

Suggest HN: Second chance for submissions (delete) - alecco

So I submitted this today http://samy.pl/pwnat/ and it didn't get a single vote while inane submissions (IMHO) got to the front page. After a while I deleted the submission and that allowed somebody else to repost it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1224905) I bet because of my other submission to Reddit got noticed.<p>HN front page rules aren't good if we need to resort to this trickery to have a second chance out of the noise of /newest. Meanwhile, perhaps this can help others.
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swombat
I agree that this is quite annoying. I can't count the number of times that I
found a truly awesome article that I hadn't read before, I submitted it, and
found that it was submitted 3 days ago but had a single upvote (probably a day
later).

Here I take a fundamentally different attitude to jacquesm. Please, if you
submit a truly awesome article, the kind you _know_ everyone will love,
please, _TELL SOMEONE ABOUT IT_. Otherwise, unless it comes from an already
popular news source that will get multiple submits, it will probably sink into
forgetfulness.

One place to tell people about it is, as has oft been mentioned, the #startups
channel on Freenode. Another place would probably be on Twitter. Here's a
pledge: if you @swombat me a really awesome submission and I happen to see it
in time, I will upvote it (if it's not worthy of an upvote, I will try to tell
you why in 140 characters).

~~~
gojomo
It seems that once something scrolls off the first page or two of 'new', or
sits too long at a low count, there's no chance of it catching a flurry of new
votes -- and even if it did, I don't think the rating function considers
momentum enough for it to reach the front page.

(That is: if a 3-day-old article that was initially overlooked gets 4 votes
today in rapid succession, while a brand-new article gets 3 votes today in the
same period, the older article is still punished by averaging its new votes
over the days when it wasn't even really being reviewed. At least that's how
it seems to work.)

There needs to be a better way for items to get a second wind when the right
readers show up.

A possibility would be to replace 'new' with 'newly worth a look'.
Essentially, this would be the combination of new items (which have an
implicit upvote from their submitter) mixed with older items that just got a
fresh upvote, minus items that are already on the front page. That is, every
upvote would bump an item back to the top 'worth a look', even if not to the
'top' rankings, so it has a chance again of a self-reinforcing rise.

Probably, once a user has upvoted or 'passed' (hypothetical new option) on an
item, it would no longer appear in 'newly worth a look'.

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dood
I don't think the system needs changing - sometimes submissions just get
unlucky and/or have a bad title. Just try again a while later, or hope someone
else does. Nothing wrong with that as long as you aren't spamming the post
(imo).

My highest voted submission of recent times was an article I thought was
great, that someone else had submitted a few days earlier, which hadn't got
any upvotes. So I made the title more appealing and tweaked the url, hey
presto 100+ upvotes. The system works! (well enough)

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gleb
Could also have been a better title. What title did you use? The repost
improved on original page title in a small but useful way. There is a lot of
value generated by a good title.

~~~
dhimes
I took the guidelines on titles to imply that if they were adequate then leave
them alone. Perhaps I'm misreading them.
<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

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vaksel
just have a bunch of friends vote your stuff up....that's what most people do.
Otherwise it's really a crap shoot on whether or not you'll make it to the
front page, unless you are submitting something that other people would try to
submit(i.e. techcrunch articles)

~~~
dotBen
This kind of defeats the point of any of these peer driven vote sites if you
can get your friends to vote stuff up (cos you asked, not on merit).

Yes, yes, yes I know that is EXACTLY how it end up working on HN, Digg, Reddit
and everywhere else. I'm just a crusty old purist.

~~~
_delirium
As a purist of a different kind, I see it as more of a fundamental problem in
the way HN/Digg/Reddit/etc. voting works, in that it's heavily sensitive to
voting in the initial period, which is often pretty random, and then stuff
that happens to get a few upvotes in that early period tends to snowball due
to the feedback loop of being on the front page -> more people see it -> more
people upvote.

Apart from its slower speed (too few stories per day), I actually see the
Slashdot model, warts at all, as somewhat superior; or the Kuro5hin model as a
vote-driven alternative. How's that for crusty purism. ;-)

I try to personally insulate myself from the fundamental brokenness by not
using the HN front page, and only looking at the /newest page.

