

Ask HN: Why is the front page stale? - geerlingguy

HN is one of maybe two sites that I&#x27;ve checked daily for the past few years (and the only site that has been stable in that role), mostly because (a) I found many stories that were relevant, interesting and exciting, and the list of stories would see a good amount of turnover—only the most popular 3 or 4 stories would remain for more than a day or two.<p>It seems this has changed in 2014, to the point where 10+ links on the front page remain for at least a day, sometimes 2 or 3 days. HN feels like it&#x27;s lost some of its freshness.<p>Could this just be an effect of a wider audience (many posts on the front page get 100+ karma before they start dropping, whereas I remember 100+ felt more substantial in the past)? Is there movement towards increasing the decay to match increased user activity, to preserve the fluidity of the front page?
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kogir
In this case, there's actually a bug we're tracking down.

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8015140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8015140)

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geerlingguy
Ah, that makes sense.

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frankydp
I was just thinking the same thing. The stagnation seems to be more drastic
since the weekend. The average age on the front page is 20hours+ right now.

There is also a [dead] link on my frontpage which seems strange.

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markcrazyhorse
This is how the Algorithm works:
[http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574](http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574)

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geerlingguy
And from pg, it looks like the 'more current' version (at least as of 4 years
go) looks like:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417)

I'm guessing the algorithm has changed slightly since then, but I wonder if
there are some parameters that could use more tweaking to take into account
what I presume would be exponential growth in the past few years?

