Do you think many posts don't get the front page attention they deserve?

Personal anecdote: I've posted something in the past which, perhaps due to a timezone mismatch with the majority of users or something else, got no points and no comments.

A few months later I got an email from the mods inviting me to submit it again, since they saw it could interest folks in here. I did it and it got hundreds of comments.

So at least there's some mechanism to "salvage" potentially interesting stories, although it's a black-box to me :)

Glad and, at the same time sorry, to read I am not the only one noticing what you and the other commenters are experiencing.

Unfortunately I don't think it's a 'so many good posts differentiation of which ones are the best becomes hard' problem, since the front page lately has been of consistently repetitive content (some article about this new fancy Stable Diffusion flavor) or downright of dubious quality submissions which deteriorates further from editorializing of their title. I've said this dozen of times but sometimes it's really like I'm on my LinkedIn frontpage, full of grifters and corporate/entrepreneur BS.

The problem imo lies on the rise of HN's popularity which unavoidably deviates its once astute userbase to a one that is prone to sensationalism and occasionally ignorance.

I still believe this is a good portal to learn first about news on tech as well as read some comments by users that happen to be prominent in the industry.

I've never used the front page and usually do not find much of interest there. All the gold is found by monitoring /newest. Some might think that's a waste of time but for me I've found it to be extremely worth it, discovering projects, products and information long before it reaches the front as well as the stuff that never ends up there.

I think there are 2 problems; user side and HN/algorithm side.

On the HN side, i have watched with dismay as several submissions of mine have gathered a lot of interest, making it quickly to the front page, only for it to inexplicably plummet down the rankings to the second page and then to the unknown regions of the third and fourth pages.

On the user side, most submissions stay on the new page for about 30min. In that time, all it needs is two or three upvotes to get onto the second page of HN which does get visited. I'm sorry to say this but i think users here are too lazy when it comes to looking for and upvoting new submissions. A post from arstechnica.com is sure to make it to the front page, even if it doesn't deserve it, while others are ignored. I think HN'ers should be spending more time on the new page and less time lazily upvoting posts from once- good websites that have lost their lustre by now.

Yes, but "attention they deserve" is a poor phrasing of "I wish I'd noticed that, but failed to check HN when it was higher up on the front page, or failed to check the second page, or ...". (I assume here that you aren't missing stuff due to excessive caching of the front page, or hiccups in the "front page" algorithm.)

I'll guess that you're trying to stay on some sort of "I want to read all the interesting stuff...that makes the cut at HN" (and maybe a few other sites) diet. Vs. read everything interesting on the internet, which is hopeless. HN's size still makes that a pretty large intake.

> "Have we reached a ...point where...content relevant to your interests [emphasis mine] rarely reaches you?"

In theory, HN could try to categorize stories, so users could focus more on their own interests. How HN did that wouldn't need to resemble how "mainstream tech news" sites do it. Say, create a few categories that many stories fit into, and many folks often don't want to see. Then put some checkboxes in the user profile - "Hide these story categories on the front/second/etc. pages". Maybe add an "invert" feature, so when you're bored you can look at all the stuff normally hidden from you. With a limited number of categories, that might not imposed much server-side load. (Just cache all possible versions of the front page, and add "&categories=0x.." to the URL for each user?)

Absolutely. Posting to HN is a bit like shouting into a hurricane. During peak hours, there are often several posts per minute. Even good posts require significant luck to make it to the home page.

That's why I mainly access the posts through RSS https://hnrss.org

Personally I use 10 points as the minimum limit, that's usually a good indicator that a post already got some traction (yet it might be still removed or flagged later) https://hnrss.org/newest?points=10

HN has a second-chance pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Probably, i use the Android App "Harmonic" for Hacker News and i can and do scroll down until the 499th post and see many stuff that some people won't see. I often upvote them and sometimes bookmark them but looking at the posts i bookmarked i see that those posts stayed down there. Which is a shame as i really wanted to see the comment sections to these post, thats (IMO) the best part on hacker news, which often stay completely empty.

I'd love for the new posts to appear side by side with the home page posts. I keep forgetting about them, but every time I go there I find interesting stuff.

HOWEVER I don't think this means they need to (or even should) appear on the home page!

I know this is an unsatisfying answer, but the best solution to this problem is to click on page 2.

Yes, I do think lots of post don't get the attention they deserve. That's why I check the front page only once or twice per day, and otherwise live inside the New page.

Nope, not at all. Unless it's about my submissions. In that case, yes, 100%!

Joking aside, the only way to get to the front page is either via pure luck, and lots of it, or on a bring-your-own-upvoters basis. I think it's normal with the amount of traffic, users, and submitted posts that we see here. The front page became, over time, an expression of what the "general audience" of techies like - an intersection of their interests, not a sum. It's perfectly natural given that there are only 30 articles on the front page - the competition is fierce, and you can't get there by relying solely on people interested in particular content. It reminds me of elections: while you may be able to get something by relying on your die-hard electorate, to actually win you need to appeal to just about anyone and their cat...

A critical variable here is the size of the frontpage.

Perhaps people tend to assume that the size of the front page reflects the volume of posts that deserve attention.

Maybe front page size should be configurable; someone could make a browser extension for that.

The elephant in the room is that you can't downvote submissions, only upvote. Which means there are posts that don't deserve to be on the front page that can't be removed from the front page, taking away spots from other posts.

In general, though, it seems like the first hour or two after the post is crucial, and if it doesn't receive enough upvotes in that window, it never will. So there's a lot of timing and "luck" involved.

