

Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now? - timf

Do you think the new links queue is filling up too fast?<p>It's almost at the point where #300 (the last one) is less than 24 hours old.  S/N ratio is starting to drop and I'm finding many 2-3 point things buried away that are gems.<p>That is not to say that the rankings should be perfectly suited to my tastes, but that as the new queue gets bigger and more unmanageable it becomes less scrutinized by voters (since time is a finite resource).
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rms
This is becoming more of a problem now. It is impossible for new stories to
get as much attention now as when the site first started, but historically
there really haven't been many good stories missed.

This Ted talk failed to really make the front page twice. It must have briefly
been on the front page but it takes so much more weight now to actually hold
that position. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474875> and
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473821> I would encourage you to look for
more examples of good stories that have not made the front page; this is the
evidence that pg has said is needed to show that there is actually a problem
here.

Time limiting submissions may help a little, though I haven't noticed people
mass submitting middling articles. What we need is some time of cultural
incentive to read the new page, and pages 2/3/4 of the new page.

~~~
fortes
> What we need is some time of cultural incentive to read the new page, and
> pages 2/3/4 of the new page.

Definitely. I'll admit that I never spend the time to go through the queue,
let alone a few pages deep. How does one encourage this behavior? I don't care
much about karma, but I guess if others do perhaps you could give extra karma
for being one of the early upvoters?

~~~
brandnewlow
PG should ask YCombinator applicants to help on the new page. If he's got
people he funded helping flag spam and rewrite lame headlines, he could
probably get candidates to step up a bit on this one.

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sidsavara
If I may briefly interject, one really nice resource for this is the
greasemonkey hacker news toolkit script

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039>

It can add the 5 newest submissions to the bottom of the front page. This is
not a perfect solution, I agree it is a band aid to the larger issue of
reducing junk submissions. However, it makes it easier for me to come to the
front page and I definitely vote up more from the new page than I used to now
(though I always made a conscious effort to go to the new page and vote there
as well, to try and get articles I enjoyed onto the front page)

I did not write the script, but I do like it =)

~~~
pclark
might not be perfect -- but its really great for me - thanks :)

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pg
Stuff falling off the end of the New list before it has time to get voted onto
the front page is a perennial problem. It doesn't seem any worse now than it
was a year ago. Which is not surprising, because the factor driving the rate
of new submissions, the number of users, is also the one driving the rate at
which things on the New page get upvoted.

~~~
timf
Are you suggesting, by extension, that if there are 300 submissions an hour
(instead of per day) and 24 times more users that it will "all work out" and a
set of similarly interesting things would pop out?

~~~
rms
Actually I think the front page would be marginally more interesting at the
consequence of many more stories going unnoticed. I'm also not convinced that
it is possible for there to be 24 times more stories -- is there really that
much relevant news out there? With 24 times more users I think we would see
5-6 times more submissions.

~~~
timf
> is there really that much relevant news out there?

I was trying to use hyperbole to make a point (personally I think dilution's
already occured). But yeah, look at digg.

------
timf
My only thought is to think about limiting submission rights to a
certain/higher karma threshold.

~~~
jm4
It would certainly cut down on a lot of garbage. Most of the posts I flag
(mostly spam links) are from users who have only been registered for a few
minutes.

On the other hand, you could have long-time lurkers with no karma that are
unable to submit and that could be a problem. You couldn't base it on length
of time registered instead of karma either because then spammers would
register accounts and sit on them before submitting garbage.

~~~
cabalamat
> _you could have long-time lurkers with no karma that are unable to submit
> and that could be a problem_

I think think that's a problem. If someone is just a lurker they aren't really
fully a member of the community the way a poster is. And when has posted
plenty of comments, gotten up-arrows for some and down-arrows for others, they
have a better idea of what community standards are.

~~~
sorbus
As a lurker, I sort of agree. That is, I don't think that I'm a real part of
the community - being more the type to hang around the edges, listening to the
conversation - but I think that that is a valid way of figuring out community
standards; watching other people try, and seeing what works. So yes, I'm sort
of biased against restricting article submission based on points and comments.

On the other hand, neither do I expect to submit anything very soon, so I
suppose that not being able to wouldn't matter much to me (until I want to
submit something, of course). It would be quite interesting to see statistics
for who submits articles, and how many comments / points they have, and how
long they have been a member.

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teej
Better moderation of the blog spammers may help as well. For instance:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ccraigIW> has 11 submissions in the
past 24 hours, none with a score > 2\. That's a third of the "new" page filled
up with blog posts from one source.

Karma threshold, average submission score or signal-to-noise ratio may be a
good way to rate limit submissions.

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cx01
An interesting idea would be to make a submission cost 1 Karma point. So
people would only submit a story if they think it's reasonable that someone
might upvote it.

