HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why are submissions staying on the front page for longer?

66 points by aaronarduino ↗ HN
I've noticed over the last few months that things submitted to HN that reach the front page have been staying there for a day or two. It seems (maybe it is just my perception) that a year ago a submission would only stay on the front page for a few hours and at max a day. Am I imagining things? If I'm not imagining it, what is causing things to stay on the front page? An influx of users, maybe?

44 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 74.1 ms ] thread
lifeisstillgood
I have noticed something similar - I just put it down to a "slow news day". Frankly it means I am getting some work done :-)
Macie44
I am so sorry. I am totally new HN platform.I can not submit posts HN. Please Help me.
[dead] whatsstolat
You probably need some upvotes first. Be patient
pvg
You can just mail the mods and ask instead of asking a zillion people who almost certainly can't possibly know.
sxates
If something changed, it's nice for everyone else to be made aware as well. I had noticed the same thing.
pvg
Not really. It's pointless meta, imagine if every change, real or imagined, clogged up the site. And there's a good chance mods who can answer it won't even see it, they can't see everything but they read all their email.

This got sensibly flagged off. If you want to know, ask the mods. If something super-interesting has changed, you can always write a thing about it and post it and see how it fares.

tropshop
Meanwhile, "Demand for Ruby on Rails is Still Huge" is about the hit the 3rd page with 157 comments and only 3 hours old...

I guess anything Ruby is old news on HN

Deimorz
That post has more comments than votes, which seems to be a factor that HN's ranking system uses to push posts off the front page faster. I think that's a terrible decision that punishes posts that generate a lot of discussion, but it seems to be how it works.
foepys
That's being done to remove posts where flame wars are ongoing.
yorwba
Discussion without corresponding upvotes usually indicates that people didn't like the original article that much and are mostly commenting to complain or rebut.
NikolaNovak
But... doesn't more votes with few comments just mean people like or agree with the idea/title, but might not even have read it and it doesn't generate meaningful discussion? :-/

I find that trivially true statement, or those that seeming to appeal to our values / beliefs, get a lot of upvotes without people even following the link, let alone contributing thoughtful comments. Whereas I come to HN to read insightful comments almost more than underlying articles - I find it fascinating when an Apollo engineer or a ML researcher or a physicist etc contribute their perspective on a topic :)

Deimorz
Not necessarily. Any individual user can only upvote once, but can leave many comments. So if any sort of conversation happens where the same users are posting multiple comments, that effectively ends up penalizing the overall post.

I understand the idea behind it, but I don't think it works very well in practice. It works sometimes, but I've also seen it kill plenty of posts that were totally fine.

ams6110
It's funny. I'll almost never vote on the topic itself, even if I comment and vote on other comments. I guess I should try to remember to upvote posts that I like.
minimaxir
On the other hand, it's a heuristic that does catch threads that become trainwrecks (recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17351353)

Anecdotally, it has been a safe heuristic. (IIRC it also incorporates comment depth, and the Ruby thread has a lot of deep comments)

dang
We get notified every time a post gets that penalty, and we review them all and restore most of the better ones. I'm not sure the Rails thread is one, but will take another look.

Edit: the article seems borderline for HN but the discussion is quite good, so we'll turn the penalty off. It's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17355187.

txcwpalpha
Wasn't that exact article already on HN's front page a few days ago when the article was first posted, or was I dreaming? I just assumed that the HN algorithm pushed down reposts.
usermac
If this is here tomorrow, your summation is verified.
brad0
Honestly I prefer this system.

There’s definitely some pseudo curation happening, which I like.

Some interesting things I’ve picked up:

- If a submission is interesting but doesn’t get picked up for whatever reason (posted at the wrong time or there was other big news at the time) mods will get in contact with you and ask you to repost.

- More comments than votes seems to sink the article quickly. It’s generally a controversial topic which isn’t engaging and inspiring in the right way.

- there are a number of mod specific flags other than the above that affect the position of articles. From what I remember reading there’s 6 such flags. Would love to know what they are

I’m guessing the algorithm is a sort based on time * points then modifying it based on hidden flags

cityhomesteader
Seems like the antithesis of what a "hacker" news site should be. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
mlthoughts2018
Maybe a new tab of results would be useful, like “discussed” or something.

I usually find the posts that generate more comments than votes to be the most valuable and interesting.

cityhomesteader
I've noticed that as well. Just a guess, but certain news organizations are given "special treatment" lately.

