I generally only visit the "new" stories page if I don't find many interesting front page items. So I wonder if there is a correlation there. Amount of browsing time available vs. promotion of new items to front page.
Yeah these days it feels really random who ends up on the front page; there are just too many stories being submitted, and too few people filtering them :(
Yeah, HN needs subreddits. I really do not care about the medium tier SV people that get bought for $50m. I know they are friends with a lot of other people here, but the only time I care about an acquisition is if it it is either over $500m or from somebody from Toronto that I might know.
Also, I'm much more interested in data science nuts and bolts or technology's impact on foreign policy than I am about CSS or Go frameworks or libraries.
What HN really needs is self-organisation :) By remembering your votes and views and doing a bit of collaborative filtering the site can give you a 'filter bubble' where things you are quite likely to like float towards the top...
I too worked on this several years ago, and would like to revisit sometime. I created a browser extension to reorder the links on the front page by weighting links higher if the people that upvoted them had upvoted things you upvoted in the past.
There was a voting graph in the background. Nodes are users and edges between users are weighted by the total number of mutual upvotes they had over all stories. With this graph you could give more weight to a story to a particular user if "similar" users had upvoted it, and everyone sees a unique front page.
One of the hard parts was how to sort stories based on these new weighted links. HN never reveals how they sort, though there is some historical evidence when things were simpler. However I found if the sorting was linearly proportional to votes, and a power law in time, then it didn't matter so much what the particulars were, and you could still reorder posts in an HNy way.
If anyone wants to talk more about this I'd be happy to revisit this project! :-) Contact info is in my profile.
So this actually is counter productive. It leads to a loss of feeling that there is a shared space for everyone. It was in fact the original idea behind Reddit but they pivoted away from it. Also, I think Digg did something similar that tanked the company.
> By remembering your votes and views and doing a bit of collaborative filtering the site can give you a 'filter bubble' where things you are quite likely to like float towards the top...
The lack of such a "filter bubble" is why I actually treasure HN more than other similar news aggregation sites; it exposes me to ideas, sites, and viewpoints outside of those I'm normally interested in, whether I agree with them or not. :)
To be honest that might be the thing I like most over Reddit's model. It prevents the echo-chamber effect and I get to see articles I normally might not have seen.
Impressive research. I don't really mind the repost if the article went in fact in oblivion while we should have paid attention. A gentle reminder for everyone to sometimes visit the 'new' section and upvote the interesting part.
Maybe an AI data mining process could know what's interesting based on.... wait, no, that's a bad idea :)
While it's a very interesting analysis, it kinda reinforce the idea that it's down to luck. Sure you can make your post on the week end to increase your chances (even though I don't understand that given there is only so many room on the hot page, if every one is more likely to go on the top page then no one is).
I think it's just the matter that people going to the "news" section tend to upvote the link that are already upvoted. The only way to increase that is to artificially bump up the upvotes by asking friends from different parts of the world to upvote your article while it's in the news section (note that if you cannot give them a link to your post directly or their vote won't be taken into account).
> Sure you can make your post on the week end to increase your chances
If everyone did this, it would increase the impact of luck: there would be an increased rate at which posts would fall off the front page of /newest - diminishing the chances that someone would see the post and upvote it. Conversely, with the consequential lower post-rate during the week your posts would earn more eyeballs.
I wonder if you could analyze this data to extract moderation information (for example when mods changed, or when mod activity level changed). It would be interesting to identify data spikes, and try to understand why.
The weekday data show a high back-page rate for Tuesday, and a high frontpage rate for weekend posts (Saturday/Sunday). This suggests to me that the total volume of posts, a statistic not presented (that I noticed) might have some bearing. Specifically, many PR firms and other seakers of publicity tend to target Tuesday morning for positive items, as these beat the Monday rush (and blues), but allow for time to process during the rest of the week. And professional submitters are going to be quiet on weekends. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that HN attracts a significant amount of direct or indirect RP blitzing. My thought is that PR pieces are, in general, less likely to be voted to front page than organic content -- where PR includes low-quality blog, YouTube, marketing, and similar type content.
