Comment by erjiang
4 years ago
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...).
One thing that could be nice is giving established users an occasional nudge to have a look at /new (and a quick explanation of why it's important people do go there). Like, maybe if they haven't been to /new in a week, show a little banner suggesting they give it a go. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could even try to throttle the nudges according to the amount of posts being submitted at the time, so you drive more eyeballs to new when there's more stuff to be reviewed.
I know it took a long time for me to start looking at new, a little nudge would have made me start much earlier.
This is a great idea, dang. I know I could use a nudge, as well.
You are doing god's work, my dude. Great insight about community dynamics, too
> We tried randomly mixing in new stories onto the front page
When you mixed new stories onto the front page, were they clearly marked as new or could they easily be mistaken for upvoted content?
Maybe this could be a karma gated opt-in feature that individual users can enable?
I think they were marked as new, but I don't quite remember.
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.