

Ask PG: has the hotness algorithm changed? Stories seem to stay longer… - Timothee

In the past few days, I've felt that stories have stayed on the front page longer than usual.<p>Right now, I see a lot of stories that I saw this morning or maybe even yesterday (e.g. the Higgs boson cartoon, the Flip ship, the next Microsoft, PageRank and soccer, MVC/MOVE…). A couple have a lot of points but the Flip story for example has "only" 230 points and 27 comments but is 18 hours old. Fairly unusual it seems.<p>Not that this is necessarily a bad thing and it could just be that there have been less visitors or something else… but I'm curious.
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gala8y
I had the same feeling, to a point where, wanting to send some link replying
to a friend, I am condfident that story will still be on the first/second
page.

These two may help see what's happening <http://hn4d.com/>,
<http://hnrankings.info/>

For the time being, I'll skip the pleasure of investigating.

Edit: I am also very often surprised that something showing in /newest feed
(even 1st, 2nd page of /newest), shows on front page, too.

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dfc
Do you think it might be that there are fewer quality articles submitted? Or a
greater number of stories submitted in general making it less likely that a
story gains significant traction?

I have no opinion one way or the other. Just curious why you think the an algo
change is the explanation?

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Timothee
It could certainly be some other factor. It's just that I can't really think
of anything besides 4th of July tomorrow, but I'm not convinced that would
have such an effect.

Some stories are still getting a lot of upvotes, so it doesn't look like a big
decrease in traffic.

So to answer your question: it just that to me it doesn't feel like there's
anything different except for the fact that the frontpage seems to decay story
slower. But maybe I have just been less busy, thus more on HN in the past few
days? :)

