
Tell HN: An Observation - DanielBMarkham
For what it's worth, seems to me like nobody is reading the new page much any more.<p>Used to be I'd submit an article and get 60-150 reads as the article dropped off the new page. Today I submitted an article  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1723576  and got only a couple of dozen.<p>Now perhaps you guys have managed to figure out that all of my articles suck all of the time, but even then you'd think with 10x the traffic it would still translate into more initial readers from a year ago.<p>I'm not trying to complain that nobody upvoted my article! Hope it doesn't sound that way. I'm much more interested in the lack of drive-by readers now as opposed to a year ago and what that means for the site.<p>If you'd like to hear me complain, happy to oblige. Meanwhile the front page has gossip stories about how a lot of Angels are actually assholes, some famous guy quit Oracle, another guy rags on .NET, Uncle Bob is a great person, and more Google/Apple fluff, along with the more usual HN material.<p>Just seems kind of strange. Don't know about you, but all this industry gossip, fanboy-bait, and the lack of user-generated content drives down the quality for me in a big way. Combine that with a lack of readers from the new page, and it seems like there is a feedback loop setting up. It's not that HN is turning into reddit, but it seems like the mechanism of HN itself has changed significantly.
======
todayiamme
I think that the real problem in operation over here is information deluge.
People aren't reading stuff on that page because it overflows on a minute by
minute basis. So let's say, if I click to read a long article and I come back
to upvote it. This would mean that I am putting a flag for others to read it,
but in this time frame it has moved beyond the first new page. Hence, the
stories that tend to get upvoted are the ones with a recognized tilt that
appeals to the lowest common denominator (which is still pretty high, but for
how long?)

However not all stories are created equal. Most of the stories on that page
are from noob users who want to jack up their karma. Hence, the deluge HN on
the weekdays (only dedicated ones stay around on the weekends) leading to this
difference between the weekday and weekend articles.

How can we solve this?

One simple way to do this would be to post noobstories _only_ to the noob
stories page and sort the entries not by time, but by karma of the user as
well as the votes given like the comments.

This way we could have a quasi front page which will create a positive
feedback loop. Hence, there will be an implicit reward in going to the new
page which will ensure that only the good stories were posted. Also, since
older users (by karma, PG's metric) who are more settled in and are less
likely to do karma antics it won't overflow every minute or so.

However, this might create a barrier to entry on HN and perhaps that's a good
thing. This would force people to comment and get karma before it shows up
over there. Hence, ensuring that the quality get maintained.

All in all with the same code behind the comments the new page problem can be
solved.

(update: wrote a lot more detail)

~~~
fragmede
I think there's another technical solution.

Instead of having a link directly to the article, have the link go to the
discussion page instead, but with an added header.

That extra header would check for a cookie. If that cookie is set, no action.
If the cookie is not set, set the cookie, then forwards the user to the actual
article.

Then, when you finish reading and decide it's worth an up vote, when you go
'back', you're already at the discuss page where you can vote the story itself
up, as well as comment on it.

~~~
J3L2404
I must say, that's a mighty fine idea you have there. Although it may surprise
some folks at first. If HN had ads it would seem to be click fraud. Might work
as a bookmarklet or browser extension.

~~~
fragmede
I was thinking it would be opt-in on the preferences page.

Another option would be an extra link at the end of the headline (like how
scribd appears for pdf), but that just ends up looking cluttered.

------
edanm
I read HN quite a lot, and I have to say, I rarely get around to reading the
New page. Honestly, it takes me a _lot_ of time to just go through most of the
stuff that hits the front page (including comments), so I usually don't have
the time to check out more articles whose quality hasn't even been vetted.

I think HN really should implement a way around this. The most obvious is to
randomly show new articles on the front page, give them a chance to collect
some points (if they're good, of course).

~~~
zephyrfalcon
Currently the front page shows the top 30 articles, so people coming to the
site see this by default. Maybe the front page should instead show, for
example, 10 of the top articles and 20 new ones, in separate lists.

