
HN Frontpage ranked using only votes from accounts over a year old - pg
http://news.ycombinator.com/classic
======
pg
I wanted to see if there had been any visible decrease in quality. Doesn't
look like it. There's surprisingly little difference between this and the
regular frontpage.

~~~
geuis
I'm not sure why, but my feeling is that I am personally less happy with the
content a) being submitted and b) making it to the front page than I was even
6 months ago.

Maybe since I'm not a newbie on HN anymore I'm remembering through rose-tinted
glasses and yelling at the kids to get off my lawn.

The things I care about are programming tips, new software,
javascript/python/ruby/etc specific articles, new startup companies. There
seems to be a lot less of this kind of content and more general tech news,
which I can read at any number of other sites.

I don't care about business stories(other than those related to startups) and
rumors Techcrunch has started about something.

On the plus side, the discussions that happen in Comments are definitely still
good. I would be great if there was a way to get easier access to the comments
than the ity-bity link we have now.

~~~
anc2020
> On the plus side, the discussions that happen in Comments are definitely
> still good.

Maybe its me, but I've found a lot more comments within the past fortnight or
so grating on me than previously. Remarkably, every time I checked the
submitter, they'd been on Hacker News for about a year and a half at least.
And by grating I basically mean rude and unhelpful.

~~~
10ren
A few times I've found the account is over a year old, but comments only
started recently. If the front page of their comments was filled (i.e. 10
comments), I probably wouldn't have noticed this. BTW they didn't seem
especially bad, just the typical newbie comments before someone replied
"Please elaborate".

~~~
jyothi
It might be worth doing one more version considering the ratings only from
people who have contributed significantly to the culture (their karma along
with age should reflect reasonably well i guess)

------
sant0sk1
Love the fact that the current "review our app" submission is notably higher
on the "classic" view. These are some of the most interesting/important posts
imo, and it appears other "older" HN users feel the same.

~~~
trickjarrett
I'm a huge supporter of the 'review' posts, it's one of my favorite things to
do on here :)

~~~
kbrower
ditto, these posts are the main reason I visit the new section

~~~
ashishk
+1

~~~
ashishk
oh no! drop in karma =(

harsh, but i guess that's fair

~~~
jmtame
it's not harsh, it's just silly to write a comment of +1 when you already up
voted. it's redundancy, and DRY is in the vocab of most coders.

you shall learn the efficiency of HN soon enough ;)

~~~
csomar
that was a though lesson! he won't forget it i think and I already remember
some lessons from the HN community :D

------
jnovek
It seems likely to me that this is just because "old timers" are seeing the
same data as newbies. How many folks look beyond the first hundred posts, or
even the front page for stuff to vote up? It makes sense that accounts older
than a year will just slightly reshuffle the top 20 posts or so.

EDIT: It would be interesting to see this comparison in an alternate reality
where we could downvote articles. I would bet that you would see more
variation between newer and older accounts.

~~~
bradgessler
It would be interesting if all of the "new" stuff was scoped to showing "new"
stuff submitted by other people who have accounts approximately as old as your
own (maybe within a month?).

This would limit "new" items to your hacker news "start class", which may make
the content more relevant.

------
frosty
i actually wanted to use HN from RSS reader but so many stories get pushed
that it was practically useless. So i created a filter which pushes stories to
rss only when they gain 20 votes or more before being pushed out of front-
page:

<http://hackernewsrss.appspot.com/downloadrss>

it has around 60% less articles. add to ur feed readers if you find it useful.

------
tokenadult
Definitely worth adding the "classic" link to the lists page.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/lists>

And, yes, as a member of the less-than-one-year-old group, I'm encouraged to
see that classic tastes from when I first started lurking here are still
reflected in current voting up to the main page.

