The first thing we added was the "rising" page, which used to be reddit's default "new" page. The rising page was a weighted new page. It was a little hacky, but worked for a while. I see they've changed this, which I think may have been a mistake, but I haven't thought about it in forever.

The second thing we did, which worked really well, was to have an up-and-coming link placed at the top of the list on the frontpage. This helped those borderline posts get more visibility. I had a reddit simulator I used to use to test things like this. That space appears to be a subreddit search box for me, so it seems they've moved onto another solution.

Randomness is an interesting idea, though it might be a bit difficult to fit into the way we cached things.

I think the problem that the randomized algorithm solve is not missing good content. It is to give the same chance for equally good content - or at least to minimize the error due to page limit.

to have an up-and-coming link placed at the top of the list on the frontpage

Two things: 1) either the up-and-coming are a few borderline posts taken in order and then here you'd just extended the front page with a few more posts (ie. it changes nothing) 2) either you'd carefully choosen a heuristic for those posts which is pretty much what is suggested here.

Anyway, thank you for sharing your experience with this problem, it's very interesting.

An other idea would be to fix the content quality and make variable the number of posts in the front page.

I realize there there are moderators for HN and they are confirmed in some cases to have changed titles but I don't think this necessarily means they are responsible for all the title updates.

Gut-level guesstimate, but the following titling strategies seem to work disproportionately well:

1) Pointed, rhetorical questions (as much as we all claim to hate them)

2) "How I..." titles (usually some legitimate merit to these posts, but if one were so inclined to game the system...)

3) Contrarian declaratives, usually about popular topics. (Hypothetical example: "Facebook is not a social network." This will generate a lot of blind upvotes, plus at least a few knee-jerk comments in opposition).

In fairness to HN, the content actually matters here. I can't say the same for a lot of the subreddits I browse, where blind upvoting based on title alone is a lot more rampant. It's pretty hard to crack the front page with lousy but well-clickbait-titled content here, though we've all seen it done before (and it seems to happen at least once a week).

Legitimate commentary will take longer to flow in, and allow for knee jerk / blind influence to last longer from original submission time.

IMO the beet would be a clickbait title for a long article that starts contrarion, but ends on a neutral note.

Rational/logical people will take less offense b/c they're more likely to read the neutral perspectives and others will blind vote/comment based on title and first couple of sentences of the article.

You'll see early comments disagree/agree with something wholly unrelated to the topic, and not realizing it.

There already is a "title" bar for submitting links which is fine, but I think the temptation to tweak and try to game for karma might make that more suitable as a byline.

I looked at the 'new' page this morning while thinking about the "optimal" time (it was around 9am EST, which is supposedly one of the best times according to several articles). Almost every post had a single point. Since your post starts with one point, that means most posts have received absolutely no support whatsoever. I suppose this is inevitable. Only a small percentage of submitted content can get on the front, but nonetheless it's still frustrating to put effort into something and then... crickets.

It seems that, if the volatility of posting is greater than the volatility of reading, then it is best to post at off-peak hours. It is only good to post at peak hours if there are more readers than posters, i.e. there isn't a large corpus of users that aren't trying to game the system.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

Instead of blocking them from the homepage, just give them a very very small chance of appearing. Might make the "Knights of New" which are considered self-sacrificing users a thing of the past.

I read HN all the time, but confess I never visit "new".

I'd definitely be a fan of including 1 random article from "new" for each pageview of the front page -- but make it explicit. Keep it at the top, or in the middle. It seems like that should produce a much "fairer" result.

I'd be curious if there are reasons why this wouldn't work -- why HN, reddit, etc. keep "new" on its own page...

E.G. I've posted around 3AM - 6AM EST (which is usually when I have more free time) and it never makes it. But if I post a bit later, say around 9AM, then it has a much higher chance of coming to the front page.

There are a great many good stories that are several pages into /new and I think (with the exception of a handful that are already on the front page) those are barely seen by the vast majority of HN visitors.

With sites like Facebook and Reddit, you're simply shouting from a mountain top and hoping someone listens.

To be fair, your odds of gaining exposure for a tech-type story are greater on sites like HN and subreddits devoted to technology. In these places, you can count on listeners sharing some of your interests.

Tweaking the ranking algorithms may improve the situation, but the fact is, many of us have become complacent; we resort to throwing our content into social news forums and expecting a lot of exposure instead of doing our homework to determine who the appropriate point people are.

For example, if you're trying to pitch a new web app, maybe you should forget about Hacker News and try strategically emailing / calling a few friends / colleagues. When it comes to early exposure, quality can trump quantity.

> quality can trump quantity

Maybe in general, but submitting a link online is so damn easy that why wouldn't you spend 30 seconds doing it?

But online submissions are worse than lottery tickets, because you buy a lottery ticket, and then check it from time to time. No, they're seductive because there seems to be some pattern behind it, because they're so easy to test, and before you know it, those 30 seconds have turned into 30 hours of testing and reading into the material for a parsley 600 views.

Technically, working at Costco's and spending your earnings on AdWords would have brought you more exposure with the added upside that those are more qualified leads (for business sites), or on Facebook, where that money could buy you thousands of impressions (I found some numbers putting average CPM for a sponsored check in story at 6$ with a CTR of 3.2%, so spending your 192$ from Costco will get you ~960 clicks @ 30k impressions, if you're doing a mediocre job).

So yeah, if it were 30 seconds it'd be a great deal. But unless you have the self control of a buddhist monk, it's not going to be 30 seconds. Never.

This way you do it once, and since you don't have to revisit it every time it posts, you can remove the element of self control.

1) increase the variability of information consumed by the community

2) combat group think (which is all too prevalent these days on HN)

3) provide a more level playing field for people who don't make an effort to abuse the voting system and exceed the front page threshold

People continue to complain that easy one-liner jokes consistently dominate the top ranks in Reddit threads, but Slashdot already came up with contextual upvotes (Funny, Insightful, etc) years ago.

Of course every time someone comes and tries to build a community we end up reinventing online comments from square one...

Somehow, that made things ten times worse.

Perhaps someone, after they've made a submission, could "pay to promote" - paying with a lockout of their account for 48 hours, or loss of downvoting, or somesuch, to give their post a smidgen of front page attention.

That means that the people just churning submissions at the rate of 6 a day have to carry on with their scattergun approach, and other people who really think they have an interesting article could give it more attention but with some pain to themselves.

i.e.

    1) Top #1 post
    2) Random New Post
    3) Top #2 post
    4) Random New Post
    5) Top #3 post
    6) etc.

Also something has to be done about the fact that many news stories that are bad PR for certain companies or good about their competitors are quickly dispatched to page 2 and 3.