
The Hacker News New Page Scroll of Death and Some Possible Solutions - curtis
http://www.almostinfinite.com/other/hacker-news-new-page-scroll-of-death.html?
======
x0054
I feel that a lot of HN visitors do not at all check out the "new" page. How
about another solution, where the front page shows a box on top with last 3
submissions from the new page, so that every new post get's at least some
exposure, and get's a chance to get up voted once or twice. Each new post
would be shown 2-5 times in the new box on the front page (depending on the
volume of traffic to the front page vs. volume of new submissions).

So, for instance, let's say there are 9 new posts in the "queue" and there are
3 concurrent visitors to the front page. Visitor A will see links 1-3 from the
new queue, visitor B will see links 4-6, etc. After being shown at least 3
times to front page visitors the link get's dropped from the new queue if it
did not gather a single up vote. However, if it does get an up vote, that also
resets it's show counter, and it has 3 more chances to gather another up vote.

The number of showings (lives) can be adjusted based on the ratio of new
submissions to front page visitors. But I suspect that that ratio is more than
high enough to accommodate 3-5 showings.

I feel like this would be a relatively easy system to implement, and could
result in better overall content. Thoughts?

~~~
jimminy
I personally think this is probably a good solution for visibility. If the
issue is visibility of new submissions, random promotion of them to the front
page seems like a valid solution.

Though it might also mean that scores will be more variable for new
submissions, and that may have an impact on front-page/2nd-page variability
and bounciness, which doesn't seem like it would be friendly to casual users.

~~~
x0054
Hmm, well the way I was imagining it, every new post will get the same amount
of promotion, but it's true that it is random in that you never know who you
are going to show it to. Some people might pay attention to the New Posts box,
some may not.

------
minimaxir
It may be worthwhile to reference my "If your HN submission doesn't get any
upvotes, don't worry about it" note
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9864254))
The probability of hitting the front page is low at all times of day and all
days of week. (see:
[http://i.imgur.com/MdUvMB9.png](http://i.imgur.com/MdUvMB9.png))

A separate /new list won't make a difference because it won't improve the
average content _quality_. Not everything submitted to HN "deserves" to
receive upvotes, to be perfectly honest.

Personally, I've had a number of submissions get upvotes after it's fallen off
the first page of /new. I admit it's counterintuitive, though.

~~~
curtis
> Not everything submitted to HN "deserves" to receive upvotes, to be
> perfectly honest.

This is certainly true. It is also the case that some things submitted to HN
deserve upvotes and don't get them. A case in point, this very article:

    
    
      Try #1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10007658
              ==> 4 points by curtis 17 hours ago | discuss
    
      Try #2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10011219 (this submission)
              ==> 42 points by curtis 2 hours ago | 18 comments
    

The obvious conclusion is that the first submission didn't get upvotes just
because it wasn't very good -- it simply didn't deserve them. And the second
submission got upvotes because it was better. It was quality content. But of
course in this example, they're the same article!

Now let me be clear. I understand that it is the nature of this particular
beast that there is simply going to be a lot of randomness. However, I believe
we can make it noticeably less random with some fairly modest effort. And if
we can make it less random, then I think that would be a good thing. Would the
proposed "preview" page actually do that? I don't know. But I certainly think
it's worth talking about.

------
jedberg
This is a problem we had to solve at reddit a long time ago. It's called the
"rising" sort:

[https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/c6f959504466333c0d7d51...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/c6f959504466333c0d7d51c131240473aaf78b04/r2/r2/lib/rising.py)

------
jimminy
Let's be realistic, even when the number of articles coming in is really high,
you're talking about 100-150 posts for an hour.

The HN algorithm has temporal-gravity to help pull down old content that
wasn't hugely popular. Due to that algorithm if the content doesn't take off
in the first hour, it likely won't take off.

Those 2 points point to a far simpler solution. Just show most of the items
from the last hour on the new page. So instead of 30 items, you show 100 items
on the new page, which should accommodate most of the recent posts without
requiring any clicks.

(minimaxir's point is also very valid.)

~~~
dang
> Just show most of the items from the last hour on the new page.

Someone else suggested this recently, and we've heard it before, too. We're
game to try it as an experiment.

What's the best way to measure whether it works?

~~~
tikhonj
Well, the first step is identifying _what the problem is_. To me it's not
obvious and a concrete statement of what we want to solve would help.

That is, we know it's that "articles that _should_ be on the front page get
overlooked"—but votes are the main metric we have for what _should_ be on the
front page. How can we tell an article that fell off /new because it was bad
from one that fell off because nobody saw it?

One way of evaluating this would be to exercise editorial discretion, pick out
articles _you_ (or some set of people) believe are good and compare how they
progress with different versions of the page. However, this is rather labor
intensive and risks biasing the experiment based on who picks the articles
out.

I can't think of other approaches off-hand. Coming up with a concrete
statement of the problem would probably help here.

~~~
dang
I agree. That's why I asked how to measure whether it works—it requires
defining "works".

Upvotes alone don't determine HN's front page. If they did, HN would be
dominated by controversy, gossip, and fashion—those get the most reflexive
upvotes, and there are more reflexive upvotes than reflective ones.
Coutervailing mechanisms include flagging and moderation.

The fundamental difficulty is that HN cares most about quality and one can't
easily measure that or automate it. Human curation is needed, plus humans
don't always agree about what counts as high-quality.

Anyone who wants to know about our current approach to this problem should
read
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866140)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134).

~~~
krapp
It might be interesting to be able to follow other users (who you know will
tend to like the kinds of stories you want to see) and you can share saved
stories or something. Or have related content or per-account filters that
change the frontpage.

If, as it seems, there's no objective standard for quality (since it can't be
measured or defined) then maybe subjective filters are the way to go.