~~~
quizbiz
I had no idea that page existed. Would be great if it could be added to the
navigation. Please...

~~~
ivank
It's at the bottom-left, "Lists"

------
einarvollset
I wonder what would happen if you did a diff between the two - a front page of
only the stuff new people liked..

------
sosuke
Anyone else happily surprised their vote counts on the "classic" version? :)

------
trickjarrett
Very fascinating! Not drastically different but shows an interesting
difference in voting. Perhaps you'll provide some sort of basic controls for
us to tweak our personal homepages along these lines?

~~~
Zak
What would be really cool is a form that took at arbitrary[0] Arc expression
as an argument to the sort function.

[0] but restricted to a certain set of allowable symbols

~~~
eru
The function should also be provable fast.

~~~
stcredzero
Just time the thing out after so many cycles.

~~~
eru
Yes, but that's not very geeky.

More seriously: I'd like to specify only a comparision function.

------
triplefox
If this view persists, the entire site's direction is going to change because
some proportion will upvote only from "classic" and others only from "main."

------
sah
The differences are hard to notice, but to me the /classic page is subtly
better. Things I'm personally interested in ("Fibers & Cooperative Scheduling
in Ruby") are mostly voted a couple places higher, and things that bored me
("Steve Blank: Gravity Will be Turned Off") are a few places lower.

------
arjunlall
Im curious, what percent of user accounts are over a year old vs not?

Also, do accounts with higher karma boost up a story more?

Im wondering if the reason why the two lists are very similar is that the old
users inherently have a high weight (in terms of number of accounts and karma
power) on the normal page already.

------
kleevr
As a simple heuristic, it's an elegant solution.

Could the front page 'merit' be more or less ~accurately~ described via
continuous function?

for (User user : item.up_voters) merit += user.life_span_in_months/12;

for (User user : item.down_voters) merit -= user.life_span_in_months/12;

~~~
kleevr
Or, perhaps you could define 'merit' as continously compounding interest with
their average karma density (votes/items).

Taking the interest forumula "Pe^(tr)", and substituting might yield something
like:

P = 1, -1, it is the single up/down vote

t = user life span in years

r = karma/submissions (karma_density)

for (user:item.voters) item.merit +=
(sign_of_vote)e^((user.life_span/12)(user.karma/user.submissions))

------
justlearning
@pg: I understand the need for this.

But here's my standing.I have been "loitering" here since the early days. I
must have registered with atleast four userids..AND used always mess up my
password.

Most recent one - even the openid auth - didn't work for a while(it works
now!). I created the one I am using now couple of months back only to be
treated as an outcast.

Is there a way to synch my accounts? (even a forget password feature would be
helpful)

~~~
SapphireSun
I have a feeling that if you open up a way to sync accounts, trolls would find
ways to exploit it very quickly. Perhaps it would work if there was not
automated, but required an admin to authorize the change. However, I'm pretty
sure that unless this is rarely used, they would not want to deal with the
number of requests.

------
quizbiz
It's interesting or me to note the changes in rankings that have occurred over
the day while this article just remains leaps and bounds above anything else.

------
Skeuomorph
"Konami Code Sites", ranked 6th on current home as I write this, isn't even on
the first page in the 'classic' view.

------
johns
Can we get an RSS feed for this filter?

------
wallflower
I personally like the diversification from pure software hacking to hardware
and personal/mind hacking.

------
rythie
I can vote in 40 days time! not that's it's a big deal I mostly vote on
comments not stories.

------
rapind
This is great. Thank you.

------
volida
personally I rarely vote. Maybe other older members act similarly.

~~~
adrianwaj
You can view it as bookmarking an item with the upvote button instead.

------
TweedHeads
Most voting systems can be gamed. Interesting to see if this approach will
reduce the PR submarines on the front page.

Payperpost, astroturfing and mob-voting are the worse diseases of news
aggregators.

------
weegee
as an aside, how many points does a user need to be able to vote an article or
coment down? (Interesting that this comment will be voted down by people who
have that ability)

~~~
trickjarrett
I believe it is 50.

~~~
alexfarran
It was 50. Then it went up to 100.

