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However, the lack of upvotes is just how link aggregators work.
The goal of many HN posters is to hit the front page. If you've received 10 points, you'll probably have hit the front page. However, depending on time of submission, you have a 10% to 20% chance of hitting 10 points: http://i.imgur.com/MdUvMB9.png
That's low, even if your blog post or startup is the Next Big Thing.
However, what's the typical behavior for HN submissions? Here's a chart of the median points for HN submissions at each timeslot: http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png
The median is either 1 (no upvotes) or 2 (just 1 upvote), which reinforces how the typical behavior of HN really is.
Yes, it's possible for submissions to slip through the cracks. HN allows resubmission of links if they haven't had any discussion (as long as you don't delete-then-resubmit to obfuscate the fact that it's a report). If your submission doesn't get points, submit again later.
(Code and data for the two charts are available in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/minimaxir/hn-heatmaps)
Clickables:
10+ points chart: http://i.imgur.com/MdUvMB9.png
Median chart: http://i.imgur.com/SN5BuAJ.png
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/minimaxir/hn-heatmaps
HN really should allow resubmissions after a certain number of days. Its fine to have an imperfect algorithm, its rather frustrating to pretends its perfect.
It does. Just put ?resubmitted=true (or any other junk) at the end of your URL. Wait a couple days before doing it.
Don't resubmit if your original submission generated a thread, or hit the front page (you can resubmit if that happens later in the year).
I had no idea this was a thing. :O
Or, more simply and without actually sending query parameters to the site, append an empty anchor '#'.
The one reason I have not to just put empty anchors on pages is that people might write comments saying your story is a "dupe" if you don't make it obvious that was intentional.
(But then, they may do that anyways).
You can append "?hn=1" to resubmit. It's not perfect and I wish it was more mechanical, though.
Query parameters don't require a value. A blank /?/* is perfectly enough.
Also, the way HN is designed the dupe-check only works on the last N posts (that are in memory), so if you wait a while you can resubmit without any of the tricks others have mentioned. You'll need to wait over a week, though (not sure the exact time).
I've been noticing recently that submissions I post will go for hours without upvotes, and then at some point around the 7th hour or so they'll climb to the middle of the front page with around 15-20 upvotes.
Is this manual intervention, or is HN testing out some new heuristic?
I think when you submit something that has already been posted it will add a vote the existing submission. So probably you got there first and a load of people tried to submit 7 hours later.
This is just how things on the internet work.
Think about it logically. Not every person is going to see every single new submission. It takes time for the submission, if it is any good, to gain momentum and rise to the level that more people will see it. The more people that see it, the more votes it will receive.
Unless your submission is really popular or noteworthy for some reason, 8 hours seems fairly typical for an average submission.
Except from my observations, at such a timeframe most of them simply die from lack of visibility, or even if they do gain upvotes, they don't actually hit the front page (I think a time-based penalty?).
I was thinking out loud because dang has been speaking of HN testing out a new feature to resurrect posts from hellbanned users (and because HN has been sending out emails asking people to repost stories), and assumed some other mechanism is also being tried out.
You're referring to a few different experiments, but the one relevant to your question upthread is what I wrote about at [1], specifically "reviewing the story stream for high-quality submissions and occasionally lobbing one or two of them onto the bottom of the front page".
How this currently works is that when we notice a substantive overlooked story, we add it to a pool. Every now and then software picks one from the pool and randomly places it near the bottom of the front page. It does that by reducing the time decay and/or adding a small number of points. If too much time has gone by for a small change to suffice, the software doesn't try, and instead we sometimes email an invitation to repost the story.
This system would never add 15 points, nor place a story as high as the middle of the front page, so if that's what you saw it means the community noticed the post at the bottom and took it from there—which is the intent of doing this in the first place. We don't much care which stories get taken up this way vs. which don't. The idea is to do the minimum necessary to give high-quality stories a second chance and mollify the cruelty of /newest.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134
/newest currently has a memory of 20 minutes. If a post gets no votes in those first 20 minutes, it is pretty much dead.
This is manual intervention. dang mentioned that they manually boost older article that slipped through the cracks.
I don't know the exact mechanics, however.
Great points. Non-submitters seldom realize how often new content goes ignored around here. Unless you're one of the top 20 most recognized names here or unless you're writing about fad-of-the-week, submissions are mostly ignored.
is never good because it breaks the integrity of the service.
vote manipulation is called hustling these days. it tends to be okay if you're in the blessed class allowed to manipulate people or are doing it for a good cause (a private for-profit startup needing "exposure").
They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
So you are trying to imply that HN(or any other link aggregator) have integrity?
I think the problem is how easy it is to game HN, how effective it is to game HN, and how random and spurious it is if you don't game HN.
