, but can't downvote until 501.

So the answer is that flags are utterly broken and vulnerable to abuse, and /new is where it shows most strongly. Tons of posts are killed there. Controversial topics almost cannot be discussed on HN because it only takes a few people to vanish the post for good.

Lewton• 5 years ago

Controversial topics almost cannot be discussed on HN because it only takes a few people to vanish the post for good.

feature not a bug

polote6• 5 years ago

Controversial topics almost cannot be discussed on HN because it only takes a few people to vanish the post for good.

Yes but that's a choice, because these topics tend to create flame war discussion, so they don't belong to HN. It doesn't mean, these topics should not be discussed. Hn is just not the right place for it.

This almost never happens. A flagged post is basically a death sentence for that post.

I'm not sure for that. I've rescued post, and I've seen post being rescued. But it could be easier to rescue a post, I agree.

Hn works as a filter for submitted content, which works pretty well but tend to filter always the same kind of posts

r721• 5 years ago

A few flags will remove a post entirely, and even with showdead enabled you have to see it in /new or at the last page of /hot

Good place to look for popular (with many comments) flagged posts is https://news.ycombinator.com/active (Most active current discussions)

usr11062• 5 years ago

Would it work better to have at least 3 categories

* off-topic: On TV, get rich schemes etc, daily politics

* on topic but lacking news value. Trivial computing problems everyone can lookup on stackoverflow should they need to look it up

* duplicate or not original, ideally with a link to the original one

polote6• 5 years ago

so I keep wondering why they are flagged

Some people have their post automatically flagged, because of their bad behavior in the past. (mod correctly if I'm wrong)

jb7753• 5 years ago

They probably auto-flag duplicates and known spam.

Whenever I look at the "new" page, it seems like a firehose of posts. I'd imagine there's luck involved with how many people happen to visit the "New" page before a post is pushed into the abyss. I'd also imagine there's a certain time-frame where a post is more likely to catch traction.

ve55• 5 years ago

While it's true that the 'new' section is pretty under-visited, one of the reasons is definitely due to the content being much worse (on average) than the front page; it's a great way to see how effective the HN system is at showing us the better content that's been submitted.

But it's also quite often that some great posts don't manage to gain traction simply due to bad luck - I imagine the amount of people that read 'new' is around 1-3% of the userbase (I know if I'm going through pages of it, it's probably time to start focusing on work instead...), so it's nice this has been submitted.

jasode• 5 years ago

Upvote to encourage more people to visit New Links on Hacker News

I experimented with the "/newest" link a while back and I decided that it was not a good use of my limited reading time. It was better to read the threads that the crowd voted up to the default HN front page or the "/best" algorithm for some older threads.

The issue is that the "/newest" would only work for me if it was a whitelist of the 50 HN users' opinions I trust.

(And nothing against you personally because I don't know you but I notice that /newest page has many more submissions by crazypython because you've submitted many articles in the last 24 hours. Do I need to see more crazypython submissions?!? I dunno.)

But I'm willing to be convinced that I should expend reading effort on the /newest page again.

mattowen_uk2• 5 years ago

The issue is that the "/newest" would only work for me if it was a whitelist of the 50 HN users' opinions I trust.

Maybe some form of /newest could be an auto-filter so that only new submissions from HN members with over 500 karma are shown ?

S_A_P• 5 years ago

Maybe I’m crazy for suggesting this, but for a non mobile layout the single column is a waste of real estate. Maybe allow a the current UI for those who don’t want to change but have a 2 column layout for those with the space that has top and new side by side. For mobile I think the current UI is sufficient.

simplecto• 5 years ago

hmmm.. It is always interesting to learn other's behavior. I hit the top links often. Maybe that just shows how often I'm here on HN :-) Gotta feed the dopamine monster

tartrate• 5 years ago

I thought all of these sites just treated it as an n-armed bandit problem.

mikkelam• 5 years ago

Honestly, I'm too lazy to sit and upvote anything to bring it more attention. I'm glad that some people like doing it

bachmeier2• 5 years ago

I go through new submissions a few times a week. A couple things that make it undesirable:

1. No way to limit to certain topics/tags. That means I'm seeing philosophy, politics, news, etc.

2. No way to see a summary without clicking the link and waiting for the page to load. Reasons this is bad: Title length is limited (for good reason) so titles on HN are routinely uninformative. There's more likely to be annoying ads/paywalls/etc. inside these posts. That's a lot of overhead to devote to a single potential vote for a probably-not-good post. As a result, I just skip over most links, and that's the same as not visiting the New Links page.

f4302• 5 years ago

I'm sorry but HN has gotten really toxic over the years. Flagging and censorship is a big concern here as there is an asymmetric balance of power that is clearly being abused.

Somebody doesn't agree with me politically? flagged & downvoted.

Somebody is a potential competitor? flagged & downvoted.