~~~
sidsavara
There are two issues with that. One is it makes karma into even _more_ of a
competition:

1) Keynesian beauty contest
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest>

2) I don't think most spammers care about karma anyway, and will likely just
continue to submit junk. I think well meaning newbies might be either turned
off by it, or try to game it (e.g., make accounts with 3 friends, constantly
vote up each others submissions so they always get 2 votes, and always have
enough karma to keep submitting.)

Personally, I like the idea of rate limiting. Seems totally reasonable to me
that until you have interacted with the community, you shouldn't clog up the
news page. How do you get around people making 50 accounts a day to submit 50
stories a day? I don't think we have scale yet to worry about that sort of
problem. At that point, we'll have to ban users, websites, ip addresses in
some fashion

I think the issue right now though is not so much that it is overrun with
spammers - just overrun with relatively well intentioned people who don't know
what's appropriate. Case in point: I know I have submitted a couple stories
that I thought were HN worthy, but that people called me on in the comments
(Alabama Fat Tax, for instance). I still thought it was relevant, but I had
the self restraint to only submit occasionally anyway. Someone with similar
taste to me without such self restraint is the issue that I think we need to
solve, and rate limiting does that job admirably (I think).

~~~
cx01
I agree with issue #1, but the other solutions (minimum karma of 100 or
something like this) would have the same problem. Regarding your issue #2, I
think users with negative karmas would have to be disallowed submitting in
order to stop spammers.

"just overrun with relatively well intentioned people who don't know what's
appropriate."

Basically my idea was that you have to prove you know about HN-culture by
writing good comments, and then by gaining karma you can start submitting.

~~~
sidsavara
I think we are both on the same page as to what the issue is, but we disagree
about the solution =)

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josefresco
How many of you actually Police the new section of HN? I will flag maybe a
couple stories per week, anyone with a much higher rate?

Maybe the site should encourage those with higher karma to spend more time
policing (the put up or shut up method).

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I read the new page rather than the "front" page, because so many interesting
submissions never make it to the front. Likewise, there are so many duplicates
that won't make it that ought to be flagged.

I'm getting tired of bothering. I rarely, rarely get any karma for this, there
is no reward, and the problem is getting worse. I'm going to stop bothering
soon, and write a Bayesian-based filter to auto-detect the things I might have
an interest in.

The mechanisms here are failing to find things of interest to me any more.

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icey
I've seen sites that solve some of the spam problem by requiring an account to
have existed for at least 24 hours before submitting.

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rapind
A lot of the proposed solutions here seem pretty complicated. The one that
makes the most sense to me, while definitely not perfect, is to start by
limiting new posts to accounts that have existed for a certain interval (maybe
even just 30 minutes). That should filter quite a bit of spam and even though
it's still easy to get around, at least it will require more effort. It's also
very easy to implement.

Then you can experiment with other methods, but I doubt we'd miss many
meaningful posts with this kind of limitation.

The other bucket of accounts created for spamming would need a little more
sophistication, like maybe a queue limit per day. Still not too crazy.

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aak
How about a karma marketplace?

1\. Upvoting costs an amount of karma points proportional to the number of
points the article has at that time. Hence, it costs more to upvote an article
on the home page than it costs to upvote an article in the New section.

2\. If I choose to spend karma by voting on an article and it starts to rise,
I get proportional "returns" on my karma.

This incentivizes me to upvote New articles I think HN will like. But then
again if I lose all my karma points, I might need a bailout.

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swombat
Unless this is having an impact whereby the home page is filled with bad
stuff, I'm afraid there's little you can do. There are only so many slots on
the front page and bringing more "new good stuff" on it will only push old
good stuff out faster.

This "problem" is a reflection of the fact that there's higher competition for
a limited resource (front page slots) because there are more stories to choose
from, rather than a problem with the submission process, imho.

~~~
tjic
Personally, I wouldn't mind a bit of high-quality churn on the front page.

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kwamenum86
It isn't that hard to get karma...thresholds could go far in preserving the
culture if set to something really high (I am thinking 1000+). I reached 500+
fairly effortlessly though and I was not always a good citizen- I have 5-10+
submissions that were killed and several of my comments have been downmodded
or killed.

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biohacker42
This is usually when some blue eyed optimists calls on all the good upstanding
old timers to vote up the good stories!

Bitter realists like myself suggest it may be time for a new new new social
news site.

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dood
I nice simple improvement might be to put the 5 newest stories at the bottom
of the front page. A little more visibility could make a big difference.

