I think it's a great idea that solves an actual problem and it would probably help smooth out voting rings that slip past the detector.
However, that would probably mean HN couldn't optimize or cache the front page. On the other hand, this is a feature for logged-in users only, so it might be feasible.
As far as I can see, HN already has randomized algorithms. I just had to create a new account because my six-month old 3,000+ karma account just got slowbanned and silentbanned for apparently no reason.
Out of nowhere, anywhere from 6 to 14 seconds to load the front page (or any other HN page) when logged into that account.
I'm not sure what the offense is for which people get slowbanned on HN, but I also don't understand how that counts as a randomized algorithm.
As an aside, it amazes me that people who notice being hellbanned (which is really the ultimate way of HN telling you not to post here anymore) make 2nd or 3rd accounts and just continue. I'd want to find out why I was being banned and then, if I didn't agree with the reason, I'd just leave.
I was not hellbanned - where everything I posted was instantly dead.
To be honest the only thing I'm sure of is that I was slowbanned. I timed page loads 10 times with the slowbanned account and they averaged about 11 seconds. Then page loads with not being logged in averaged about 1 second. Then page loads with a new account averaged about 1 second as well.
The junky thing is that the account was almost 7 months old and had 3,324 positive karma but I guess I said something that ticked someone off:
There isn't anything in that account's immediate history that looks like grounds for bannination, on the contrary. Are you sure it's a slowban, not some technical problem? I'd try to email the admins to find out more.
I'm pretty confident it's a slowban. Logging in with this account again, I go from instant page loads to 12 second page loads - only on HN of course.
After re-reading the terms of use of the site, I emailed pg on 11/22 stating that I believed I was slowbanned and that I didn't believe I had violated any terms of use. I hadn't spammed ever (I have nothing to sell), I don't participate in flame wars. I didn't get a response so I emailed him again on 11/27 just saying it's clear I was slowbanned and that it would be nice to know why but that I guess that's not going to happen. I figure there are a few possibilities:
1. I said one thing one time that rubbed someone the wrong way
2. An admin thought it would be funny to give someone who uses the username 300bps a slowban thereby effectively causing their web experience to be equivalent to a 300 bps modem
Again, I don't know what HN uses slowbans for, but my guess would be it's for technical reasons rather than content. It's an interesting issue that got me googling. There doesn't seem to be a real point of contact where people can appeal account moderations on HN. It seems to me that emailing pg doesn't scale very well, which might be the reason why you didn't get an answer.
And I found this, somewhat self-absorbed, blog entry by Michael O. Church about pretty much the same thing you're describing:
I think it's weird that people think HN admins, or specifically pg, owe them an apology - but it does show how serious people are taking their accounts. On the flip side it's not at all clear how seriously HN takes its more seasoned users. All things being equal, I trust the admins to statistically do the right thing because there are probably a lot of hidden variables we're not aware of.
However, there seem to be a lot of young and/or low-karma accounts who do just fine while being hostile, personal, and all-around detrimental. Maybe there is an algorithmic problem that causes more seasoned accounts to accrue "flag debt" or whatever without a sufficient method of decaying those flags.
When you're first banned in any way it's pretty easy to get upset about it. Stating that someone owes you an apology is silly, but I know from personal experience that it is not a great feeling.
The thing that I remind myself of though is that if HN didn't have counterintuitive rules that it would likely be more like reddit which I think would be a bad thing.
So I had 555 comments, 42 of which contained the word Microsoft. I had 5 submissions, none of which were about Microsoft.
Is your conclusion that I was slowbanned because 0% of my submissions were about Microsoft and 7.5% of my comments mentioned Microsoft?
If someone who doesn't work at Microsoft and has no affiliation with them whatsoever other than to use their products is banned for mentioning Microsoft so infrequently, then this place is a ridiculous echo chamber.
EDIT: My last comment mentioning Microsoft was over 3 weeks ago and honestly it's more about stock performance of multiple companies than it is about anything to do with Microsoft.
This sounds like a cool idea that solves a real problem, but I'm not convinced it will work. The main blocker for an article is getting the first two or three votes fast enough to get from the new page to the front page. If you look at my article on HN scoring [1], most successful articles shoot up quickly and then slowly drop, so randomization is mostly going to just put declining articles back on the front page for a bit, which doesn't really help the reader or articles.
To be effective, the randomization needs to be focused on newish articles. I like danmaz's idea of adding a random new article to the front page. Best would be combining ideas and using weighted randomness to add a new article to the front page, so a vote or two would boost an article's chance of getting the random slot.
(Another thing that would help is if the More link didn't time out after a couple minutes, so readers could go to the second page more reliably.)
Giving a randomness to the whole sorting of the articles could have a "noisy" effect on users who update the home page often.