It's really difficult to just have your post get to the front page organically. It's possible (and probable) that when you submit there just aren't enough people looking at the /new page, so a lot of it comes down to sheer luck. A lot of good/great posts go by unnoticed. Getting 1 or 2 friends to upvote would probably increase your likelihood of being on the front page by 90%.
I've been gravitating towards things like http://lpushx.com, both because they're smaller, and because everything has more of a chance to "survive."
Ironically, this post just exposes how helpful it is to do the behavior it discourages. When you're trying to kill a lucrative behavior (especially something that exposes a loophole), saying, "Please don't do this behavior" is probably the worst way to do so. Now several people just figured out that you can game the system. I would recommend dang kill this.
This just occurred to me and I'm sure it's probably already been considered.
The home page should have display a sidebar or similar with the top 5 or so 'new' items. They then have a chance to catch someone's eye and get voted up to the 'real' front page.
I'd love to spend more time on 'new' - I just tend to forget about it. Something that improved the visibility of new items would help me (..help HN)
I agree that something like this could be good. Maybe instead of a sidebar, it could have them interspersed throughout the page? (possibly with the additional requirement that they wouldn't already be on the front page)
The average post in /newest is so bad that it's not clear you want to promote any of them to the frontpage randomly. I'd guess on average on a 30 item page of /newest I might click through two links, and upvote one.
I actually wonder if the stats in this post can possibly be correct. Never would have guessed that anywhere near 10-20% of the submissions hit 10 points. There's a lot of spam and offtopic stuff, and it is indeed really common for great posts to get lost in the noise with just a couple of votes.
It's probably from dupe submissions counting as votes.
You're quite right. We tested this, and it was terrible.
What about the first five posts from the 2nd page of /newest, with the added addition that at least one newer than it must be dead (e.g., moderators have at least looked at the queue)?
[dead] stories are often, perhaps mostly, killed by software.
Showing the top 5 would just move the gaming to a different playing field. Perhaps add 1 item at random (or a per-user configurable N items) from the last few hours of 'new' to the bottom of the front page?
I didn't discuss it in the original post, but HN has an anti-gaming mechanism: flagging.
Flagging is much more powerful than an upvote. If a completely terrible article/startup is posted and gamed so that it hits the Top 5, the attention will cause it to get more flags faster and die even faster. Thus, it's self correcting. This also addresses your "promoting a loophole" argument.
You don't know if something has been gamed unless it's blatantly obvious or they're tweeting about it. So flagging doesn't solve that problem.
Please don't use flags as downvotes, though. Flag things that are inappropriate for HN. Don't flag things to try to rebalance the front page.
Weren't you the one advocating flagging of surveillance-related news articles?
I don't flag "surveillance articles". I flag political articles, and blogspam retreads of things that have already generated 300-comment threads earlier in the day. I think HN is really bad at discussing surveillance issues, but I don't think that makes the articles --- which are mostly about technology --- inappropriate for HN.
This only works for blatantly terrible articles. There is a lot of gaming of ok or mediocre startup announcements. I have personally seen it being done (and even participated!) to great effect. It's called bugging your friends for up votes.
I always found such behaviour pathetic, but it increasingly becomes apparent to me that trying to be decent is a handicap and successful people are those willing to do anything, no matter how despicable.
"Bugging your friends for upvotes" is risky on modern HN.
A bit off topic.
So my question is, should I try to visit it again tomorrow? Is it worth it?
Yeah, people are actually pissed at me for linking to it. Give it a couple hours, things fall off pretty fast.
The good stuff isn't automatically at the top (like HN presumably would be). But there's always interesting stuff in there.
looks like there are some unannounced visitors (4chan) on the site now..
If anyone tries to act on what you say here, they're likely to get their and their friends' accounts thwacked.
We see a lot of people trying to game HN, and I can tell you they are not having an easy time of it [1]. Of course we don't see any who manage to fool us plus the software plus the community, but do you have reason to believe there are many of those? I doubt it's a good bet.
I go back and look at the data when people post about how they've gotten results by gaming HN, and what I see is a trail of penalized accounts. We sometimes turn the voting ring penalty off when a story is of interest to the community, but that doesn't mean the accounts got away with it.
The randomness of what gets elevated from /newest has indeed been a problem, but we've put a huge amount of work—of both kinds, development and grunt—into addressing this in recent months [2,3].
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9857874
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828818
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134
I suppose "easy" is a relative term. Thanks for all you do; none of these problems are trivial.
Usually the front page of HN contains very little noise compared to most other things I know. But maybe this is some reverse psychology where seeing the thing on the front page validates it enough to be of interest for me.
As I was recently told...
Let's try to avoid double standards, OK?
I love the irony of this post.
Sure, don't worry about wasting your time submitting links that have a 80-90% chance of being ignored. Do what I do and, once you manage to get enough karma points to no longer care about them, simply stop trying to contribute.
