
Ask HN: HN Dups, Randomness, Herding, ETC - saycheese
Curious if anyone has anyone has any thoughts of if there&#x27;s a better way to manage HN submissions.<p>For example, there are a lot of duplicate submissions, users tend to herd around top submissions, etc.<p>One thought is that randomly users are presented with a mix of new and top stories and requested to say if each story is new or a top story.
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Tomte
I think you're confused about what "new" means in HN submissions. Asking
people is unnecessary. The software knows when the story was submitted.

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saycheese
Not confused. Saying that new/top adds bias - that a blind sampling would help
solve.

Reference to dups provides proof that "top" stories are being missed, since
one dup might have 100+ upvotes, while another will have just a few upvotes
and no comment saying it's a dup; meaning to me the only difference is the
volume of comments/votes between the two.

Beyond that, I've seen research that shows seeding a submission with even just
a few comments/upvotes greatly increases the odds of future traction.

Point is to reduce noise to signal ratio.

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Tomte
"New" is simply decided by an unambiguous timestamp.

You want to ask users if a story is new, so that they check a timestamp
manually and maybe even report correctly?

That's inane.

