
Ask HN: Is there a guaranteed exposure for each HN post? - matijash
Does HN somehow give a &quot;chance&quot; to each post to survive, or if you are unlucky and other posts just pile on top of yours too quickly you just drown?
======
gus_massa
Each post goes to the newest page
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) .
Please go there from time to time an upvote good stories (and flag spam).

The stories in the front page are sorted by "penalties * upvotes / time^1.5"
(Where penalties are a lot of automatic an manual penalties added by the mods
and the flags of the users.) (And the number 1.5 is only an approximation. I
don't know the current value of "gravity".)

Using this calculation, to get to the front page, post currently must get 3 or
4 upvotes in the first hour.

There is also the second chance pool, that sends a story to the front page for
a short time. More details in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)
The mods use a mix of manual and automated criteria to add stories to this
pool.

The details change from time to time and are part of the secret sauce, so take
this as a rough approximation.

And remember to go to the newest page and upvote good stories
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)

~~~
matijash
wow, thank you for such a detailed explanation! I didn't know about flagging,
will become active in /newest and do it.

I suppose spam that should be flagged is the usual stuff - ads, repeating
content etc.?

~~~
gus_massa
You need 200 points to flag. Get one now! Use the flag button wisely when you
get enough points.

From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _What to Submit_

> _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
> answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity._

> _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they
> 're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or
> disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's
> probably off-topic._

A small amount of repost are ok.

About ads: Some post are almost an infomercial. If it is interesting it is ok.
If it is just "buy me" repeated one hundred time no. Some post are about
personal projects or a starting business looking for feedback. If it is
interesting it is ok. Hey! Dropbox begun as a personal project and was posted
here by the author before it was cool.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

