

Ask HN: How to give submission a second chance? - rpsubhub

It's really a pain sometimes to watch brilliant and thoughtful submission sinking unnoticed in all the noise. Should I just accept the way it is and move on? Does anyone has examples of great submissions we've missed?
======
bensummers
I don't bother submitting stuff any more because:

1) There's too much noise on the new page.

2) It matters which at what time of day you submit an article.

3) There's too much chance about whether it'll been seen or not.

4) Someone else will post it with a slightly different URL (see above), and
that's the one which will be noticed.

I am, of course, very grateful for everyone else who posts stuff. There's
usually a good article or two on the front page.

I suppose the question we should ask is if it matters if decent articles are
missed? There's lots of text out there on the internet.

[edit: Removed three trivial ways to defeat the dup detector.]

~~~
bvi
I'm really hoping pg is working on something as we speak about the SNR (based
on his thread a few days ago asking for feedback).

Personally, I think a separate section is needed _just_ for HN'ers to
showcase/demo/launch their startups or projects - "Show HN" threads, for the
most part, have even less chance of getting eyeballs especially if they're
self-posts; plus, there's the whole luck/timing thing as well. Or instead of a
separate section, perhaps they should be given more weight,
considering...isn't that what HN is all about in the first place?

------
jawns
Not too long ago, I was thinking about a "second chance lottery" for Hacker
News submissions that never gained the traction they deserved.

Wouldn't it be kinda neat to have a webapp that locates all of the HN
submissions with just 1 lonely point from the past day, and picks one at
random to feature prominently?

Along similar lines, last week I whipped up a little tool called Momentum that
lets you "pre-promote" links that you plan to submit to HN, so that people who
think a link is interesting can plan to up-vote it when it's actually
submitted:

<http://momentum.pressbin.com>

Ironically, I submitted Momentum to HN ... and it never gained traction.

------
erikstarck
There will always be great articles that no one reads. That's just the way it.
The internet is too big for it to be any other way.

The question is rather: how do make sure the average quality of the articles
on the front page is as high as possible?

Probably we're quite close to as good as it gets.

One option would be to have a "runner ups"-page ("bubblers"?) which lists the
newly submitted articles that are _almost_ on the front page. So instead of
two pages (front and new) we would have three (front, bubblers, new).

The algorithm would be simple: the 30 latest articles with more than 1 point
that are not yet on the front page.

Hm. This actually sounds like quite a fun little weekend project. Anyone up
for it? Is almosthn.com available? :)

------
psg
I think utilizing another method besides "votes" could help increase traction
for more submissions. For example, if I could easily discover users who share
my interests, I'd love to receive an update (RSS) whenever that user
submitted, voted, commented, etc. on an article. Instead of receiving a stream
of content that may not interest me (I therefore only scan the page), I would
know the content I'm seeing is somehow pre-vetted (at a minimum, by the
submitter).

Ironically, I've felt this way for a while and created a website to test this
theory.

------
kevinburke
Maybe you can submit twice, but it costs you 10 karma or something the second
time you submit...

~~~
duck
Better yet, make it cost you 10 karma to submit it in the first place and then
the noise on the new page would all be gone.

~~~
derefr
And better even yet, allow you to spend more karma points to give it a higher
initial score.

And still better, when a thread gets archived (when the comment thread becomes
read-only; happens after some N days), add its current score delta (the number
of points it has now, minus the number it had when you initially invested
yours) back into the user's karma, times some coefficient (possibly just 1.)

And finally, allow anyone to do this (invest karma; reap eventual score-delta
rewards), not just the initial poster.

Bam: average-sized link futures market.

~~~
ouchies
I like the sound of this game, much more interesting than just reading techy
news all day. What do we get when we win? Is it better than the knowledge I
currently get? Something like kudos from people I'll never meet?

 _remove tongue from cheek_

Seriously, why? This would seem to me to be the perfect way to breed people
who care more about karma than content... and they're the problem, IMHO.

~~~
bensummers
Seems to me that all the people who have lots of karma don't care about it,
and just got it as a side effect of contributing. Now they're all[1] leaving,
or participating less.

[1] For some definition of 'all'.

------
stevenj
Perhaps people could put a list of submissions (links) they thought were good,
but went largely unnoticed by HN, in their profiles.

For example, it could look like this:

My overlooked submissions list, from newest to oldest (last updated:
xx.xx.xxxx):

1\. Article Name (<http://domain.com>)

2.

3.

4.

5.

------
petercooper
And even when things _are_ noticed and voted up, flagging seems to have a
_significant_ effect. There are plenty of examples of items with 10-20 votes
that are mysteriously several pages deep just an hour after submission despite
those with fewer votes and longer times coming sooner.

------
swah
Does the ranking algorithm considers the amount of discussion on each
submission?

~~~
riklomas
No it doesn't, there's details about the algorithm here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417>

------
triviatise
dailykos has a similar problem, huge number of posts so some good ones never
get traction. Someone respected (maybe markos) will post an article each day
that will list a few particularly good articles that may have never gotten
traction.

I think that you can give trusted members in the community more weight when
voting. Determination shouldnt be done in an automated way.

------
impendia
As a newbie, I wouldn't mind if submissions from high-karma users dropped off
the new page a wee bit more slowly.

