
Tell HN: The Submissions System is Broken - tomerico
6 days ago I submitted the following story:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1785497<p>It's a blog entry of an iPhone developer, sharing an interesting story on his marketing attempts of his app. He shared actual sale number, amount of effort, and a tactic he used which actually got him featured on the app store. This story got even more interesting after I submitted it, because he became so successful to hit #1 best seller in the US app store for a moment, and now he is #5.<p>When I submitted the story, it didn't get noticed, and quickly went past the first page of new submission without a single up vote. This is of course natural. As there are many stories being submitted.<p>The problem is - you will notice it has 6 up votes now - this means that 5 additional people has tried to submit this story to share with everybody in the past 6 days. But the system completely ignore this fact, and the story doesn't even have a chance to hit the front page again - just because it missed the chance once...<p>There are many possible solutions, I can offer at least 2:<p>1 When a story that didn't hit the front page get resubmitted, it hit the new submission page again, as it was just submitted.<p>2 A small part of the front page will be dedicated for the 5 latest submission, this way new stories will have thousands of views, and will have more chance to not get ignored.
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mortenjorck
An idea to address #2: <http://imgur.com/HocGF.jpg>

~~~
tung
The HN Toolkit userscript [1], amongst other things, shows a preview of the
new submissions page to the right of the usual front page links.

[1]: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039>

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gregable
Someone posted on HN a couple weeks back about the story ranking algorithm. PG
mentioned that there were some hidden tweaks, but the basic idea was a
function of number of votes and age of the article since submission (a
"gravitational" term of sorts which drops stories over time).

This type of algorithm explicitly penalizes stories with a pattern like that
which you mention. If a post gets little interest initially but later becomes
very interesting, it can't possibly do well in the ranking algorithm.

It would be more realistic if the ranking algorithm took into account the age
of the votes more than the age of the article. Recent votes can pop an old
article back to the front page, but not if that article had a ton of old votes
as the "center of mass" (average age) of the votes would still be pretty old.

~~~
lepton
Here's a fairly recent post, and in the top comment pg exposes those hidden
tweaks: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013>

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vaksel
i think the reddit system of featuring one new story on the front page would
be good. Show a story to a 100 users...if it doesn't get an upvote...retire
it, if it does show it to another 100...if a story doesn't get 5
upvotes...retire it.

~~~
happybuy
Yes I agree. I've found that the reddit system has a lot better chance of
bubbling up interesting articles irrespective of who submitted it.

Unfortunately, from my experience, HN has become a bit of an echo chamber in
the sense that certain posters have a lot better chance of having their
articles noticed than the majority; irrespective of the relative value of the
individual articles.

I don't have data to support; but with the current system it feels like HN is
increasingly pushing users into two extremes - new users (who have an
extremely difficult time of getting anything noticed) and longterm posters
(those who whatever they post gets noticed and promoted). Long-term this is
not conducive to a healthy, growing community.

~~~
Alex3917
"an echo chamber in the sense that certain posters have a lot better chance of
having their articles noticed"

It's also an echo chamber in terms of ideas. Why is it that when a woman does
a reverse job application she gets 4 upvotes, but when a guy copies her two
years later he's 'a genius' and gets 450+ upvotes?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648128>

~~~
jeebusroxors
Just throwing this out there...

    
    
        Why is it that when a woman does a reverse job
        application she gets 4 upvotes, but when a guy 
        copies her two years later he's 'a genius' and 
        gets 450+ upvotes?
    

Because it was two years ago, and the link is to a landing page.

Your implication that sexism is the cause is pathetic.

~~~
Alex3917
To clarify I don't think it's sexism per se, but rather the fact that she's
non technical and not part of the tech community. I think if she had been a
Ruby programmer and the design and content of the site had fit the norms of
the HN community then it probably would have done just as well. (Adjusted for
vote inflation.)

------
csomar
1\. This will just lead to more spam. Submit, re-submit...

2\. Won't work. They are recognized as new stories and they change quickly.
Nobody wants to waste his time with "possibly" uninteresting stories.