The time-of-day analysis suggests something similar. Traffic begins to pick up at about 0400 system time, which is US/Pacific. That would be 7am East Coast (morning breakfast/commute) and about 10am in Europe, suggesting there's traffic arriving from those locations. There's also a pretty noticeable dip in backs ratio around the noon hour, plus or minus, and a slight increase in the early afternoon. Again, PR / SEO content might take a mid-day break within the US.
As for "new" page reconfigurations, a concern I've had is that as submissions increase, the latency of any given item on the page decreases -- well under an hour at peak times. Odds of even a good item collecting upvotes is small.
An alternative presentation might be to randomly shard submissions such that each is present on the page for at least some period of time, for some fraction of HN users. A hash of UID (or some other arbitrary value) and shard assignment, weighted by the predicted voting on the item, would present each unvoted and low-voted submission to a small set of users, but over a longer period of time, while increased positive votes would expand the exposure category. The idea being that each piece has a more realistic opportunity for exposure. Flags would remove from scores.
HN does a good job of (usually) promoting quality and interesting content. It does have a high false-negative rate, in not promoting good content, which is a problem. On the other hand, there are very real limits to how much content a pereson can handle in a day, and simply opening the firehose wider isn't a viable solution.
Based on counts of daily emails from Stephen Wolfram and Walt Mossberg, and The New York Times moderation desk volumes, I'm seeing ~150 - 300 emails, or <800 comment moderations, per day, as something of a pertty consistent upper bound to meaningful content interaction, and that 800 is a pretty low value of "meaningful" at about 36 seconds per item. HN's front page with 30 solid articles is a pretty reasonable target for deeper material.
One suggestion: For each important conclusion try to have at least one sentence that is understandable by a business exec.
For example at first glance it looks like time of day may be significant, then you conclude:
"Because the p-value is greater than the alpha value, we fail to reject the null hypothesis that the two nominal categories are independent."
By adding after this something like "Therefore submitting articles at a certain time of day is not an effective strategy to achieve front page visibility.", your post gains accessibility.
This is not a nitpick. The idea is to make sure the full power of your analysis is felt across a broad section of readers. Even if you send to tech people, these things often find their way to a wider audience.
Absolutely agree. I think the most important part of being a data scientist is being able to communicate your conclusions (and their limitations!) to your audience. IMO, this is even more important than the actual analysis
Please don't use this language. Your suggested quote implies the null hypothesis has been confirmed. In fact, the null hypothesis has simply not been rejected. A better summary would be: "We did not find any proof that submitting articles at a certain time of day is an effective strategy to achieve front page visibility."
It's so easy to make mistakes when talking about this, with double and triple negatives that don't necessarily cancel out. I made one myself in the above comment before editing it.
To that point, I read the full article and still don't fully understand the difference between fronts and backs. I have an idea of what it means after re-reading the description several times, but terms so central to the article should be made crystal-clear.
Side discussion, does anyone know what type of code highlighting library they are using for this? Looks like server side processing, and then outputs the html/css.
This is a case where the sample size used may be problematic. "425 fronts against 570 corresponding backs" (n = 995), in the grand scheme of Hacker News, is not a lot, even if statistical analysis permits it (example: the by-hour Chi-Sq test, which barely hits the 5-per-cell assumption). Given the method of collection by scraping the front page directly, this is understandable, though.
However, that presents a problem. the front-page algorithm has changed in recent months and I myself have had difficulty predicting what makes the front page and what doesn't (and what ends up making the front page hours after being submitted for no reason). With relatively new features like the second-chance pool and explicit dupe marking, there is new quality control of the front page thanks to dang/sctb. That is another issue of looking at a small subset of HN data; it does not reflect the site as a whole, although looking at more-recent data might be more beneficial for optimizing one's own posts.
> (and what ends up making the front page hours after being submitted for no reason).
Some post are "resubmitted" by the mods using some kind of manual curation. They appear a few hours later. I sometimes notice this with a comment in an obscure submission with 2 or 3 points that falls from the newest page, but a few hours later the submission gets to the front page and then the comment can get a few upvotes.