------
jacquesm
Around this time of day the submissions on the new page go by so fast that
only the most juicy stuff makes it to the front page. 4 votes before you
scroll off the new page or your article might as well be dead, it's _very_
rare (but it does happen) to see anything get traction afterwards.

And of course you didn't write about a scandal in progress or something like
that.

If you write just for the interaction with HN I can imagine that it is hard if
your stuff goes by unnoticed, but of course there is no automatic relationship
between what you did and how it was received in the past coupled with
everything you write in the future.

Maybe simply not enough people thought it was homepage worthy and it is a
signal to do better? That's how I interpret it when my stuff slides by without
even a single upvote.

(I note that even devmonk who commented did not upvote your submission).

Don't take it so personal, as HN grows this is bound to happen more and more
often. I've had it happen to me with an article that was requested by people
here, that felt pretty weird too, but there really are no guarantees.

Spray and pray :)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Thanks Jacques. As usual, we agree. Sometimes I wonder why I reply to your
comments at all, since we agree so much. :)

I think what bugged me was the lack of drive-by readers.

HN is pretty much the only site I submit to. I have no aspirations of blogging
as a business. I blog because I want to, and I'd blog if nobody came by. So
heck with the score or the front-page status. And no, it doesn't bug me that a
large percentage of what I write is not home-page material. That's okay too.
Hey, I got used to being a mediocre writer many years ago. It's all spray and
pray now.

The problem is that as a submitter you'd at least like to get a decent second
set of eyeballs on your work. The value the site provides to me as a submitter
isn't making the front page -- it's getting the feedback from readers. No
initial readers, no feedback (good or bad)

Sure, there is a bit of sour grapes here. I guess you'd think if you spent a
long time writing something that in return you'd at least receive a reasonable
review. But if the average number of initial reviewers is decreasing for
everybody, it can't help but mean a decrease in the quality of material
overall. So it would seem that my problem as a submitter, even a submitter of
poor quality material, affects the quality of material on the site for all
users.

~~~
jacquesm
As for the original topic of your submission, minimalistic interfaces, I'm all
for it.

I predict the death of the submit button in the next 2 years.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
It occurred to me over the last week or two that most all of the startup and
pet project work I've been doing over the past decade has all boiled down to
presenting complex and thought-provoking data to the user in the most simple
way possible. Every little piece of user interface, web application, or
technology that sits between the brain and a simple version of the decisions
it needs to make each day is a cognitive weight we carry around.

There was another great article on the front page of HN today about cognitive
slaves. It's a topic that keeps coming up again and again for me and the
community, and as one other commenter asks on this thread, at some point it's
not enough to simply complain, what would you do to fix it? I'm happy to
actually be trying something. Wish me luck!

~~~
jacquesm
This is going to sound very cryptic, but I hope it comes across, you are a
solution looking for a problem.

I think it's only a matter of time before you find your groove, I see it
happening all over HN, people that try one thing after another and suddenly it
clicks, they find their thing and from there on it's upwards.

Don't give up, the 'making complex stuff simple' thing you've got is
absolutely a key in all this. The webcam thing was much the same, until we
came along it was just too hard to put live video on the web, we reduced it to
one click, that was all it took. Youtube did the same for clips and look where
they ended up.

All you you need to do is to apply that wisdom to something that draws a
crowd.

~~~
chopsueyar
What is the difference between ww and something like justin.tv?

I am fairly addicted to ww(particularly, the pet deer).

~~~
jacquesm
Funding and execution I guess.

WW.com was bootstrapped out of my previous company (consultancy / software
licenses).

Justin.tv is a lot slicker and it seems they are doing way better than we are
in terms of traffic and user satisfaction, but we're working quite hard at the
moment to turn the tide on that. WW.com to me feels as though it has a
stronger community element to it.

WW is actually quite a bit older than justin.tv (we started in 1998 as
'camarades', but because the name was pretty hard to spell it got changed), we
missed a few chances, had some spectacular bad luck but on the whole I'm
feeling better about it today than I have felt in the last 5 years.

I don't think the Justin.tv guys have too much to worry about for the time
being, but we're definitely planning a very serious effort to make a go of it.

