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Suggestion: Improve Hacker News algorithm to serve Europe better

15 points by nichochar ↗ HN
I have a relatively simple suggestion which I think could make hacker news better for some of us on the other side of the pond:

The problem: During the awake hours of Europe, since there is less traffic, it is harder for an article (even though it's buzzing, relatively to the traffic) to move around the front page. This is a shame in my opinion

My suggestion: Why not either change the rules depending if we're simply on pacific time or 9 hours appart. But then that's just custom for Europe. How about inducing an hourly traffic variable in there?

6 comments

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Peroni
>During the awake hours of Europe, since there is less traffic, it is harder for an article (even though it's buzzing, relatively to the traffic) to move around the front page.

My experience has been the polar opposite. I've had a number of posts sit on the front page for hours. One of my most recent posts drove massive traffic to our blog and sat on the front page for over 8 hours.

Velox
If we want Europe to be served better, then disallowing articles behind paywalls would be the best option to make me happy. Most non-americans won't have a membership to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. That would make me much happier than an algorithm change. But the powers that be have stated that this just won't happen.
anthony_franco
Most Americans also don't have subscriptions to those sites. It's been stated many times that the way around paywalls is to search the article on Google and click straight from the results. That's how I get around the restrictions.
Atroxide
I don't know a single person that has a subscription to either of those two services...
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