The solution is to prohibit people with less than a karma threshold, are new,
didn't contribute a lot in the discussions from submitting stories. Also,
limit other members to 1 story per day, this will give equal chances to all HN
users.

~~~
ugh
That rule change is not about stopping someone like tomerico from submitting
stories (he has a lot of karma and submits only sporadically), it’s about
reducing the volume of stories on the “New” page and giving them more
exposure, right?

I was already about to write a retort because at first I didn’t understand the
mechanism by which this rule change would improve HN. Reducing the volume on
the “New” page seems like a good idea, though.

~~~
chmike
I miss the info on how many eye balls the article got. If a submitted article
gets only one upvote, is it because it didn't have readers or because people
didn't find it worth the upvote ?

~~~
user24
I recently submitted an article [1], it got 4 upvotes and translated to about
200 views.

[1] My Startup Ideas - <http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/10/ten-ideas/>

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btilly
Here is yet another way to tackle this.

If an article is voted for first the first time after time X of not being
voted for, it goes back on the new page as of the time of that vote. I don't
know the aging algorithm that is used on the main page, but make it be one
where the age of the article doesn't matter, but the age of the votes for it
do.

This would also handle the case where someone dives through the new
submissions page and votes for an article that was posted several hours ago.

------
CWuestefeld
This is compounded by the speed by which new articles scroll by in the "New"
view. Right now the oldest New article on page #1 is 58 minutes. This means
that I can't honestly upvote more than, say, 2 articles out of that list
(since I wouldn't have time to read them).

It seems like the mechanism that puts new articles in front of people is at
least part of the problem. Since they go by so quickly these days, maybe
different sets of readers could get different "samples" of the New list,
allowing those items to be around longer (but seen by fewer people). Since the
HN readership is growing, I think it might be fair to rely on the statistical
sampling this would provide.

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mikerhoads
Option 1 would result in a lot of reposts getting back to the front page and
option 2 would be bothersome or redundant for users that frequent the new
submissions page.

I don't know how the current algorithm works but there has to be some exchange
rate between independent submissions over a relatively short period of time
(multiple days) to upvotes over a shorter period of time (multiple hours). I
assume this is already part of the process and that your specific example
falls outside of what the algorithm considers to be significant.

EDIT: Clarification

~~~
timmorgan
Wrt option 2, the new submissions page already contains stories that are
currently on the front page, so it's already a bit redundant. Doesn't bother
me that much.

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sp4rki
A couple of hours ago I made a comment here about the importance of giving a
good article a good title so it does get read in here. In comparison at this
moment the original post went from 6 to 25 points (thanks to this post), this
post and it's 'better headline' had 90 points, the post I resubmitted has 104
and is second on the home page right now.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809051>

The new post completely won over thanks to a better title. Food for though.

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zacharycohn
My initial response to this was that maybe it could get resubmitted with the
boosted number of upvotes, so it would have a slight edge over new stories
being submitted at that time. In addition, you could have this only effect
stories with less than 10 upvotes, to prevent people from griefing the system.
(spam submitting the same link over and over/necroposting old content with
lots of upvotes by reposting it and giving it just a +1 for your resubmit).

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ScottWhigham
Hate that I missed that as I think Trainyard is a great app...

I have a few observations about how I use HN and maybe there are others using
it the same way.

\-- First, the "Tell HN:" or "Ask HN:" is a real attention getter for me. The
first post didn't have it and, because of that, it was easy for me to skip it
in the submissions

\-- Second, I rarely visit the home page or even the "New" page and instead I
opt for the "Classic" page (the page featuring submissions that have been
upvoted by a person who has been on here for 365+ days

\-- Third, your quote that the post 6 votes because "5 additional people has
tried to submit this story" isn't exactly accurate. It has 7 votes now - I
just upvoted it.

\-- Lastly, what time did you submit it? There is clearly a bias towards
certain times here.

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bootload
_"... The Submissions System is Broken ..."_

Yes it's broken but HN has always been broken to some degree ~
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/398269769>

But is the core functionality broken? Not really. These type of problems are
edge cases, a PIA, but not killer bugs. For pg, I imagine HN is sort of a
positive side effect of developing Arc & YC. Fixing this kind of broken but
working feature, the downside.

