Ask HN: Do you think many posts don't get the front page attention they deserve?

I never use the front page because I have little interest in what the collective finds interesting. I only ever check the newest page and I have showdead set to true so I can see things as they come in, and I think that's a far more interesting way of consuming HN, if you can tolerate the occasional spam imploring you to buy earthmoving equipment.

Perhaps people tend to assume that the size of the front page reflects the volume of posts that deserve attention.

Maybe front page size should be configurable; someone could make a browser extension for that.

For example, a layer over the basic front page might offer stories thought to be of greater interest to each individual user - essentially, a recommendation algorithm. Maybe submission/commenting patterns (which are basically available [0] via the API) could be harnessed towards this - taking the hypothesis that users interact with stories which most interest them, and there are patterns of similar interest between people?

Or maybe there are other opportunities; for example, if story voting was made available per user via the API, this would add an additional stream that roughly signals "this interests me". (Although of course this miight consequently cause other problems...)

[0] https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/jl.json?print=pre...

I'll guess that you're trying to stay on some sort of "I want to read all the interesting stuff...that makes the cut at HN" (and maybe a few other sites) diet. Vs. read everything interesting on the internet, which is hopeless. HN's size still makes that a pretty large intake.

> "Have we reached a ...point where...content relevant to your interests [emphasis mine] rarely reaches you?"

In theory, HN could try to categorize stories, so users could focus more on their own interests. How HN did that wouldn't need to resemble how "mainstream tech news" sites do it. Say, create a few categories that many stories fit into, and many folks often don't want to see. Then put some checkboxes in the user profile - "Hide these story categories on the front/second/etc. pages". Maybe add an "invert" feature, so when you're bored you can look at all the stuff normally hidden from you. With a limited number of categories, that might not imposed much server-side load. (Just cache all possible versions of the front page, and add "&categories=0x.." to the URL for each user?)

And since a few/most comments don't understand this post check out 'past" and see if it represents what you thought HN was talking about yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/front

I've tried recently to click into the Ask sections more because I think that is the place that can have more value, collective discussion and the knowledge pool that is available here is incredible, this is what I find most disappointing about a lot of other resources, such as reddit, it often just becomes trash when the potential to discuss ideas and develop concepts / learn from others is the reason any of these tools excite me to begin with.

There are so many things I wish I had people to talk to with, to help try and figure them out, not necessary just tech issues, often places like stack overflow etc is a good place for that, but more, life, personal, career etc.

HOWEVER I don't think this means they need to (or even should) appear on the home page!

In general, though, it seems like the first hour or two after the post is crucial, and if it doesn't receive enough upvotes in that window, it never will. So there's a lot of timing and "luck" involved.

Personally I use 10 points as the minimum limit, that's usually a good indicator that a post already got some traction (yet it might be still removed or flagged later) https://hnrss.org/newest?points=10

If the issue is posts that drop off the front page before they are seen, you might like using Wayne Larsen's https://hckrnews.com as an interface. It gives you a chronological list of all posts that get enough votes to break out of "new".

A few months later I got an email from the mods inviting me to submit it again, since they saw it could interest folks in here. I did it and it got hundreds of comments.

So at least there's some mechanism to "salvage" potentially interesting stories, although it's a black-box to me :)

From that point on, we continued to research this problem and are working on an improved HN frontpage website right now, which takes live data from HN and factors out the feedback loops. It should be ready to use soon. If you want to get early access or get notified, please write me an email.

Joking aside, the only way to get to the front page is either via pure luck, and lots of it, or on a bring-your-own-upvoters basis. I think it's normal with the amount of traffic, users, and submitted posts that we see here. The front page became, over time, an expression of what the "general audience" of techies like - an intersection of their interests, not a sum. It's perfectly natural given that there are only 30 articles on the front page - the competition is fierce, and you can't get there by relying solely on people interested in particular content. It reminds me of elections: while you may be able to get something by relying on your die-hard electorate, to actually win you need to appeal to just about anyone and their cat...