------
petercooper
Idea: Only have the "submit" link (or even the "threads" link) on the "new"
page. It won't get everyone reviewing _new_ all of a sudden but undoubtedly
headlines will catch people's eyes en route and perhaps encourage people to
pay more attention to it.

(Update: On reflection, reducing usability might not be a great way to go.
Typically that's a better way to reduce bad behavior than to encourage good..)

------
slowpoison
I have said this in the past (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665746>) -
as long as posting doesn't "cost" anything, there will be mindless as well as
countless posts, making it harder to really spot intelligent stuff. It's
natural for explosive stuff to make it to the top.

Now, how we pay for the posts is probably have karma as part of it somewhere.
Or may be not. But, it's a discussion worth having.

------
mattmanser
According to a thread less than 24 hours ago the problem is that your articles
are falling off the new page too fast.

The problem is too many submissions, not less people reading the new page:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720742>

It's an alternative explanation.

~~~
jackowayed
And it's a testable alternative explanation.

PG, check the analytics. What's been the trend on hits to /new over time?

------
michael_dorfman
One of the factors that I've noticed lately is that due to the quantity of new
submissions, it takes only 30 minutes or so for an article to drop off the
first "new" page.

I try to check the "new" page periodically, but I must admit, I don't scroll
beyond the first page-- so, the article referenced above I missed entirely,
and it seems like I wasn't the only one.

Which means that the problem may not be that "nobody is reading the new page
much any more" as much as "things age off the new page too quickly for most
people to notice them."

As for potential fixes: off the top of my head, I haven't the foggiest.

~~~
diego
It's obvious: feature a random article from the new page on the front page
like Reddit does (a different one each time you load the page), so it gets
some exposure.

~~~
jacquesm
But that would have the unintended side-effect of making the site _much_ more
attractive to spammers because they'd be almost guaranteed some homepage
exposure.

~~~
tjr
Feature a random article selected from new articles submitted by users with at
least 10 points?

~~~
RickHull
Feature a random article selected from a probability distribution based on
user karma.

e.g.

    
    
        Alice   - 100
        Bob     - 200
        Charlie - 300
        Dave    - 0
    

Dave's new article will never get front page exposure. Charlie has a 50%
chance, Bob a 33% chance, and Alice a 16% chance.

~~~
jacquesm
That wouldn't work either, it would simply cause a karma feedback loop.

~~~
RickHull
Worse things have happened. You could easily cap the "considered" karma at
like 500. Or some value that is a function of the total karma in the system.

EDIT: or cap the "considered" karma at the median for all users.

------
awa
My problem with looking at the new page and help in filtering is due to the
amount of general and blog spam.

I think downvotes on new page can actually help so they can discourage users
from spamming HN with articles in trying to build karma points

Alternately, make posting cost the user something, say 10 Karma points per
submission, in that case users will only submit something they think will grab
enough attention

------
seancron
One example that I have seen of this was this submission of Grace Hopper on
David Letterman's show from 1984
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719458>).

Now I realize that many people don't vote up videos. However, this is Grace
Hopper, who was one of the first programmers for the very first computer ever.
She is credited with coming up with the term "debugging" after finding a moth
in one of her computers, and she wrote the first compiler for a programming
language.

If that's not Hacker News worthy then I don't know what is.

And yet amazingly, this submission only got two upvotes (one of which is
mine). Now I realize that we've had a lot of scandalous and "Big Important
News" but two upvotes seems abnormally low to me. In fact, if Google Students
had not tweeted it (<http://twitter.com/googlestudents/status/25361367579>) I
would have never even seen it.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Thanks for the upvote. I was the one who submitted it, and I really thought it
was something HNers would like to see-- a real piece of Hacker history.

I was quite surprised when it didn't make the front page.

------
Maro
Perhaps the frontpage could be filtered per account. In other words, if HN
shows me the same article on the front page for the 3rd time and I don't click
it, I probably don't care, so it could use that slot to show me something new.

------
theycallmemorty
I'm not helping the community if I visit the new page and don't vote on
anything.

I don't vote on anything because I don't want to 'save' all of the threads I
find slightly interesting. Saving is only for things I want come back to
later.

------
rokhayakebe
Most people just consume. I think a very small fraction actually comes to the
new page and vote.