------
dageroth
I think two useful pieces information could be added to the ranking algorithm:
the ratio of clicks/view and the ratio of upvotes/clicks - basically the
conversion rates of an article, which should be more telling than just the
total number of upvotes. If a story is read by 10 people and nine upvoted it,
it's a much better story (although with a bad title perhaps) than a story
which was read by a thousand people and upvoted 10 times. If a submission gets
less upvotes and clicks because it comes in at a time with not too much
traffic or comes with a bad title these factors could offset the penalty it
receives.

It's not necessarily trivial to count the views of an item, since the ranking
quickly changes, but at least the number of clicks should be trivial. One
should also weigh the clicks and upvotes according to rank as the rank itself
influences the likelihood of a click or upvote.

Also I'd take into account the number of people who submitted a story - a
submission is a much stronger vote of quality then a simple upvote.

------
sp4rki
It probably did not get the attention you thought it deserved because the
title is just not interesting. If you think the content is worth the time,
take some of your time to give it a better title so people are attracted to
the article.

This does nothing for me: "IPhone's Trainyard developer share his story on how
he got featured"

But change it to something like: "From 0 to 450k, an App Store Success Story -
With Charts and Numbers!"

And I bet the story ends up in the home page. I'm going to drink my own
koolaid and submit the story with such a title to see what happens ;)

Edit: I mean, look at what you did here, you posted this message with a title
that people noticed and boom, you now have people looking in to the article
that wouldn't have already.

~~~
rlpb
This just leads to another problem though: the first submitter can bury a
story by submitting a poor headline.

~~~
sp4rki
Yep that's correct, but that's how it is now. I can submit a story with any
title I want. If you really want to submit a story that has been buried by a
lousy title, there are ways to do so (as I did with this story a couple of
hours ago)

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idoh
There's only 30 slots on the front page at any given time, so something has to
give. I'd rather miss good stories than have a part of the front page which is
consistently junk.

For what it's worth reddit tried the same strategy but they deprecated the
feature.

------
code_duck
It's basically the same on Reddit. A couple of times I've tried to submit an
interesting new story, only to be told that it has already been submitted and
I'm welcome to add my vote and comments to some six day old ghost town of an
article.

------
nkurz
I like number 1: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724516>

I think that a resubmission should have more weight than an upvote.

~~~
dzlobin
Then people could game the votes more easily by submitting in groups, rather
then voting in groups.

~~~
sinamdar
This is already happening. Some bloggers like ryanwaggoner are openly asking
for upvotes by submissions at the end of the blog posts. So, unfortunately,
this is something that will always remain broken.

~~~
zach
I think that an active HN member "asking for the sale" at the end of a post is
clever and responsible marketing.

More so than many blogs' gratuitously inflammatory titles or even having
widgets to submit every post to Reddit or Digg or every other site under the
sun.

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chmike
Maybe there is not enough people checking the new submisson page. This is
logic because it takes time and competes with work to do. Though there is an
incentive to check the new submissions because chances for a comment in them
to be upvoted are much higher because it gets more eye balls. This is not true
when there are already 40 comments like in this thread.

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klync
I agree. I think HN is becoming a victim of it's own success, and it's UI
wasn't built to scale. (aside - that's a challenge to all you folks interested
in ux ;) ).

I would say that we definitely need a way of detecting duplicate submissions.
And I would also add another suggestion: categories (or tags) for filtering.

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eof
I don't really support 1, it's just too easy to abuse.

edit: the ideas about a threshold (even just two or three for now) of
resubmissions to put a sub 5-vote submission back on the new list sounds like
a good idea that's significantly less likely to be abused.

------
photon_off
If you really believe your story is FP-worthy and it doesn't make it the first
time around, I suggest you delete the original post and resubmit it a few
hours later.

~~~
adambyrtek
I wouldn't recommend that, it can be seen as spamming. Not to mention that
everybody thinks his story is FP-worthy.

~~~
photon_off
Spamming would be spamming. Reposting once is not spamming.

I think people have different incentives. If you spent time hacking together
something and want to share it, I think you'd be more likely to think your
story FP-worthy. If you're just submitting something that you read, much less
so.

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spooneybarger
Lets not forget that time of day of submission can lead to a getting buried or
at least getting less exposure than it would otherwise...

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SUKKZZ
well heres sumthing new.. I cannot submit to HN via my mobile. Any answers?
Tx.

