Comment by morsch
4 years ago
Many of those stories seem familiar, because they ended up getting lots of votes on their second run. I guess the team of reviewers have good taste!
How much of "page one", ie. the top ranked stories, is made up of stories from those two pools?
It looks like 9 of 30 at the moment, but we don't track that number. Someone else could now.
I feel good when a re-upped post or an invited repost makes #1, like Yayagram did yesterday, and Internal Combustion Engine has now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26991300), because that's such a strong indicator of the community finding a story interesting.
Yayagram was submitted nearly a dozen times before it got attention, but when it did get attention it was extremely well received.
Is it just that the ratio of submitted stories to people browsing new is too high, causing a low chance of any particular story to be looked at? If I had novel ideas on improving this I'd write it out, but I think others have already suggested things like randomly mixing new stories into the hot pages.
We tried randomly mixing in new stories onto the front page - it was a disaster. The median new submission is pretty crappy, and readers reacted with "how the #@!? did this make the front page", as if we had placed a turd in their breakfast cereal. "We were just trying to test if you would like it" turns out not to be a very popular answer. I've written about this several times in the past, but the only one I can find right now is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
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Wow. To me that shows how much luck there is in hitting the front page of HN, even if what you're posting is interesting.