I think it would be nice to add the time delay upon the first upvote as a feature in the analysis. Whenever checking the "new" page, I tend to look at the items which already had an upvote.
I like the analysis, but I wonder if the criteria is week enough to detect the dupes from medium.com , because medium adds some tracking crap to the URL that confuses the dupe detector of HN. For example see: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=I%20Peeked%20into%20My%20Node_... (this list doesn't include many dupes that were detected and marked).
A problem with this analysis is that it doesn't count the dupes that never had a sibling that get to the front page. Counting it would modify the distribution of some domains and submitters.
The first number might be a document version, the second is most certainly a tracking number. Load that first link in a few successive tabs and see how you get a different one each time.
Why is that "posts" button moving so much? I can't focus on the text at all. I had to inspect the page and remove the animation in order to be able to focus.
I wrote it for myself. Anytime before posting to HN, I use it to decide if the activity on the site is high enough. Right now the graph says, current time has the highest activity spike in the past 24 hours.
It's far from done. I'm yet to plot answers to few more common questions, backed by realtime data. Like say,
+ Which weekday had the highest activity, last week?
+ Which weekday usually has high activity?
+ What time slot last week had the highest activity spike?
the plot of differences would benefit from showing negative values - so that fronts > backs is positive (like sat, sun) and backs > fronts is negative (like tuesday).
The way it's currently shon (magnitude or abs value) requires a lot of cognitive load to parse that could be intuitive.
46 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadBack when I was blogging I crunched the HN stats and tried to draw conclusions: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18839832580/reddi...
Also, I'm much more interested in data science nuts and bolts or technology's impact on foreign policy than I am about CSS or Go frameworks or libraries.
I prototyped and wrote a blog post about that too: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-... ;)
There was a voting graph in the background. Nodes are users and edges between users are weighted by the total number of mutual upvotes they had over all stories. With this graph you could give more weight to a story to a particular user if "similar" users had upvoted it, and everyone sees a unique front page.
One of the hard parts was how to sort stories based on these new weighted links. HN never reveals how they sort, though there is some historical evidence when things were simpler. However I found if the sorting was linearly proportional to votes, and a power law in time, then it didn't matter so much what the particulars were, and you could still reorder posts in an HNy way.
If anyone wants to talk more about this I'd be happy to revisit this project! :-) Contact info is in my profile.
The lack of such a "filter bubble" is why I actually treasure HN more than other similar news aggregation sites; it exposes me to ideas, sites, and viewpoints outside of those I'm normally interested in, whether I agree with them or not. :)
(My prototype split above the fold into "unfiltered unrated" stories and the filtered stories, so everyone was always exposed to some irrelevancies.)
Maybe an AI data mining process could know what's interesting based on.... wait, no, that's a bad idea :)
If everyone did this, it would increase the impact of luck: there would be an increased rate at which posts would fall off the front page of /newest - diminishing the chances that someone would see the post and upvote it. Conversely, with the consequential lower post-rate during the week your posts would earn more eyeballs.
The weekday data show a high back-page rate for Tuesday, and a high frontpage rate for weekend posts (Saturday/Sunday). This suggests to me that the total volume of posts, a statistic not presented (that I noticed) might have some bearing. Specifically, many PR firms and other seakers of publicity tend to target Tuesday morning for positive items, as these beat the Monday rush (and blues), but allow for time to process during the rest of the week. And professional submitters are going to be quiet on weekends. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that HN attracts a significant amount of direct or indirect RP blitzing. My thought is that PR pieces are, in general, less likely to be voted to front page than organic content -- where PR includes low-quality blog, YouTube, marketing, and similar type content.
The time-of-day analysis suggests something similar. Traffic begins to pick up at about 0400 system time, which is US/Pacific. That would be 7am East Coast (morning breakfast/commute) and about 10am in Europe, suggesting there's traffic arriving from those locations. There's also a pretty noticeable dip in backs ratio around the noon hour, plus or minus, and a slight increase in the early afternoon. Again, PR / SEO content might take a mid-day break within the US.