There's always lobste.rs for when you really want to share something with your peers.
lobste.rs is only accessible through invitation, can you send me one?, echo bUBqYXZpZXIuaW8K | base64 -d
Invitation sent. I don't know when they disabled the form to ask for an invitation. I used that more than a year ago when I joined. Maybe it's the curse of any online community to get shittier as the time passes...
Stefan, would you please send me an invite to lobste.rs?
We've seen some legitimate posts consistently reported and removed. There are definitely fishy dynamics.
The stuff they do to detect voting rings is broader than you might expect, so if you're submitting things and having them fail, consider not telling your friends about it.
It's worth noting that there are two sorts of posts that people will try to game the voting process - submissions by people who want the status of higher karma among their peers and submissions by startup founders who want "traction"[1]. That is to say, people believe there is actual, real tangible value in getting upvotes. To that end, while it'd be nice for HN to be more organic, unless there's a penalty for gaming the system it's not going stop just because people ask nicely.
[1] The traction you get on a site like HN is useful for feedback but it probably won't covert to sales unless you building something for other startups. It's not real take-it-to-the-investors traction.
I would point out that, getting karma using submission isn't that hard. Considering that Hacker News is very tolerant to re-submissions, you can usually land your submission to front page, posting some of the many awesome articles that you might have read from here. Some of the articles have been posted dozens of times, yet they articulate interesting discussion, even after being posted nth-time.
True, but there are two distinct cases.
1. You post something awesome that you saw on HN that didn't get any traction. This we encourage! It's a kind of community service and deserves karma, though arguably the original submitter should share some.
2. You post something that has had significant attention on HN already. This is ok, but only for the very best stories and only after a year or so (cf. the FAQ linked at the bottom of the page).
Does HN penalize submission violating the second point?
We bury the post as a duplicate.
If you get onto the front page of Hacker News, you can show that to other publications (such as Ars Technica or Techcrunch, for example) and they are more likely to write an article about your company. Then you can take the Ars Technica post and show it to Business Insider, etc, and then show that to The Guardian technology section and then, if you're lucky, show that to CNN or whoever.
Getting a front page post on Hacker News shows other news outlets that people are interested and that it might be worth covering. It can be the first rung on the press ladder.
I always try and 'remember to upvote'. So much great content goes through here, I think many members forget to upvote things they thought were interesting. I often forget to hit upvote on an article I clicked through to and read/enjoyed.
Might lead to upvote inflation but I think extra positivity isn't a terrible problem to have.
No worries, it's just not worth it to post on HN.
Idea for a fix: Perhaps HN should have separate karma to reward upvoting on /new on links that are successful later, much like reddit used to have (or still has?) trophies for correctly predicting that a link reaches the frontpage. If there is more incentive to vote on new items you get more accurate estimates of the link quality, and it also does warrant reward to sift through lists with such a low SNR.
Despite all of these problems, I always have a good reading here on HN.
The issue isn't that content rises which isn't good, it's that good content doesn't rise. So there might be 3x more good stuff getting posted than actually makes it onto the frontpage.
Yes, thinking a little bit more, I agree with you. But in my case, just as it is, HN has so much good content that I can't read it all.
I already can't read all the good stuff I'm seeing on the front page...
I can say from personal experience that it is much easier to get on the frontpage if you have a group of four or five people ready to upvote your content. It is possible to get a post to rise without that, but it often takes a handful of reposts.
I believe the crux of this issue is not enough people frequent the new page (https://news.ycombinator.com/newest). If that page got enough traffic, the legitimate votes would outweigh all but the most systematic attempts to 'game' the system.
I can speak for myself that I often forget that the new page exist.
I have better luck getting upvoted on weekends or as a side article to a topic-of-the-day, but I tend to submit articles that are either directly computer related or about systems that are not going as planned.
Why does it break the integrity of the service? Sockpuppets, sure, but why does asking friends/acquaintances with established HN accounts (presumably the HN software can distinguish these cases) for upvotes work contrary to the goals?
Presumably if you have an account and you "vote well" -- that is, your upvotes are well-correlated with what other people upvote and don't downvote -- you know what people like to see. If a friend asked me to upvote their spam listicle, or a question they could just ask me and get an answer, or some politics story irrelevant to hackerdom, I'd say no. If I "manipulate" a friend's post, I'm making as much of an endorsement of the content as HN-appropriate as if I upvoted something I saw on the front page. (And if I abuse that, my upvotes should get disregarded.)
To be clear, I'm not advocating that bugging your friends for upvotes is a good system. I am advocating that posters asking people who care about HN for endorsement is explicitly desirable, and the software and community norms should be designed to reflect this, instead of the community norm deciding that vote manipulation is an acceptable means to an otherwise-technically-unsupported end.