I don't know... All I know is how I use this website and the first thing I do when I come here in the morning is I'll go to a couple pages of the normal front page. Then I'll click on new and then go until I caught up to where I was the previous time I was here. So basically I end up seeing everything on the website all the time and it's not hard to do there's not that much submitted to this website.

You raise an interesting point, which immediately leads to the question of how it could be improved or solved, without significantly affecting how the front page works currently.

For example, a layer over the basic front page might offer stories thought to be of greater interest to each individual user - essentially, a recommendation algorithm. Maybe submission/commenting patterns (which are basically available [0] via the API) could be harnessed towards this - taking the hypothesis that users interact with stories which most interest them, and there are patterns of similar interest between people?

Or maybe there are other opportunities; for example, if story voting was made available per user via the API, this would add an additional stream that roughly signals "this interests me". (Although of course this miight consequently cause other problems...)

[0] https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/jl.json?print=pre...

Yes I think so, the front page is always going to be relatively inane and unchallenging as it represents the curated intersection of the interests of the many, which is often boring and conventional.

I never use the front page because I have little interest in what the collective finds interesting. I only ever check the newest page and I have showdead set to true so I can see things as they come in, and I think that's a far more interesting way of consuming HN, if you can tolerate the occasional spam imploring you to buy earthmoving equipment.

Ah to be honest i've forgotten there is more than the front page.

I've tried recently to click into the Ask sections more because I think that is the place that can have more value, collective discussion and the knowledge pool that is available here is incredible, this is what I find most disappointing about a lot of other resources, such as reddit, it often just becomes trash when the potential to discuss ideas and develop concepts / learn from others is the reason any of these tools excite me to begin with.

There are so many things I wish I had people to talk to with, to help try and figure them out, not necessary just tech issues, often places like stack overflow etc is a good place for that, but more, life, personal, career etc.

If you're that interested in quality posts, why are you focused on the front page at all? You need an alternative source of posts that's still powered by some user curation (aka upvotes) -- like twitter accounts that post stories as they start to rise. (https://twitter.com/betterhn50) etc That way you'll catch some of the quality posts that don't quite explode into front page territory but still might get 100 upvotes and have quality discussion.

Some of them do. Some of them do not. But its a really big hit and miss on the Hacker News. Its really a lot more 'balanced' on Lobsters or Reddit for example ... but its probably a lot more people read/open Hacker News then some subreddit.

What is a real mystery for me is sometimes I add some stuff to HN and it gets 2-3 votes (and misses everything). Then someone else does the same and it gets the Hacker News Front Page and 10000 views - where is the login in that? :)

Regards.

The worst part about the front page is the censorship... sometime by top users and sometimes by mods ... Like some other users mentioned, I also like https://news.ycombinator.com/newest better then the front page (you avoid HN ads by using that, too)

Submissions in Active Threads [1] typically stick around longer. It often happens that my favorite submission of the day appears on the first page of Active Threads and is gone from the first four regular pages.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/active

I'm bit salty about my "en lan 2000" submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32828671) I think it is interesting how many things they kinda got right in prediction 100 years ago

I still think the problem is the opposite. The front page isn’t picky enough. There is so much content and so little time. Making it to the front page of a site is an indicator that it’s worth spending precious time to read that content. Only the best of the best should pass that high bar.

I think the number of posts that reach the front page is precisely the same number of posts that deserve to reach the front page, as the means of determining worth is entirely self-referential. Thus the purpose of this system is what it does.

My first impression is, that just the life! Everything like this, need some luck to run out.

then, I realized that is about productivity. Give good things more chances/resources, is the key of productivity, for a product, a community, or a race.

> many times I happen upon posts in the 100+ votes from the past day or two that somehow I didn't even see

If the issue is posts that drop off the front page before they are seen, you might like using Wayne Larsen's https://hckrnews.com as an interface. It gives you a chronological list of all posts that get enough votes to break out of "new".

There should be a tagging system

A simple change which would be easy and interesting to A/B test might be to just display more posts on the first page. 30 vs. 45 vs. 60? I suspect that the benefit to effort ratio of making that change would be high.

I may well be in the minority, but I am sort of sad that for every programming related post there is probably 4-5 times as many non-CS ones on the front page. I am almost exclusively here for the former content, because it is frankly unparalleled - the depth of knowledge some comments show is truly remarkable, and it is not rare to find the very creator of a well-known project themselves answer. That’s why I often search with “hackernews” concatted at the end, if I try to evaluate some new tech.

Meanwhile, while there are certainly good discussions on other topics as well, I see the Dunning–Kruger effect more often than I would like, especially on political topics (myself not being exempt). I don’t know the solution, but perhaps the often recommended tagging could help here, with perhaps slightly different logic applied for each post to get to the front page based on the tag (so massively important political topics could still get there, but otherwise the above ratio of topics could be alterned).

Specific examples, please!

Generally I've noticed that unless the post has a huge amount of upvotes you generally have a random amount of time between 10 minutes and a few hours to catch it on the front page

As a work-around, I usually read to post 300, then check the ask page, and keep an eye on my threads. Sometimes I check new, but the spam level risk there is higher.

I try to post when americans are awake, so my post has a chance.

Timezones matter, even if you are 12hrs out of phase with the world's largest economy.

We explained some of the problems of the ranking algorithm in an article and backed it up with data: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...

From that point on, we continued to research this problem and are working on an improved HN frontpage website right now, which takes live data from HN and factors out the feedback loops. It should be ready to use soon. If you want to get early access or get notified, please write me an email.

Posts from established sources (economist, nyt) should be "un-flaggable"

"past" is what you possibly want. At the top header.

And since a few/most comments don't understand this post check out 'past" and see if it represents what you thought HN was talking about yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/front

try https://hckrnews.com for chronological version