As for "new" page reconfigurations, a concern I've had is that as submissions increase, the latency of any given item on the page decreases -- well under an hour at peak times. Odds of even a good item collecting upvotes is small.
An alternative presentation might be to randomly shard submissions such that each is present on the page for at least some period of time, for some fraction of HN users. A hash of UID (or some other arbitrary value) and shard assignment, weighted by the predicted voting on the item, would present each unvoted and low-voted submission to a small set of users, but over a longer period of time, while increased positive votes would expand the exposure category. The idea being that each piece has a more realistic opportunity for exposure. Flags would remove from scores.
HN does a good job of (usually) promoting quality and interesting content. It does have a high false-negative rate, in not promoting good content, which is a problem. On the other hand, there are very real limits to how much content a pereson can handle in a day, and simply opening the firehose wider isn't a viable solution.
Based on counts of daily emails from Stephen Wolfram and Walt Mossberg, and The New York Times moderation desk volumes, I'm seeing ~150 - 300 emails, or <800 comment moderations, per day, as something of a pertty consistent upper bound to meaningful content interaction, and that 800 is a pretty low value of "meaningful" at about 36 seconds per item. HN's front page with 30 solid articles is a pretty reasonable target for deeper material.
One suggestion: For each important conclusion try to have at least one sentence that is understandable by a business exec.
For example at first glance it looks like time of day may be significant, then you conclude:
"Because the p-value is greater than the alpha value, we fail to reject the null hypothesis that the two nominal categories are independent."
By adding after this something like "Therefore submitting articles at a certain time of day is not an effective strategy to achieve front page visibility.", your post gains accessibility.
This is not a nitpick. The idea is to make sure the full power of your analysis is felt across a broad section of readers. Even if you send to tech people, these things often find their way to a wider audience.
Looks like it might be called pandoc
http://pandoc.org/demo/example18g.html
This is a case where the sample size used may be problematic. "425 fronts against 570 corresponding backs" (n = 995), in the grand scheme of Hacker News, is not a lot, even if statistical analysis permits it (example: the by-hour Chi-Sq test, which barely hits the 5-per-cell assumption). Given the method of collection by scraping the front page directly, this is understandable, though.
However, that presents a problem. the front-page algorithm has changed in recent months and I myself have had difficulty predicting what makes the front page and what doesn't (and what ends up making the front page hours after being submitted for no reason). With relatively new features like the second-chance pool and explicit dupe marking, there is new quality control of the front page thanks to dang/sctb. That is another issue of looking at a small subset of HN data; it does not reflect the site as a whole, although looking at more-recent data might be more beneficial for optimizing one's own posts.
HN has always had moderators who make decisions about content. That's what makes this site good.
Some post are "resubmitted" by the mods using some kind of manual curation. They appear a few hours later. I sometimes notice this with a comment in an obscure submission with 2 or 3 points that falls from the newest page, but a few hours later the submission gets to the front page and then the comment can get a few upvotes.
I think the most clear description of this by dang is in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926
A problem with this analysis is that it doesn't count the dupes that never had a sibling that get to the front page. Counting it would modify the distribution of some domains and submitters.
(im sure from now on we will see a pike on Tue 6 and 11 on posts)
If everyone reads this article and then follows its recommendations, wouldn't HN posting strategy change?
jQuery('.shaker').removeClass('shaker');
http://hnlive.tk/static/index.html is a "live" HN activity meter.
I wrote it for myself. Anytime before posting to HN, I use it to decide if the activity on the site is high enough. Right now the graph says, current time has the highest activity spike in the past 24 hours.
It's far from done. I'm yet to plot answers to few more common questions, backed by realtime data. Like say,
+ Which weekday had the highest activity, last week?
+ Which weekday usually has high activity?
+ What time slot last week had the highest activity spike?
The way it's currently shon (magnitude or abs value) requires a lot of cognitive load to parse that could be intuitive.