However not all stories are created equal. Most of the stories on that page are from noob users who want to jack up their karma. Hence, the deluge HN on the weekdays (only dedicated ones stay around on the weekends) leading to this difference between the weekday and weekend articles.

How can we solve this?

One simple way to do this would be to post noobstories only to the noob stories page and sort the entries not by time, but by karma of the user as well as the votes given like the comments.

This way we could have a quasi front page which will create a positive feedback loop. Hence, there will be an implicit reward in going to the new page which will ensure that only the good stories were posted. Also, since older users (by karma, PG's metric) who are more settled in and are less likely to do karma antics it won't overflow every minute or so.

However, this might create a barrier to entry on HN and perhaps that's a good thing. This would force people to comment and get karma before it shows up over there. Hence, ensuring that the quality get maintained.

All in all with the same code behind the comments the new page problem can be solved.

(update: wrote a lot more detail)

I know it seems unwelcoming to noobs, but we already have a tiered system where you need N karma for your votes to count, to downvote, to submit polls, etc.

I didn't submit anything for months after joining, which I think is the best way to go. Through actively participating in the comments, I got a good idea of what the HN community was really like.

And even now I don't submit that much (though since I discovered the bookmarklet my rate of submissions has increased). HN isn't about submitting to me, it's about comments (though obviously I realize we need good stories to comment on).

The biggest drawback I see is that it might impact the quality of comments. If users desperately want to hit that submission threshold, they might comment a lot or comment group-think-ily trying to pick up a few points here and a few points there until they hit that threshold.

http://stupidfilter.org/wiki/index.php?n=Main.Status

Why do people do that?

They usually do it for Ask HN posts and well you can easily discriminate for them. Further if anyone tries to spoof the system by adding a URL there then we can parse it to see if there is any text there according to the stupidity filter. So, essentially it will still work.

Instead of having a link directly to the article, have the link go to the discussion page instead, but with an added header.

That extra header would check for a cookie. If that cookie is set, no action. If the cookie is not set, set the cookie, then forwards the user to the actual article.

Then, when you finish reading and decide it's worth an up vote, when you go 'back', you're already at the discuss page where you can vote the story itself up, as well as comment on it.

The back button should always do just that ~ take the user back to the previously viewed page.

Another option would be an extra link at the end of the headline (like how scribd appears for pdf), but that just ends up looking cluttered.

Kind of like how Facebook has "Top News" and "Most Recent," but instead of intelligent filtering there would a simple random selection. The selection would be persistent, so that you'd see the same articles when you went back to the page.

I think HN really should implement a way around this. The most obvious is to randomly show new articles on the front page, give them a chance to collect some points (if they're good, of course).

A new front page sidebar could work, but it would clutter things up. I'm not sure of a design that combines new with popular. Are there any precedents out there?

And of course you didn't write about a scandal in progress or something like that.

If you write just for the interaction with HN I can imagine that it is hard if your stuff goes by unnoticed, but of course there is no automatic relationship between what you did and how it was received in the past coupled with everything you write in the future.

Maybe simply not enough people thought it was homepage worthy and it is a signal to do better? That's how I interpret it when my stuff slides by without even a single upvote.

(I note that even devmonk who commented did not upvote your submission).

Don't take it so personal, as HN grows this is bound to happen more and more often. I've had it happen to me with an article that was requested by people here, that felt pretty weird too, but there really are no guarantees.

Spray and pray :)

I think what bugged me was the lack of drive-by readers.

HN is pretty much the only site I submit to. I have no aspirations of blogging as a business. I blog because I want to, and I'd blog if nobody came by. So heck with the score or the front-page status. And no, it doesn't bug me that a large percentage of what I write is not home-page material. That's okay too. Hey, I got used to being a mediocre writer many years ago. It's all spray and pray now.

The problem is that as a submitter you'd at least like to get a decent second set of eyeballs on your work. The value the site provides to me as a submitter isn't making the front page -- it's getting the feedback from readers. No initial readers, no feedback (good or bad)

Sure, there is a bit of sour grapes here. I guess you'd think if you spent a long time writing something that in return you'd at least receive a reasonable review. But if the average number of initial reviewers is decreasing for everybody, it can't help but mean a decrease in the quality of material overall. So it would seem that my problem as a submitter, even a submitter of poor quality material, affects the quality of material on the site for all users.

I predict the death of the submit button in the next 2 years.

There was another great article on the front page of HN today about cognitive slaves. It's a topic that keeps coming up again and again for me and the community, and as one other commenter asks on this thread, at some point it's not enough to simply complain, what would you do to fix it? I'm happy to actually be trying something. Wish me luck!

I think it's only a matter of time before you find your groove, I see it happening all over HN, people that try one thing after another and suddenly it clicks, they find their thing and from there on it's upwards.

