
Randomize HN: Removing the vote threshold for getting to the front page - pcr910303
https://danluu.com/randomize-hn/
======
btilly
I like this solution, and would like to point out another way to look at it.

It can be viewed as simulated annealing. A brand new article starts at a "high
temperature", it has a chance of showing up randomly for a selection of
people. As time goes on the temperature lowers. And it either made it or
didn't.

That is suppose we have a function called rand_hash that takes an article id
and a user id and produces a random number between 0 and 1. Suppose that T is
the time in minutes that a new article has been up. For position we treat a
new article as having a vote of:

    
    
        votes + C * rand_hash(article, user) * e^(-k * T)
    

Where C and k are factors that affect how much we want a random boost to be
able to raise a new article, and for how long we want it boosted.

Then what happens is that every person will see, mixed with the popular
articles, a random selection of new ones. The new ones that are particularly
interesting will organically pick up a few votes and then snowball. The new
ones that aren't will disappear from the random mix.

~~~
dang
When we tested a variant of this idea, we found that it didn't work for what I
guess you could call psychological reasons: readers reacted negatively, even
violently, to seeing junk on HN's front page. By "junk" I mean stories that
were placed there randomly and that weren't of high-enough quality to
otherwise be credible candidates for the front page. Basically, it was an "ow
my eyes", "get that shit away from me" effect. (I don't mean to demean the
submissions people posted that got randomly placed in this way; it's just that
words like junk and shit reflect how users reacted to the random placement
thing.)

HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page. This
shows up in the inevitable "How is this on HN?" comments when a story somehow
violates the commenter's personal contract or mental model of HN. Randomly
placing candidate stories on the front page created a version of this that was
like 100x worse. It violated people's model of what HN is supposed to be, in
ways that the randomness exacerbated. Two lessons I drew from that experience:
(1) people's relationship with HN is surprisingly personal; and (2) never
jeopardize that bond. Runner-up lesson: don't introduce noise into an
emotional relationship.

If we had software that could measure how credible an article is as a
candidate for HN's front page, I'd be willing to try this again. But I suspect
that would amount to software that could measure how good an article is, and
that would be the P=NP of internet news sites.

I'm still convinced that a lot of the best content—i.e. submissions that would
gratify intellectual curiosity and that the community would have a great time
reading and discussing—languishes in obscurity in the lower echelons of
/newest, so HN's front page is still far from optimal. The second-chance
process has helped
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380))
but I'm convinced that there are more things that we can do, mainly by
building ways for the community to do them. It's important that we not build
new mechanisms that just reproduce the upvote system, though.

~~~
btilly
Interesting. I am glad that you tested it.

I would suggest as a followup that you allow people to opt in to getting a mix
of new stories. My suggestion would be that "people are automatically opted
in, and every new story comes with a link to opt back out". I do understand if
that version scares you though.

I suspect that only a vocal minority of people will have a strong negative
reaction. And if objectors have a painless way to solve the problem, you
_shouldn 't_ get many complaints.

~~~
cortesoft
Isn't 'opting in' just going to /newest? You can already do that.

~~~
btilly
No, it is getting a couple from /newest when you're on the main page.

------
vjktyu
HN could implement an interview style vetting. A new post is shown to a N
interviewers who vote yes/no. The stddev is sqrt of number of votes. Once the
number of upvotes crosses the 95 tile, the post is admitted. Once the number
of downvotes crosses the 95 tile, the post is rejected. Otherwise the post
stays in the undecided area until it expires.

~~~
dang
We actually do something like this with the story reviewing mentioned at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380).

------
jacquesm
The simplest solution in my opinion would be to expand the length of the new
page. Good stuff simply lives there for too short a time to gather sufficient
upvotes and people rarely click through to page 2.

~~~
Jaruzel
Seconded. I personally think it should go up to 50 posts.

------
wruza
HN has 30 cool slots, internets have millions. It is okay if something cool
doesn’t get to the front page and that’s it.

Links don’t go /news-first for the exact same reason most HN readers don’t go
/newest-first.

~~~
kurthr
The interesting thing is that you could have a nearly continuous selection of
links from latest/certain to newest/random.

------
capableweb
I think it works fine like it is. Things easily get on the frontpage so they
can get some exposure, but they only stay there if enough people continue to
vote for it. If someone flags it, it also disappears quicker.

The value is not about how fast it gets to the frontpage, but about how long
time it lasts there.

------
surround
This article is from 2013. Does HN currently do something like this?

~~~
btilly
Not to the best of my knowledge.

If an article manages to get a few votes, quickly, then it gets on the front
page fairly easily. (This one got there with 5 votes.) Once on the front page
it snowballs. The obvious solution to that is to ask a handful of friends to
vote for it. HN has a solution for that workaround by identifying vote rings
and banning them, plus banning the site that was attempting to do that. So
getting on the front page remains a crapshoot, even for good material.

~~~
dang
> If an article manages to get a few votes, quickly, then it gets on the front
> page fairly easily.

In principle yes, but HN's anti-voting-ring software often drops a lot of
those votes. If you see something on /newest with a bunch of votes and it's
not on the front page, that's likely why. A side-effect that we never
anticipated is that some eagle-eyed HN users figured this out and started
calling out the egregious cases. So we got a secondary hivemind ring-detector
out of the deal.

------
lookdangerous
I don’t see the effect this piece aimed to solve as a bad thing. It’s
effectively the Pareto principle and it is found in so many places.

------
tartrate
I'm guessing it turns out that new posts are good because of the current front
page rules.

------
superkuh
The best way to view HN is by RSS. Items come in sequentially in time but you
can sort and search however you want in your reader.

~~~
joshschreuder
Yeah I normally read via the HN 100 feed
([https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/#activity-
parameters](https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/#activity-parameters)) which picks
up posts that pass 100 points.

I find it to be a pretty good gate of quality submissions and I don't have to
sit on the site all day... the other bonus is I catch stories that get
flagkilled after that threshold that I would otherwise miss which is sometimes
nice.

------
lukego
Speaking as an Australian raising Swedish kids, it's going to be weird
watching this with them in s couple of hours and acting like it's a natural
thing to do!

(Christmas is of course really about eating mangos and drinking cold beer in
the sweltering Queensland sun...)

------
Dowwie
Make front page participation accessible through participation in the newest
section. You have to earn the privilege of participation. Upvoting the first X
items on the list, so as to just get the work done, is an issue I haven't
figured out yet.

~~~
dang
That would be a sort of paywall, and we know how HN feels about those.

