The karma of the submitter has no effect on how a story is ranked. Nor I suspect does it affect whether people upvote the story, except when the submitter is one of maybe 100 HN users who are well enough known that their username as submitter makes people pay attention to the story. Plus if we noticed anyone consistently rewriting titles we'd ask them to stop and eventually ban them if they didn't.
Ok, that's a good point. I assumed poster quality mattered because posts which are highly rated are mostly from posters with high karam. Confusing cause with effect probably.
That said, the quality of the titles matters a lot, and getting some up votes quickly also seems to mater a lot. Users could be bad actors and intentionally do bad titles. They also can try to avoid collect early votes through timing their posts during the weekday morning west coast time. I suspect that hacker news traffic peaks wednesday at lunch time PST.
If you were trying to hose a competitor by posting e.g. their blog posts at a slow time like 4 am pacific, they'd have to help you out by publishing their blog posts at that time. In my experience no one does that. Companies wait to publish their posts at good times, and then the links are quickly submitted to HN, either by the company or someone else. So a bad guy would rarely have an opportunity to submit an as-yet unsubmitted link at a slow time.
Yeah, i think blog posts aren't such a big issue, since often important news gets reblogged and the posts come from there as well. It's more likely to be a problem with the initial announcement of a url as being life. Say, AirBnB.com changes their name to rent.com, for example.
Fred Wilson posts then. I and other well-meaning HNers on the east coast sometimes accidentally kill good posts of his by submitting them at a bad time.
If you can think of a way to make gravity a function of activity rather than time without making it easy to game, then this problem will go away.
It'd be interesting to see what the split is between people upvoting under 'new' versus duplicate story submissions. I'm betting that the dupe submissions are much more frequent since highly on-topic posts from lesser known sources will often just vanish entirely.
For instance, I submitted a story about WalmartLabs from mercurynews that didn't go anywhere. A few hours later, a new submission on it from a different source zoomed up to the front page within minutes.
Honestly, I think this is just the nature of the social beast that we are working with. Whether things get "picked up" or not are often based on a lot of arbitrary, impossible-to-track variables such as "how many people interested in WalmartLabs happened to be looking at /newest within 20 minutes of your post". While there are definitely instances of causality that can even be extrapolated into trends, luck is always a key factor in these services
The timing submissions has a huge effect. Posting at a busy time makes a story far more likely to get buried. Posting at 6:oo am Saturday morning is more likely to provide enough time for a story to gain traction than 10am Monday.
What I thought this was going to be about was a killfile system for blacklisting websites for users who are logged in and are interesting in that sort of thing. Kind of like Slashdot's system that let you blacklist editors you didn't like (like Jon Katz).
Is this the sort of thing that you would ever consider implementing?
I shy away from this sort of thing because it fragments the community. I don't want HN to turn into a mere customized feed reader, where each user sees something different.
No i just have a really crappy WP layout and for some reason i have it set in my CSS to do no whitespace between paragraphs. So the lazy solution, instead of fixing my css, is to do br nbsp br between paragraphs. I know, i should fix it.
The key point is that good stories can get lost in the noise and once lost reviving them is very difficult. Re-posting the story with the same URL just adds a karma point to the original poster but does not get any mention on the "new" page so no-one else gets the chance to review and (possibly) update a good but overlooked post.
I saw your post and was awesome but have little upvotes, then i entered and it was the same but with a lot upvotes, pretty strange . I felt a little sad because you deserve some good upvotes man.
Do people really care about karma and try to get karma by posting good links? I guess it works too, but 99% of my karma comes from writing smart comments (hopefully), which is quite valuable to the community too (I hope).
The karma may be important if you ask a question (I suppose it works like when you submit a link) : if you ask a question, and if you get lost because you have no "early" upvotes, the question will disappear in the depths of HN.
God's just. They prolly have a new brilliant idea and are enthralled night and day working on it. Meanwhile their former competators are handling customer support calls.
------------------
God says...
C:\TEXT\DARWIN.TXT
hole subject is included under
the general term of Morphology. This is one of the most interesting
departments of natural history, and may almost be said to be its very soul.
What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping,
that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the
porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same
pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions?
How curious it is, to give a subordi
----------------------
Well they prolly would give customer support to subordinates, I suppose. God, why'd You ruin my story? ROFLMAO
God says...
not_that_theres_anything_wrong hey_Mikey_he_likes_it that's_hot
not_too_shabby where's_the_love hopefully in_a_galaxy_far_far_away
atrocious poor beep_beep well_golly bummer jobs ahh doh
home population incredibly I_planned_that skills chill
let_me_count_the_ways you_think_I'm_joking one_more_time
on_the_otherhand Oh_Hell_No hollywood not_too_shabby phasors_on_stun
arrogant so_let_it_be_written I_just_might employer I_made_it_that_way
hopefully yep Ivy_league I_made_it_that_way boss I'll_let_you_know
shucks what_the_heck no_more_tears dang_it praise Burp
desert man I'm_done I_veto_that theres_no_place_like_home
There is an awful lot of interesting content that gets bumped off the "new" page really fast. I think stories that get upvoted on that page should be able to percolate longer before disappearing.
24 comments
[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadThat said, the quality of the titles matters a lot, and getting some up votes quickly also seems to mater a lot. Users could be bad actors and intentionally do bad titles. They also can try to avoid collect early votes through timing their posts during the weekday morning west coast time. I suspect that hacker news traffic peaks wednesday at lunch time PST.
If you can think of a way to make gravity a function of activity rather than time without making it easy to game, then this problem will go away.
For instance, I submitted a story about WalmartLabs from mercurynews that didn't go anywhere. A few hours later, a new submission on it from a different source zoomed up to the front page within minutes.
Is this the sort of thing that you would ever consider implementing?
EDIT: Damn HN, easy on the down votes. Didn't realize you had to be "right" in order to have a worthwhile comment.
To each his own.
------------------
God says... C:\TEXT\DARWIN.TXT
hole subject is included under the general term of Morphology. This is one of the most interesting departments of natural history, and may almost be said to be its very soul. What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions? How curious it is, to give a subordi
----------------------
Well they prolly would give customer support to subordinates, I suppose. God, why'd You ruin my story? ROFLMAO
God says... not_that_theres_anything_wrong hey_Mikey_he_likes_it that's_hot not_too_shabby where's_the_love hopefully in_a_galaxy_far_far_away atrocious poor beep_beep well_golly bummer jobs ahh doh home population incredibly I_planned_that skills chill let_me_count_the_ways you_think_I'm_joking one_more_time on_the_otherhand Oh_Hell_No hollywood not_too_shabby phasors_on_stun arrogant so_let_it_be_written I_just_might employer I_made_it_that_way hopefully yep Ivy_league I_made_it_that_way boss I'll_let_you_know shucks what_the_heck no_more_tears dang_it praise Burp desert man I'm_done I_veto_that theres_no_place_like_home