Somebody drives a Ferrari and I don't? flagged, downvoted (recently, somebody on HN tried to doxx me with no moderator taking action)

I miss the days when there were really good discussions, while those are still around, HN increasingly feels like a competition of "I am smart because X so Y". There appears to be a cabal especially around specific topics like Bitcoin or their affiliated companies.

edit: heh case in point. now all of my other comments are being brigaded & downvoted. Lots of bitterness and negative vibes here that is only going to impede growth. I will pray for you.

fortran77• 5 years ago

There's also a lot of "brigading" -- mass flags and downvoting of everything an individual has posted or commented on.

f4302• 5 years ago

Yes, there is sometimes an excessive pedantry that is used to attack an FOSS or some new project on Show HN or new thoughts. It's impossible to placate this small group, they decide what gets upvoted and what doesn't.

It is the same problem on Reddit too. Anybody can create multiple accounts or buy aged ones, use different proxies to downvote. On the server side, what can you really do to fight this?

Fingerprinting, IP address intelligence, account age, points, user activity that will be compared to the normal distribution of most legitimate user activity (I doubt this is used efficiently).

edit: Case example, within minutes of posting my parent comment, its downvoted to oblivion and they are probably going through all of my comment history to do the same. It's really churlish and parochial.

parenthesis• 5 years ago

How about having the per-user option to make HN show the new page as the default, as reminder to have a look at it before going to the real homepage?

BrianOnHN• 5 years ago

Have you heard about the new HN yet? If not, by the time you do hear about it, it will be the old HN, so...

crazypython3• 5 years ago

I don't understand why so many people are flagging this post, when it caused 8 different articles (which are ranking above it) to get the front page. If anything, it should rank above the articles it helped get to the front page.

polote6• 5 years ago

You completely bullied the algorithm. There are like 20 new posts on the front page and no post stay at the top. Because there are too many posts being upvoted

arbitrage• 5 years ago

training the user is never the correct response to UI/UX issues.

Fixing your UI/UX is.

Shocking, I know.

nudpiedo• 5 years ago

Some issues I see on HN new links are:

- People missusing flagging as if it was sort of "super downvote"

- Coordinated groups of people promoting certain news, like programming communities (spam for tech solutions)

- Meaningless blog posts crafted only to drag HN users onto them (low value but appear to be voted enough somehow)

EDIT: format

jimmyvalmer• 5 years ago

nnhackernews on a 5min refresh is as optimally anti-FOMO as I can get it.

mattowen_uk2• 5 years ago

Y'know what would be really easy to implement? A /random which just took you to a random post (not flagged/dead) that's been submitted in the past X hours.

dcminter• 5 years ago

Is it really a problem though? When I submit a post I usually spend a little time voting on other submissions in the new queue. I'd guess that's a pretty common mode of usage.

My own submissions and the ones I see when voting on new seem to land on the front page in rough proportion to their quality.

I see more political (in some sense) posts than I really want, and not enough super-duper technical stuff - but I don't really get the impression that that arises from a lack of attention in voting stuff onto the front page.

anarbadalov• 5 years ago

I don't see it as a problem either. I visit HN a few times a day, when i need a break from work and want to avoid descending into the dark Twitter rabbit hole, and usually check out and vote on a couple of articles in the new links queue.

Only difference is that i come less for the technical stuff — i'm not a developer — and more for the (usually) intelligent discussions, which sometimes lead me to even better stories.

Udo• 5 years ago

The problem is I often don't think of clicking on the "new" link and I do understand why people may be reluctant to spend the effort of curating a couple of new entries.

So, idea:

How about everyone gets a random new submission shown on their front page, at a static spot where it's easy to ignore if you don't want to see it. This would still drastically increase the chance of something interesting catching your eye, without polluting the front page too much.

It's a randomized algorithm, but paradoxically, I think it would reduce the randomness of whether a submission gets picked up or not.

known• 5 years ago

Difficult since Wisdom of Crowds is not always rational;

dddddaviddddd• 5 years ago

I'm happy with how Hacker News currently works re how new links are displayed and ranked.

Abimelex• 5 years ago

Using https://hckrnews.com/ interface with top 20 filter. Works out pretty well, oc I'm kinda blind to less voted threads and thankful to your all voting the interesting stuff up :)

brianzelip• 5 years ago

I always wonder how stories get upvoted enough to make it to the front page, if /new isn't being checked in critical mass.

ballenf• 5 years ago

You'll pretty regularly see a story on the front page with a low double-digit score, especially during off-peak times. Point is, it doesn't take that many upvotes coming quickly to rocket a story to the front page.

I'm more frustrated at stories that get missed due to poor titles.

But that's kind of also true across all of life, so probably not something HN is going to solve anytime soon.

gnicholas• 5 years ago

It would be nice if there were some sort of advanced features, like downvoting or flagging, which could only be maintained by users who upvote at least dozen links off of the new page per week.