~~~
jacquesm
The best spot to make a difference is the second and third pages of the 'new'
set, that's where the stuff is that got lost.

------
rewind
You're unhappy that people aren't going to the New page so you wrote an
observation that can only be seen by going to the New page ;-)

In all seriousness, it took me quite awhile before getting into the habit of
going to the New page, but now I do it after going over the main page. It was
actually only after seeing a comment that "people don't go to the New page"
that I started doing it, so it was one of the rare times when a "reminder"
post didn't annoy me and seem like whining. These types of reminders are
legitimately helpful IMO.

I'd love to see new items integrated into the home page, personally. Like a
split screen, or just have them listed at the bottom of the page, or just in a
narrower column somewhere, or whatever.

But I'm not sure that that would have any effect on your other issue, which is
the type of thing being voted to the top. They get there because people start
by going to the New page; they don't get there on their own. So although
giving more attention to new items might get more people to take notice, I
don't think it would have any effect on what makes it to the top.

------
nhebb
I can sympathize with your complaints. There does seem to be a lot of
retreaded topics on the main page, so I've just changed my HN bookmark to
<http://news.ycombinator.com/newest>. I'll try it for a week, and hopefully
I'll spot some more interesting stuff that otherwise would fall by the
wayside.

------
metachris
Here's an idea: Only users with a certain amount of karma can submit stories.

The first few karma points have to be gained by commenting, and then for
example with every 10 karma points a user can make 1 submissions. Or have
different 'levels' with certain thresholds, etc. You get the idea, and I think
that could help reduce the amount and increase the quality of submissions.

~~~
michael_dorfman
The obvious problem with this is that it eliminates the possibility of old-
timers using throwaway accounts to submit anonymously. That's a pretty major
drawback, if you ask me-- there's a lot of good discussions that begin with an
anonymous "Ask HN" or "Tell HN"...

------
rayvega
Yes, I've noticed that it is harder to get things on the front page.

I've recently submitted a few links that I thought were HN worthy but they
barely got any notice if at all.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714743>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1696933>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1714334>

Perhaps they're not interesting or maybe with the current system more things
are getting overlooked and lost. Don't know.

Usually, I tend to only look at what's on the New page when I submit something
(since it automatically redirects you there). So, I'm as guilty as the rest.
However, at that time, I'll check out the other posts and upvote other
submissions that I consider quality material.

I probably need to spend more time looking at the New page than the front page
to help with keeping the quality up.

------
terra_t
Actually this is the biggest problem that the internet faces now. The number
of quality signals that people send is much less than the amount of content
that's out there -- one consequence is that it's easy to "game the system."

Hardly anybody is viewing "new" queues, making links to interesting web pages,
or otherwise doing the work to discover what's new and good. They make it too
easy for spammers and voting rings to do their evil work.

Also there's a general "burnout" effect that happens in social media -- if a
particular forum isn't all that excited in your content, you'll find that it
gradually gets less and less traffic because people see your URL or your name
and decide to move on to the next thing. This can be overcome with real or
imaginary 'social proof' (lots 'o votes) but then you get into the fact that
the populations of people who are looking at the "new" queue and looking at
the front page are entirely different.

------
tdavis
_...all this industry gossip, fanboy-bait, and the lack of user-generated
content drives down the quality for me in a big way_

The more mainstream adoption HN receives, the more the stories will degrade to
the lowest common denominator—that of gossip, fan-bait, and chop shop content.
I returned to my feed reader for the majority of my interesting articles a
long time ago.

The "new" page is basically a feed aggregator of tons of individuals' posts,
most of whom don't have the notoriety or baiting title necessary to stick on
the page long enough for the few people who read "new" to see them.

Like any other public link sharing site—no matter how niche or well-seeded to
start—it will increasingly pander to the 90% who come rather than the 10% who
started it. And it'll keep doing that until it becomes reddit (no insult
meant; reddit is a great public link share). But at this stage I'm pretty
confident it'll always have better discussion.

------
nkurz
As a tiny incremental change, it might help if the resubmission of a link by
another user would bump the link back up to the top of the new page in
addition to adding a vote. If multiple people find it worthy to submit, it's
probably worth giving it more screentime.

------
robryan
It depends on time you can spend on HN to, really with the speed HN moves
these days it's hard enough just to keep up with some of the top stories. Only
when I really have hours to spend do I get time to get past the stuff that
catches my eye on the front page.

------
nostrademons
I read the New page sometimes. I've found that I have disproportionate power
over what appears on the front page. Maybe half of the stories I upvote from
the New page end up hitting the top half of the front page.

It only takes 3-4 votes for a newly submitted (< 30 minutes ago) story to hit
the front page. If you and one other person like it, it'll usually get to the
bottom of the hot list. From there, there's often a cascade effect as more and
more people see it on the hot list. If the article's any good at all, it can
often be in the top 5 within an hour or two.

It's good for karma, too, as getting early comments in on stories that later
become hot is a good way to get lots of points on them.

------
sluckxz
How about tweaking karma to add value to certain users votes, users with tons
of great submissions and comments to have more effect. You can grant power
karma to people you feel have the same philosophy or that you feel drive HN in
the direction you want. This isn't necessarily democratic or "fair" and i do
not care because i love the great submissions with intelligent commentary. i
have seen a lot of submissions concerned with submission quality and am happy
to see HN publicly addressing the issue and apparently making an effort to
ensure the quality and heritage of the site. (long time lurker brand new
acct.)

------
logicalmind
Forgive my generalization, but I see HN as a handful of groups with some
overlap. You have hackers/programmers, business marketing, pure entrepreneurs,
and investors/angels. There are people who fall into multiple camps, but
stories tend to fall into one of these groups. I think the point you're making
is that topics along the lines of hackers/programmers seem to have fallen off
in favor of some of the other areas. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Personally, I visit the "new" page as often as the frontpage and find many
interesting stories there.

