

Ask HN: Noise in HN, an idea to throttle it down - heelhook

It has been pointed out several times that new items submitted to HN have increasingly less chance of being picked up because of how fast the new items page scrolls items out of sight. This problem will be growing as HN gets more users.<p>Maybe the approach of showing the list of new items in the "new" page is not necessarily the best one [anymore]?<p>An alternative approach would be to display a random subset of new articles from the past n minutes on each display of the new items page. This is particularly true for times when several articles are submitted per minute, which will only become increasingly common.<p>That way each submission would get more time (from a smaller audience) to be picked up and more quality items would be upvoted.
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tokenadult
What also helps is to ruthlessly flag off-topic (especially political) and
spam posts from the new page, if you have enough karma to flag submissions.
Submissions that receive enough flags from different users are autokilled, and
then they drop from the default view (showdead off) of the new page. I visit
the new page frequently to look for good new articles to upvote to the main
page, and to flag articles that don't belong on Hacker News at all.

I do like the idea of part of the main page display showing some subset of the
newest submissions, as many very good articles don't make the critical karma
gain soon after submission that is necessary to reach the main page under
current forum settings. Hacker News doesn't offer a way to "bump up" old but
good posts, as do forums that prioritize display by last reply date.

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sixtofour
Make an RSS feed for the discussions (what you're reading right now), not the
articles. You can always get to the articles from the discussions.

If the RSS feed linked to the discussions I would almost never go to the HN
front or new pages, and nothing would ever drop out of site (for people who
use a feed reader).

As it is, I don't bother with the article feed, because the value is in the
discussions as much as the articles.

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retroafroman
That is the way Reddit does it, correct?

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heelhook
Is it? Didn't know. I don't use reddit. Any reason why HN doesn't do it that
way?