I’d suggest keeping the karma threshold required to earn these privileges, but just require a little bit of ongoing service to maintain them. No penalty if you are take a break from HN for a while; just spend a couple minutes voting on new and your advanced abilities will return.

blindm• 5 years ago

I'm sure it's easy to write a small script that spawns new tabs in the browser and opens several random sites from /newest. In-fact I am tempted to write a bookmarklet that does this. You could also code up something in Tampermonkey that automatically opens everything in /newest

jb7753• 5 years ago

HN should create 4 categories for posts(technical, political, non-technical & non-political, misc -- or something similar), then simultaneously display the top 10 for each category on the "New" page.

webXL• 5 years ago

This Chrome/Brave extension makes this task a bit easier: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-ux/chn...

areoform• 5 years ago

It is disappointing what gets picked up in New. Dang's second chance pool etc are a great way to address it, but the New tab upvotes prioritize controversy and "hot" topics over substantial ones. Here are my last 25 submissions, please guess which ones made it to the front page,

The Romeo File (1997) (newyorker.com) 1 point by areoform 17 hours ago | past | discuss

A Review of “So You Want Your Child to Be a Genius?” (plos.org) 2 points by areoform 2 days ago | past | discuss

Hollywood and hyper-surveillance: the story of Gorgon Stare (2019) (nature.com) 52 points by areoform 5 days ago | past | 17 comments

Should We Open Some Sealed Apollo Moon Samples? (space.com) 1 point by areoform 8 days ago | past | discuss

Flashback: Bob Dylan Performs at the 1963 March on Washington (rollingstone.com) 2 points by areoform 9 days ago | past | discuss

Onesimus (wikipedia.org) 1 point by areoform 10 days ago | past | discuss

NSFW: Someone at Osama Bin Laden's Compound Sure Loved Anime (gizmodo.com) 3 points by areoform 12 days ago | past | 1 comment

In a Murderous Frame of Mind (washingtonpost.com) 2 points by areoform 16 days ago | past

Did the NSA Help Russia Target Dudayev? (1997) (free.fr) 1 point by areoform 19 days ago | past

IBM and the Holocaust (wikipedia.org) 55 points by areoform 19 days ago | past | 11 comments

Kettering Bug (wikipedia.org) 2 points by areoform 22 days ago | past

Mason Jar (wikipedia.org) 3 points by areoform 22 days ago | past

An Economic Analysis of Liquidity-Saving Mechanisms [pdf] (newyorkfed.org) 1 point by areoform 22 days ago | past

Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience. Simulations and Image Processing (nasa.gov) 1 point by areoform 24 days ago | past

[dupe] Nintendo's use of surveillance and private investigators to target modders (twitter.com/eclipse_tt) 264 points by areoform 26 days ago | past | 112 comments

Pan-American Highway (wikipedia.org) 4 points by areoform 26 days ago | past

Sonic Hedgehog (Genetics) (wikipedia.org) 1 point by areoform 28 days ago | past

When California Went to War over Eggs (smithsonianmag.com) 2 points by areoform 28 days ago | past

What Happens to All Those Letters Sent to Santa? (smithsonianmag.com) 4 points by areoform 29 days ago | past

Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet (rand.org) 4 points by areoform 30 days ago | past

Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow (rollingstone.com) 15 points by areoform 32 days ago | past | 17 comments

FSB Officer Inadvertently Confesses Murder Plot to Navalny (bellingcat.com) 1 point by areoform 34 days ago | past

Can You Hypnotize a Chicken? (smithsonianmag.com) 2 points by areoform 34 days ago | past

Designing with Fluid Type Scales (utopia.fyi) 1 point by areoform 35 days ago | past

I Stole Gram Parsons’ Body (loudersound.com) 1 point by areoform 35 days ago | past

Some of the most interesting submissions never saw the light of day. The "I Stole Gram Parsons' Body" story is bizarre in a very HN way. An economic analysis of liquidity saving mechanisms explains how the modern economic payment system works. The Romeo File goes into an interesting facet of espionage history where the stasi targeted secretaries with "Romeos" to send information to the USSR. A practice that has reverberations to this day. When California Went to War over Eggs is a bizarre story about protein at the early west.

However, none of these received any interest. Which is frustrating. I try to share interesting things I find on HN, but it feels horrible to find something cool that you wish to share with the world and watch it slip into the endless void.

Unless, the submission generates outrage. Such as the Nintendo story. Or, IBM and the holocaust. Or, the Gorgon Stare. That's what makes it to the front page. It is soul crushing to know that interesting stories about the time there was a very literal war over eggs won't get as much attention as these clickbaity things. Which leads to a natural conclusion, the reason why the internet is so crap in general is because people like things that make them rage or feel strong emotions, and they reward it.

Dang's inbox is always open, but it feels needy and depressing to email him repeatedly "Hey, I submitted something great, have a look?" I wish there was some way to fix this problem.

You can see my submissions here, https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=areoform

aasasd• 5 years ago

Imgur's users once conducted an experiment, or a flashmob, where people hanging out at ‘new’ were supposed to upvote just anything, to show the mainpage users what it's like in ‘new’. In practice, weirdest things were floating up to main, and that night was by far the best experience I've had on the site.

There was also a regular feature called ‘Late Night Imgur’ where at night (on the US time) people upvoted horror stories, strange visions and such.

aabbcc1241• 5 years ago

One can see new posts in https://news.ycombinator.com/newest or http://hn.luap.info/

manx• 5 years ago

How about taking the current ranking formula and dividing it by the number of clicks? This should make the "new" page obsolete. I ran some simulations to analyze the new behavior: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring

Upvote to encourage more people to visit New Links on Hacker News

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