Should HN users be incentivized to use/visit newest submissions?

I often come to HN for the discussions, not for the links themselves, and unfortunately that's something missing in "New". It happens quite often that the submission itself is not terribly interesting (e.g. a blog post ranting about some database engine), but nonetheless it spawns a fascinating discussion, filled with first-hand anecdotes and other insights.

So when I browser "New" I usually upvote submissions that have potential to create an interesting discussion (so I upvote what I believe _other_ people will find interesting, in a Keynesian beauty contest way).

I've had an email from Dang, I think, in the past, and so has a buddy of mine.

> A submission that you posted to Hacker News looks good, but hasn't had much attention so far. We put it in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page some time in the next day or so.

So there are mechanisms to get new content on to the front page, but they're dependent on Dang noticing them.

I've never succeeded in getting even a single upvote on links I submit. I've stopped bothering, there seems to be no point. It's not the quality of the links either. It just doesn't have a high chance of getting through. I've actually seen links that I submitted land to the front page a day or so later when somebody else resubmitted them. You basically need to get lucky with the right people actually looking at the new section in the few minutes it will be on there. After that it's gone.

One interesting enhancement that would help with that and that also addresses the problem of duplicates is to simply count duplicate link submissions as an upvote on the original. Most popular links have numerous duplicates before and after that did not make it. Some links actually make it to the front page multiple times.

So use the link as a Unique Resource Locator and treat them like the ids they are.

Enough people visit the newest page such that that around 80% of the good stuff makes it to the front page, and about 5% of the bad stuff makes it (and then is quickly flagged to death).

I think it's working fine as things are now. Our information is imperfect enough as it is, even before taking into account the huge number of people trying to game the system to get their ph3r0mones to reach the front page (seriously, the new page can get pretty dismal). Complicating it further will give diminishing returns, and even risk backwards progress.

Maybe 1 or 2 of the top 1000 /newest submissions could be randomly mixed into the homepage results on every page load

Rather not, I like NH as it is. I do not want to get notified upon reactions, I do not want to be fed the latest, I do not want emotes wilder then :)

What makes this site so compelling is the quality replies & discussions and the lack of anything blinking and shiny.

Source: old man.

/newest is tricky because it's inherently the opposite of what most people read the front page for. What's a little worse is that there are actually disincentives to visit it - like many people, I have showdead on which is essentially harmless for comment pages because dead comments are rare.

It shows all the spam in /newest so on top of looking at a stream of unfiltered submissions, you also have to look at all the spam. It's too big of an ask - you'd like to do your bit to help the site but in this case it feels like the site goes out of its way to not help you.

So people visit new when they post a story, when I am on new I look over what is around and if there is anything I should upvote or flag if really bad obvious advertising. I guess it is probably the same for most users who submit things.

As it is submissions do show up on the front page, so it must be that some are getting upvoted, so I sort of think the system works good enough, despite my many quality submissions not getting more than one upvote.

Another thing to consider (at least something that I sometimes do myself) is that some people may open a story to read for later (or even at the time) but never come back to upvote the post or engage in conversation.

I almost have a different issue. I feel like I miss big news here, even though I check in multiple times a day. When using the "past" menu item, there's stuff on top there I never saw on top on HN. Does thing stay shorter on top than they did before? Didn't feel it was such a problem a few years back.

If you're worried about missing quality new stories because they skyrocket or maybe don't hit front as fast etc, and you're on Twitter there's some handy bots collecting posts at thresholds like 20 and 50 upvotes over the course of a day that are handy for what's good

https://twitter.com/betterhn20

https://twitter.com/betterhn50

https://twitter.com/newsyc100

Yes, it would broaden the subject matter that hits the homepage. Also, encourage people to upvote more often. There appears to be a 150:1 click to upvote ratio on stories which seems very low.

No, it works well as of today. The more new stories are upvoted the less time a good story spend on the front page ( because the front page has fixed number of links)

I wonder if you could come up with some incentive scheme where if you upvote something you get karma or a different set of points based on a) how early you were to the party, and b) how many upvotes things gain after you, sort of like the internet community version of a Keynesian beauty contest, or a prediction market.

This is obviously a bit convoluted and not really hashed out, but I got curious how the incentive scheme might look like.

Nah, I think it's fine as it is, I like that the frontpage is "slower" and that I can get all sorts of random, funny trash in /newest

Could we sign up to be reminded to check new with a intermediate page that might be displayed occasionally?

Maybe set the frequency we'd like the reminder?

I think requiring a starter comment for submissions would be helpful and up the quality of submissions. Not sure if HN has ever tried that?

Recommend against incentivizing visiting the newest submission - it would increase effectiveness of submitting content over the effectiveness of community moderation. That kind of change would empower the outsiders over the community, presumably resulting in decrease of relevance and gradual erosion of HN's local culture.

You might not be visiting New but someone is. And/or enough ppl are submitting naturally new stuff to cause stuff to float up. It works pretty well for notable and fresh things (and then even old stale rehashed stuff that the new-watchers constantly upvote also pushing it onto the rest of our radars)

The current way HN works is fine for news and links etc, but for discussions i personally believe an imageboard style will work better (based on the number of replies against time), though that means that certain threads that become arguments will also be on the front page.

I sometimes use the search engine to filter popular topics from the last 24h. That often gives a good pre-selection of interesting newer topics. There is a lot that gets posted on HN and you cannot read it all.

Sometimes I look at newest too, but it is a lot to read through...

I think the existing incentive is by browsing /newest, you can find interesting submissions and get a quality comment in earlier, and probably get more upvotes as more people view the comments page.

>Quality submissions can only reach visibility if HN users upvote them from /newest

I could be wrong, but new posts should show on the main page to at least a small amount of users.

Good line of thought.

Quality content tax-payers could at least know what they are missing when they reload the same home page / feed for the 10th time. Quantity has a quality, etc...

I thought HN randomly pushed new submissions to the front page for random users, and measures how many votes they get before deciding whether to put them onto the home page for more people. There was a post about the mechanism recently. (It's why getting friends to upvote your new submissions doesn't front-page them, as those votes are ignored).

If you find the unfiltered new submissions interesting, that's the incentive.

Is there any evidence that upvotes affect frontpageification?

Serious question.

No.

HN should be as it is now.