

Ask HN: Anyone else notice a higher churn rate for the front page? - bsaunder

It seems to me that posts on the front page have been changing much faster than usual.  Perhaps submission rates  have increased?
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nopinsight
I'm not sure, but I think it's too fast. Some worthwhile topics could be
easily missed if one stays off HN for just half a day. (Even with AutoPager,
after 2-3 days, most topics go off the first few pages entirely.)

 _Perhaps there should be some sort of 'classic' or 'long-term' article tab
that people can check out._

The quality of those articles/discussions would likely be higher as well.

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Brushfire
100% agree.

Its very hard to keep up. I use the RSS feed, and it seems everytime it
updates (hourly) there are 5 new posts. This of course isnt always true, but
it does get overwhelming to sift through to the stuff I am interested in
reading, and I know good things are lost.

This seems, to me, to be just as big of a problem as the community/culture
one.

It would be very interesting if we/they/pg could figure out a way for us to
filter or get the best n# of stories per day (say 10, for me). Clearly, 'best'
is subjective, but perhaps the most commented, longest on frontpage, or some
smart combination of metrics including views, upmods, comments, etc.

~~~
stcredzero
You could do this by taking an integral of position over the last 72 hours.
This way, "sleeper" stories that take some time to rise in popularity can also
appear in the RSS feed.

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marksutherland
<http://news.ycombinator.com/best>

The highest rated posts in the last N days (not sure what N is). Not very well
documented, but interesting to know about.

~~~
pg
It's actually the highest rated links among the most recent 15k items.

~~~
silentOpen
Ack! It needs to be normalized by the active user population at the time of
submission.

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pg
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553959>

~~~
bsaunder
Any chance of publishing several front page algorithms and letting users set a
preference for one? Or even better somehow letting people suggest/test custom
ones?

~~~
dbul
I agree. This may be a sign that either a restricted scope of HN needs to be
enforced, or an algorithm needs to be written to correlate the interests of
users. Neither is pretty, but the alternative is a saturated Hacker News.

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zacharydanger
If you're subscribed in Google Reader, you can view details about the feed and
it does show a steady incline in "items posted" over the last 30 days.

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trickjarrett
I tend to skim the front page and then hit the new section for the majority of
my time, and I don't think we're running much faster than we have been. This
is obviously unscientific and I have no data to back it, but from my
perspective I haven't seen that many new stories.

Perhaps its an influx of new involved members who are actively voting?

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AndrewHampton
I don't think the churn is a big problem yet, but I think the position of
stories on the front page uses a formula similar to gravity. Upward
acceleration is determined by upvotes/time and downward acceleration is
determined by the time since submission. pg could always decrease the
acceleration of "gravity" on the formula (to allow popular stories to stay on
the front page longer) and/or decrease the "acceleration" per upvote (to
prevent less popular stories from jumping to the front page so quickly).

So if this becomes a big problem, it shouldn't be too hard to fix.

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mattmaroon
I've noticed that too. Big stories (i.e. ones written by Paul Graham) used to
stay up here for days, they do no longer. My guess is they increased the time
factor to account for the increase in traffic.

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themanual
So many exciting things happening in the world. Try and keep up :)

The churn rate is fine!!

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vaksel
I think it just became much easier to get frontpaged. I see a ton of stories
getting front paged with 2, 3 upvotes.

~~~
mattmaroon
That's not new at all. If anything there are fewer of them now.

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csomar
i'm afraid this become like "Digg". In past, the time between stories that hit
front page (in digg) is 1 to 2 hours, now it's less than 10 minutes and a new
story hit it.

That's why I rarely upvote stories in HN, if we all upvote a little only
Worthwhile topics that we can increase the quality.

~~~
stcredzero
To me, it feels more like reddit some years ago.

~~~
csomar
This happen with any community that grows large... but there's no solution to
keep quality?

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TweedHeads
Take a look at the front page. The right half is blank space.

That space can be used to show two sections: popular & upcoming.