Almost everyday, I see a post from select news sources with 1 or 2 upvotes and no comments very high on the frontpage.

Also, is it just me or has hacker news slowly shifted from being about technology to more politics?

And a final observation, what's with the neverending submissions about facebook?

creep
>facebook

The nature of tech communities is that we tend to value privacy, so I think perhaps the Facebook issue is pushed here vigorously by zealot-types to try and "win the team" or by agents who have vested interest in seeing Facebook destroyed. It's a bandwagon thing mostly though.

aaronarduino
I agree HN has been becoming more about politics and non-tech focused submissions. I'm wondering if this change in content is due to the community or HN's ranking algorithm. Either way, I'm starting to look for a more tech-focused community.
at-fates-hands
>> Almost everyday, I see a post from select news sources with 1 or 2 upvotes and no comments very high on the frontpage.

I've noticed this a lot lately as well. I always think, "I wonder how this got to the front page with zero comments, but a ton of upvotes."

Any of those posts seem suspicious to me since the MO for HN seems to be if it's good, it should generate some discussion on its way to the front page. Unless they're trying to circumvent the algorithm that pushes stories with more comments than upvotes?

>> Also, is it just me or has hacker news slowly shifted from being about technology to more politics?

Yes.

I'm seeing more and more political stuff, which is NOT the reason I come here. If I want a political flame war, I can go over to Reddit. TBH, I don't come as often anymore because it seems everything gets turned into something political.

yorwba
> if it's good, it should generate some discussion on its way to the front page.

That is not how HN works. Posts start on the "new" page, once they get three upvotes they show up on the front page, then they get more attention and, if there are enough upvotes to make the submission stay, a discussion develops.

If you don't like the topics that show up on HN, try submitting more interesting stories and occasionally check the "new" page to upvote other submissions.

megaman22
There's a few very common news outlets that are always on the front page with not-very-interesting stories that I've resorted to just flagging and hiding automatically. Especially when you realize they trot out the same story or opinion piece every three weeks, it gets really tiresome. If I don't do this, sometimes more than a third of the front page is garbage pieces from these half dozen or so outlets.
dang
> Also, is it just me or has hacker news slowly shifted from being about technology to more politics?

People have been saying this for about as long as HN has existed, but it isn't true. HN is a mix, it's always been a mix, and the proportion of politics in the mix has gone down somewhat. Why do people perceive the opposite? Because of the cognitive bias where whatever you dislike stands out more. The users who wish HN would have more politics believe that the trend is just the opposite way (a la 'political stories are being increasingly suppressed' and so on).

For anyone who wants details, I wrote a detailed post about this a few weeks ago with tons of examples, so I could link back to it when this issue inevitably comes up again. It's here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

p.s. There's no special favorable treatment of any publication on HN. We do penalize sites that have been the source of too many off topic or lightweight submissions in the past.

aaronarduino
Has that proportion of politics gone down on the front page or just over all of HN?
dang
I'm talking about the front page because, for better or worse, it's approximately all that anyone looks at.
wrp
Although the political/technical balance may have stayed the same, I expect that the recent trend to keep old posts on the front page longer would heighten any perception of bias.

I for one have been finding coming to HN much less rewarding lately. I have to search more pages to find interesting posts.

dang
It would be helpful if you'd include the newest page in your search routine and vote for interesting things.
mmt
Just the one (first) page of newest articles? Is that enough?
dang
The more the better!
[dead] charlyjaja
this motherfuckers selling out
minimaxir
Relatedly, submissions have been making the front page with only a few points (3-4), and from what I can tell, it's at random (I've seen a lot of bad posts fit this criteria, then quickly fall off once they are flagged). It's a bit of an unstable equilibrium and I'm not fond of it.

Placement on the front page is a very finite resource.

dang
Submissions have always made the front page with three votes, depending on how new they are vs. how stale the front page is. That hasn't changed in years.

There's also the second-chance pool that we put stories into, which get randomly placed on the front page (this is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there), and the repost invites we occasionally send out when we notice a great post that's more than a few days old.

minimaxir
That's true, although I've noticed it occur much more recently (admittingly that's a selection bias)
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curtis
Algolia's "Last 24h" view is often a nice alternative to the HN front page. It's more stable and it's also a good way to find articles/discussions that drew a lot of attention and then got flagged.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page... (it's not working at the moment for some reason)

The "Past Week" view is still working: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...

captain_perl
Because the YC alumni moved to their internal social network, BookFace.

HN is for rubes now.