~~~
dang
I think there's value in HN having a shared single view of the front page and
the threads. It means we all can't do the standard internet thing of self-
selecting into subworlds that don't interact. This leads to friction in the
short term—we're all exposed to things we don't like, some of which is uncivil
and shouldn't be here, but some of which is merely disagreeable because it
contradicts what we believe or like, and that's unpleasant. In the long run,
though, my bet is that having a single whole community provides something
deeply valuable.

On the question of how objective vs. subjective HN's notion of quality is, I
don't think it's completely subjective. Everyone has their personal tastes,
but HN's standards are reasonably well-established too. So I still think we
may be able to come up with a story curating mechanism to supplement upvoting
that is open to any user who wants to put in the effort. The big question,
again, is how to score the effort. It can't be just "vote for whatever you
like," because we already have that.

------
nsns
I think many important entries get to the first page not because people upvote
them on the "new" page, but because people keep on re-submitting them, where
resubmition actually functions as an (unintended) upvote.

That said, it seems that HN has grown so big, many "top stories" don't get
enough time for discussion before completely disappearing from the front page.
It might be time (shudder the thought) to introduce channels...

~~~
curtis
I have long suspected that this is true for certain types of articles. If a
new article appears on some really popular website like CNN or Slate (for
example) and it is about some HN-worthy topic, there's a good chance that
multiple HN users will encounter the article browsing the original source site
and submit it from there. Now you've got a submission with 3 or 4 upvotes,
none of them from the /new page.

~~~
jacquesm
Especially 'Ask HN' and 'Show HN' posts.

------
joeyspn
Allowing submissions only from users with a minimum karma (50, 100, 200, x)
would be a better solution for preventing spam and flooding. Something similar
to down-voting permissions that currently requires 500 points.

It would be also much easier to implement.

~~~
dang
A few problems with that: missing a good story costs HN far more than
tolerating a bad one (kind of like startup investing that way); users with
higher karma by no means reliably submit high-quality stories; by closing
newcomers out, karma thresholds heighten the risk of the community becoming
insular, something we definitely don't want.

------
lwhalen
c'mon now, they aren't even about to fix the simple 'comment layout on mobile'
problem. You really think they're going to go through the trouble of adding a
whole new ranking system? :-)

~~~
dang
> they aren't even about to fix the simple 'comment layout on mobile' problem

Why do you say that? We've put a ton of work into that problem, which is not
quite as simple as you'd think.

~~~
hobs
Hey dang!

Just wanted to first say that I absolutely have enjoyed your work and time on
HN, but from my experience as a user (important distinction here), the mobile
interface hasn't changed much in the last few years.

The only thing I see is a slightly bigger triangle button and a whole lot of
tiny tiny text. I completely understand that my phone isn't the target
audience (S3), and so I use an Android app to make up the difference, but when
I saw your comment I reopened HN on my phone to see if had improved since I
had last checked a year ago.

Here's what I saw:
[http://i.imgur.com/CRonP5c.png](http://i.imgur.com/CRonP5c.png) I am NOT a UX
expert (or even novitiate) but if you would, compare the size of the refresh
button to the size of the upvote or comments buttons and notice the vast
difference in area.

I took the liberty of coloring in the comment link in red, and comparing it to
the refresh button:
[http://i.imgur.com/GZEs7cN.png](http://i.imgur.com/GZEs7cN.png) and that it
is less than 1/10th of the same clickable area.

Now, I am 100% not saying you should be targeting this button size or that
specifically, but that would be a reason I would make this type of comment.

Hopefully that isnt too frustrating of a response, I assume there are a lot of
factors going on that I am not aware of.

Thanks.

~~~
dang
Sorry! I see now that my comment was far from clear. You're right that there
haven't been major changes to the interface, but that's not because we haven't
been working hard on it. It's because we haven't released that work yet.

We did make a couple attempts at quick fixes for HN on mobile that provoked
howls of protest, so we rolled those back and have been working instead on
rewriting HN's markup entirely. This is not a small project, and everyone
working on it has other responsibilities, so it has taken a long time. It is,
however, getting closer to being ready. That's why I objected to the statement
that we "aren't even about to fix" it (and also that it's a "simple" problem)!

When we do have something ready, we'll release it for a while as a different
set of URLs and start taking everyone's feedback about what still doesn't work
right. I imagine there will be a long process of tweaking it, and we'll be
happy to do that over time.

(Also, that was very nice of you to be so friendly even though it sounded like
I was saying something silly.)

~~~
hobs
That sounds great dang, thanks for continuing to work on it even if there was
a backlash. I will be interested to see what shows up in the next few months
(hopefully) :)

------
curtis
One of the possible advantages of the "preview" page from the proposal is that
it might draw more eyeballs to new submissions than what they're receiving
now. This is because the design interleaves new submissions with submissions
that have received some degree of filtering. I really spend very little time
checking the new page, and I suspect I'm not alone in that. I don't know if HN
would be better if regular users spent more time looking at the new page, but
I suspect that it would.

It's also worth noting that HN _could_ interleave new submissions into the
front page to get them more visibility, forgoing a preview type page
altogether.

------
ZenoArrow
Perhaps the New feed could be tweaked, so that if a New submission gets an
upvote it goes back to the top of the New feed. If the submission reaches the
front page then its chronological position on the New feed could be restored.

------
kryptiskt
Put in a random recently posted story on the front page, different for each
visitor.