Don't give up, the 'making complex stuff simple' thing you've got is absolutely a key in all this. The webcam thing was much the same, until we came along it was just too hard to put live video on the web, we reduced it to one click, that was all it took. Youtube did the same for clips and look where they ended up.

All you you need to do is to apply that wisdom to something that draws a crowd.

It might seem to the outside observer that I start a lot of things and don't finish them, but really I'm iterating around where things hurt and where the response is, just like you note. I have been very fortunate to make enough consulting that I can take several months a year to work on my pet projects. And after all, isn't wealth really the ability to use your time as you see fit? So in that sense I am truly a wealthy man.

I have some "boring" work I am doing that is bringing some residual income as well. I've found that time is truly your friend with startups -- the longer you are out there the more success you get, no matter what you are doing. So in some ways this start/stop work has been counterproductive, but you play the cards you have, not the ones you wish you had.

I am truly excited about the long-term capabilities of functional programming and the F# language in particular. It's allowing me to build blocks of little "solutions" that can then be assembled in ways to make larger products in a way that OOP simply didn't accomplish. Very cool.

I am fairly addicted to ww(particularly, the pet deer).

WW.com was bootstrapped out of my previous company (consultancy / software licenses).

Justin.tv is a lot slicker and it seems they are doing way better than we are in terms of traffic and user satisfaction, but we're working quite hard at the moment to turn the tide on that. WW.com to me feels as though it has a stronger community element to it.

WW is actually quite a bit older than justin.tv (we started in 1998 as 'camarades', but because the name was pretty hard to spell it got changed), we missed a few chances, had some spectacular bad luck but on the whole I'm feeling better about it today than I have felt in the last 5 years.

I don't think the Justin.tv guys have too much to worry about for the time being, but we're definitely planning a very serious effort to make a go of it.

I cringed.

Maybe for data that isn't high value, urgh.

It’s unclear what could be done to counteract this.

(Update: On reflection, reducing usability might not be a great way to go. Typically that's a better way to reduce bad behavior than to encourage good..)

Now, how we pay for the posts is probably have karma as part of it somewhere. Or may be not. But, it's a discussion worth having.

The problem is too many submissions, not less people reading the new page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720742

It's an alternative explanation.

PG, check the analytics. What's been the trend on hits to /new over time?

I try to check the "new" page periodically, but I must admit, I don't scroll beyond the first page-- so, the article referenced above I missed entirely, and it seems like I wasn't the only one.

Which means that the problem may not be that "nobody is reading the new page much any more" as much as "things age off the new page too quickly for most people to notice them."

As for potential fixes: off the top of my head, I haven't the foggiest.

e.g.

    Alice   - 100
    Bob     - 200
    Charlie - 300
    Dave    - 0

Dave won't get anywhere with either this scheme or the one I proposed, at least not immediately. But that's the idea: it will be a little bit harder for Dave to gain traction, but it will demonstrate that he's not a spammer, which should be a reasonable price to pay for ensuring the site isn't overrun with garbage (any more than some claim it already is).

EDIT: or cap the "considered" karma at the median for all users.

Since the signal:noise ratio on the /new page is pretty darn good right now, I don't think that featuring one of the new submissions on the homepage would change that much.

Also: this proposal would only lead to more impressions for the spammer if the homepage received more than 30x the traffic of the new submissions page. That may be the case, but how would a spammer know that?

Right now I count 8 'dead' links, but it's not rare at all (especially when it's quiet) to see 15 or more.

I think downvotes on new page can actually help so they can discourage users from spamming HN with articles in trying to build karma points

Alternately, make posting cost the user something, say 10 Karma points per submission, in that case users will only submit something they think will grab enough attention

Now I realize that many people don't vote up videos. However, this is Grace Hopper, who was one of the first programmers for the very first computer ever. She is credited with coming up with the term "debugging" after finding a moth in one of her computers, and she wrote the first compiler for a programming language.

If that's not Hacker News worthy then I don't know what is.

And yet amazingly, this submission only got two upvotes (one of which is mine). Now I realize that we've had a lot of scandalous and "Big Important News" but two upvotes seems abnormally low to me. In fact, if Google Students had not tweeted it (http://twitter.com/googlestudents/status/25361367579) I would have never even seen it.

I was quite surprised when it didn't make the front page.

I don't vote on anything because I don't want to 'save' all of the threads I find slightly interesting. Saving is only for things I want come back to later.

In all seriousness, it took me quite awhile before getting into the habit of going to the New page, but now I do it after going over the main page. It was actually only after seeing a comment that "people don't go to the New page" that I started doing it, so it was one of the rare times when a "reminder" post didn't annoy me and seem like whining. These types of reminders are legitimately helpful IMO.

I'd love to see new items integrated into the home page, personally. Like a split screen, or just have them listed at the bottom of the page, or just in a narrower column somewhere, or whatever.

