Comment by dang
4 years ago
HN's second-chance pool is a way to give links a second chance at the front page. Moderators and a small number of reviewers go through old submissions looking for articles that are in the spirit of the site—gratifying intellectual curiosity—and which seem like they might interest the community. These get put into a hopper from which software randomly picks one every so often and lobs it randomly onto the lower part of the front page. If it interests the community, it gets upvoted and discussed; if not, it falls off.
We started doing this in late 2014. There's an explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
Poster of yesterday's top item here - thanks for the email! It was completely unexpected (to the point where I needed to convince myself it wasn't a weird spear-phishing attempt) and I appreciated the opportunity to share the story again with the community. In my opinion it's a fantastic example of user-centered design, with a great story.
[Disclaimer: A write-up of mine is one of the current front page items thanks to second chance, as well.] It's a great feature, because, as long as you want just to share and do not care too much about your karma (you'll lose half of it), you don't have to manage submission dates, like figuring out, if the right audiences will be present right at that moment to pick it from the stream of new posts.
Shout-out to dang & Scott, who are doing fantastic work!
I don’t think HN karma means anything but what causes you to lose half of it? I haven’t noticed it happening to me.
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Hi Dang, well done on getting some of the software done! I think this is a great addition.