~~~
logicalmind
To be constructive, if my generalizations are correct, then HN could support
some form of tags or categorizations to identify the kind of story being
posted. People could focus on the areas that interest them and not see stories
that don't appeal to them. This could also be a way to identify "gossip" and
track its appeal to parts of the userbase. Just an idea...

------
percept
One more try:

1) Why not limit submissions on HN to one per day?

That way, people will only submit their most relevant links. If a story is
important enough, then either 1) someone else can submit it and this will
invite broader participation on the site, or 2) it won't be submitted today
and can be added tomorrow (and it probably wasn't that important to begin
with).

2) HN articles used to relate to either hacking or startups (stories about
education, economics, etc. were typically found on Digg and Reddit). Why not
return to this formula?

------
notaddicted
There has been some really sensational news during the past few days:
Angelgate, Facebook downtime, Zuckerberg $100mm donation, uncomfortable micro
analysis of patio. Maybe it's the time of year? Or a coincidence. In terms of
the normal ebb and flow this is surely a period of flow. I think that just due
to regression to the mean next week should be more quiet and readers will have
more time for the new page. Hopefully another "Erlang day" won't be necessary.

------
wolfv
Did this decline start when Hacker News Daily opened? The Hacker News Daily
lists the 10 highest-rated articles from Hacker News at
<http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/>

Maybe some readers are less engaged because they skip the
<http://news.ycombinator.com> and go straight to Hacker News Daily.

------
hkuo
I have an idea that I want to throw out there. I haven't fully thought it out,
so I'm sure it would have drawbacks.

But what if one were able to earn karma points by interacting with the "new"
page. The details could be worked out to make it un-"gamable", but the basic
premise is to reward users that put more effort into discovering posts in the
waterfall of the "new" page.

------
iterationx
The title "My Master Plan to Destroy the Internet as we know it
(whattofix.com)" doesn't have any terms that interest me.