But I'm not sure that that would have any effect on your other issue, which is the type of thing being voted to the top. They get there because people start by going to the New page; they don't get there on their own. So although giving more attention to new items might get more people to take notice, I don't think it would have any effect on what makes it to the top.

The first few karma points have to be gained by commenting, and then for example with every 10 karma points a user can make 1 submissions. Or have different 'levels' with certain thresholds, etc. You get the idea, and I think that could help reduce the amount and increase the quality of submissions.

I've recently submitted a few links that I thought were HN worthy but they barely got any notice if at all.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714743 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1696933 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714334

Perhaps they're not interesting or maybe with the current system more things are getting overlooked and lost. Don't know.

Usually, I tend to only look at what's on the New page when I submit something (since it automatically redirects you there). So, I'm as guilty as the rest. However, at that time, I'll check out the other posts and upvote other submissions that I consider quality material.

I probably need to spend more time looking at the New page than the front page to help with keeping the quality up.

Hardly anybody is viewing "new" queues, making links to interesting web pages, or otherwise doing the work to discover what's new and good. They make it too easy for spammers and voting rings to do their evil work.

Also there's a general "burnout" effect that happens in social media -- if a particular forum isn't all that excited in your content, you'll find that it gradually gets less and less traffic because people see your URL or your name and decide to move on to the next thing. This can be overcome with real or imaginary 'social proof' (lots 'o votes) but then you get into the fact that the populations of people who are looking at the "new" queue and looking at the front page are entirely different.

The more mainstream adoption HN receives, the more the stories will degrade to the lowest common denominator—that of gossip, fan-bait, and chop shop content. I returned to my feed reader for the majority of my interesting articles a long time ago.

The "new" page is basically a feed aggregator of tons of individuals' posts, most of whom don't have the notoriety or baiting title necessary to stick on the page long enough for the few people who read "new" to see them.

Like any other public link sharing site—no matter how niche or well-seeded to start—it will increasingly pander to the 90% who come rather than the 10% who started it. And it'll keep doing that until it becomes reddit (no insult meant; reddit is a great public link share). But at this stage I'm pretty confident it'll always have better discussion.

It only takes 3-4 votes for a newly submitted (< 30 minutes ago) story to hit the front page. If you and one other person like it, it'll usually get to the bottom of the hot list. From there, there's often a cascade effect as more and more people see it on the hot list. If the article's any good at all, it can often be in the top 5 within an hour or two.

It's good for karma, too, as getting early comments in on stories that later become hot is a good way to get lots of points on them.

Personally, I visit the "new" page as often as the frontpage and find many interesting stories there.

1) Why not limit submissions on HN to one per day?

That way, people will only submit their most relevant links. If a story is important enough, then either 1) someone else can submit it and this will invite broader participation on the site, or 2) it won't be submitted today and can be added tomorrow (and it probably wasn't that important to begin with).

2) HN articles used to relate to either hacking or startups (stories about education, economics, etc. were typically found on Digg and Reddit). Why not return to this formula?

Maybe some readers are less engaged because they skip the http://news.ycombinator.com and go straight to Hacker News Daily.

But what if one were able to earn karma points by interacting with the "new" page. The details could be worked out to make it un-"gamable", but the basic premise is to reward users that put more effort into discovering posts in the waterfall of the "new" page.

In your first paragraph you use the phrase "web interface" if that or some other technical term had been in the title, I might have clicked. fyi

I actually use only the new page since enough of my interests are sufficiently esoteric that submissions about them never get many votes (often only mine).

But your title was a distinct turn-off, strongly enough so that I actually remember it as such. Unfortunately I just about never look at who submits items, otherwise I might have given it a chance.

At least for me, you'd be much better off with a title that gives me at least the slightest concrete idea of what the submission is about.

Submit on a Saturday.

HN is already in a third stage. ^_^

You'll be down-voted if you even try to say that Ubuntu, or Java or PHP (or any other target of a mass-hysteria) isn't cool or superior to anything.

Recently I got that just because I didn't agree that Ubuntu is the greatest and coolest Linux distro ever.

How many of my down-voters can build a distro from scratch or at least recompile PHP with all its modules and their dependencies, or, OK, know how to build a package from its sources? It is a rhetorical question. ^_^

So, everything eventually become reddit. It is just a relation to a number of unique visitors.

And when you have a lot of unique visitors then you'll have all those technology narcissists, who're promoting how cool they are in finding a security issues in an amateur code, or how they so clever in explaining obvious things or making easy things easier.

Everyone is a teacher nowadays. ^_^

is it because I was only wondering if it was a good or not? Oh, HN...

(EDIT: This wasn't meant as a diss... it's just that people know by now that saying "HN is becoming Reddit" is a no-no, it's even listed in the guidelines. So whoever has complaints or concerns about the site, often wants to make it clear that they are not playing the HN-is-Reddit card.)