On the other end, PG could just add a line at the end of the home page to show one post randomly selected from the new articles. This way we could all contribute to the selection of new articles, instead of only relying on those brave souls who regularly wade through the "new" page.
>Giving a randomness to the whole sorting of the articles could have a "noisy" effect on users who update the home page often.
Yes, but not much. Provided the amount of noise is small enough, the order of articles on the front page may change a bit, but the articles themselves won't change much. I don't know much about the typical distribution of scores of articles on the front page at any given moment, but I suspect even the order of most of the page probably won't be affected.
Think about it this way: pushing an article that's already high up on the home page up or down a little in ranking won't push it off the front page. It's only the bottom of the page (and the top of page 2) that would even be materially affected.
Agreed on that, but you know, just not knowing if you are "really" #3 or not is bad, if you have your post in the home page. IMHO it would detract some from the value of the website.
> It is unfortunate that you have to read the footnotes
> to understand the article - on a first read of the text
> I was completely lost.
I'm not the author, but I'm intensely interested in effective communication. You've taken the trouble to comment, and I was wondering if you'd be willing to walk through the item and explain where you got to in the main body that you thought was unclear, and where you were lost. I assume the first paragraph was self-evident - where did you find it started to become impossible to follow?
> ... at the moment, many interesting articles are lost
> because not enough people visit the new page.
I've always done this, but it's becoming increasingly pointless. My impression is that the number of really interesting articles remains roughly constant, but the total volume increases. It's getting more and more depressing to wade through the uninteresting (to me) to find the rare gems. I still do it though.
The first three are in English, sure, I'm talking about the last two paragraphs. I understood the problem, almost from the title - I was interested mostly in the proposed solution.
In particular, the last 2-3 sentences where a complex procedure is defined in a few inline code snippets - and then the author continues as if the result is obvious.
It reminds me very much of when I read overly mathematical scientific publications (which I do a lot, being a PhD student.) In such papers, the authors often expect you to stop and spend 5 minutes reading a few symbols (perhaps reading a couple of Wikipedia articles along the way) before continuing. This makes the articles highly unreadable - I sometimes spend 2-3 days slowing working through the particularly poor ones. (Obviously, I only do this for highly relevant/useful papers!)
This article isn't in the same level of awful, obviously, but it did give me the same "I'm lost now, I should go back" feeling - which I thought was worth feeding back to the author, especially since they had provided the explanation, but they'd hidden it in a footnote.
The fact that you're a PhD student might help to explain this. My experience is that most people just won't care, but will be reassured by seeing real code in the text. They will skim without understanding, but getting the idea that there is a concrete process being explained.
You (somewhat like me in this instance) will want to understand what's actually happening. For that case the author has in fact provided more detail, relegated to a footnote. You decry this, but you (and I) are in a significant minority in this instance. We want to understand it properly, but I suspect the vast majority or readers won't. Or if they do, not yet.
Your comment is useful, and I will keep it in mind next time I write something. For reference, when I want to tuck away technical details I do it in side-bars so it's there to be read alongside the main text.
Your paper (the first one is as far as I got) is much better, since it just states a simple equation which is typeset separately ("in display mode", in LaTeX-speak) with the derivation for the equation in a sidebar and a note inline in the text pointing it out.
This reads like a normal human speaking, who was asked a question and elaborated. That's fine.
The problem with the OP's article was that I couldn't skim read it, because the code didn't make obvious sense in a "reading aloud" kind of way. It would have worked much better if the footnote had replaced, or been included as padding around the code. The skim readers would still have been happy, especially if there was a carefully placed paragraph break so they could "skip over the details," and I/we would have been happy too.
Also, two code snippets out of context are anything but real code, at least in my brain :)
It's a good idea, though I wonder if there is a better way to do this without randomness.[1]
I mean it's just an exploitation vs exploration problem. You want to maximize the number of articles the average user will upvote (essentially avoiding wasting our time.) You want to use the time and number of votes to predict the probability that a user will upvote it. But you also want to do "experiments" to find even better articles even if it means wasting a few people's time.
I'm certain there is an elegant math equation that does this perfectly but I can't figure it out.
I definitely agree with this. I'm not sure what HN's algorithm is actually supposed to optimize, but apart from that I think it's pretty straightforward how to optimize it with non-random systems.
...or we could have a much larger home page, so we don't have to deal with the end-of-page-1 discontinuity, and we rely on the end-of-reader's-attention-span discontinuity, which is much smoother.
I've put some thoughts into it as well. By doing that you create a new problem :
pushing crappy stories to the frontpage and scaring new users away. For a website like HN that doesn't need or want new users that's a good thing. But for a reddit, hypem, etc... the best solution, IMO, is to trust people browsing /r/new to do the work for the others.
However, that would probably mean HN couldn't optimize or cache the front page. On the other hand, this is a feature for logged-in users only, so it might be feasible.