In your first paragraph you use the phrase "web interface" if that or some
other technical term had been in the title, I might have clicked. fyi

~~~
hga
Bingo.

I actually use _only_ the new page since enough of my interests are
sufficiently esoteric that submissions about them never get many votes (often
only mine).

But your title was a distinct turn-off, strongly enough so that I actually
remember it as such. Unfortunately I just about never look at who submits
items, otherwise I might have given it a chance.

At least for me, you'd be _much_ better off with a title that gives me at
least the slightest concrete idea of what the submission is about.

------
swolchok
Because articles cannot be downvoted, I am very stingy with upvotes. I don't
like most articles on the front page, let alone the new page. If your article
is really great, it won't be on the new page but not the front page for long
anyway.

------
Splines
I think this is one the places where the concept of subreddits really shines.
Allowing users to control the content that is shown to them allows interesting
niche posts to maintain visibility.

------
jonpaul
Consider yourself lucky that you can submit your own articles to HN. My blog
got banned from HN, but I gave PG my word that I wouldn't submit my own
articles and so he unbanned me.

Submit on a Saturday.

------
sesqu
I would expect time of year is a significant factor. Are you sure you're
comparing to this time last year? I do believe what you say, but memories are
terrible data.

------
duncanj
I'm not even sure my votes ever count on HN so I rarely vote. The algorithms,
as people talk about them, seem to be stacked against us casual readers.

------
Keyframe
I'm guilty of this. Reason behind is that I click on links and discussion
threads via newsyc20 on twitter whenever something of interest pops up.

------
gasull
I have a rule for myself: every time I submit a link I have to scan the New
page and upvote those links I like (after reading them).

------
EGreg
I'm working on a site to fix something like that. I don't want to reveal the
name yet, but stay tuned :)

------
devmonk
What changes do you think should be made to enhance the quality of content and
get more people to vote?

~~~
trustfundbaby
Load random new stories on the homepage (top 2 or 3 spots) with markup that
makes it clear that this is a new story

------
makeramen
the RSS feed is nice for catching new threads, but I haven't been using google
reader much lately for my own reasons. (<http://news.ycombinator.com/rss>)

------
howard_yeh
how about for the first page display a random subset of N pages worth of new
submits, for a small N? Nobody scrolls past N pages anyway.

------
jimlyndon
Hide your kids, hide your wife <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlZOfHCpFFs>

------
c00p3r
Remember the mantra? Innovators, then imitators, then idiots?

HN is already in a third stage. ^_^

You'll be down-voted if you even try to say that Ubuntu, or Java or PHP (or
any other target of a mass-hysteria) isn't cool or superior to anything.

Recently I got that just because I didn't agree that Ubuntu is the greatest
and coolest Linux distro ever.

How many of my down-voters can build a distro from scratch or at least
recompile PHP with all its modules and their dependencies, or, OK, know how to
build a package from its sources? It is a rhetorical question. ^_^

So, everything eventually become reddit. It is just a relation to a number of
unique visitors.

And when you have a lot of unique visitors then you'll have all those
technology narcissists, who're promoting how cool they are in finding a
security issues in an amateur code, or how they so clever in explaining
obvious things or making easy things easier.

Everyone is a teacher nowadays. ^_^

------
J3L2404
HN does not need to be re-jiggered or re-invented or re..., just make an
effort to check the new page and upvote the articles you like. I always do
because I like to see quality, or my assessment of it, make it to the front
page and have other users chime in. Let the experiments happen on the plethora
of clone sites.

------
paolomaffei
Requiring 10 points to submit is really stupid?

~~~
icey
Requiring 10 points to submit stories seems like a pretty decent idea to me.

~~~
paolomaffei
wait, why his post is +8 while mine is -3?

is it because I was only _wondering_ if it was a good or not? Oh, HN...

------
zephyrfalcon
I suspect that "HN is not turning into Reddit, but..." is the new "HN is
turning into Reddit". :-)

(EDIT: This wasn't meant as a diss... it's just that people know by now that
saying "HN is becoming Reddit" is a no-no, it's even listed in the guidelines.
So whoever has complaints or concerns about the site, often wants to make it
clear that they are not playing the HN-is-Reddit card.)

