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Comment by AlexMuir | Hacker News Reader

(I have the 2nd story HN as I write this.)

I've had front page stories on HN maybe five or six times over the last couple of years. I don't feel anything has changed over that time. If you look at my submission history, you'll see about 90% of what I submit gets no votes. I once tried submitting a story a couple of times when I felt that it was getting less traction than expected - it made no difference.

I'm actually surprised at how well HN surfaces decent content (I'm quite happy to accept that my stuff which got no upvotes just wasn't of interest.) Whenever I put something up it gets about twenty eyeballs off the 'New' page so real people are looking at it.

I can say for sure that I don't have any friends with HN accounts (much to my disappointment!) and I've never tried to game it.

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"I don't feel anything has changed over that time."

Approaching 3000 days on HN. The things I notice most:

* increase in users has increased the churn rate of new submissions.

* the new page is dead because of the submission rate. good stories disappear off the stack quickly.

* the up-click is not a good indicator of story quality. I now see stories with up to 80 votes sans one comment. I used to read the comments BEFORE the post. This has now changed because of limited comments.

* the rate of high vote submission decay, means some good stories are lost as the HN crowd chew over some interesting post(s).

* also interesting to see users comment/post ratio. A lot of ppl have limited or no posts yet they comment. If you look at my post profile, in the last 60 days I've posted 100 posts. Approx 1:25 hit > 100. It would be interesting to see how this has changed over time. cf: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bootload&next=9025...

The biggest problem is the dilution of good posts/actual posts. Slow the rate of posts and might influence the quality of posts.

Excellent point. One (or two?) submissions per day for each user would be a reasonable restriction. Good stories will find their way here via someone else if my submission limit has already been reached..

Good points.

On the comments:upvotes ratio - I think there's two types of submission.

Blog or newsy stuff invites discussion and comments. But other things, like Show HNs, for instance, might be upvoted for being useful but without anyone commenting much. Both are fine.

Highly technical articles often get a lot of upvotes with few comments as well. I often find these good, so I usually do click if a post has a lot of upvotes, 0-3 comments, and seems to be on a technical subject.

"Highly technical articles often get a lot of upvotes with few comments as well."

I often wonder about this. Is it a sign, nobody reading it knows anything about it (noobs)? or is it a sign it's so specific there are few people who understand it. Either way you'd expect some questions and comments.

There are a few people who make very many submissions. Some people submit more than 2 stories per day, every day. And those are often duplicates-but-different source of other articles already on HN.

Better enforcement of the deeply interesting guideline would help but stories that are intensely interesting get many upvotes so it's unlikely to change.

If there was a submission quota, either time-based or karma-based, the "new" page would clear up rapidly, especially if obvious spam was not displayed as well (though that may be a result of my "show dead" setting).

Perhaps it would work to have users earn posting tokens by upvoting new stories. Need to find a balance of upvotes to token for a good flow. Would foster attention to the new articles and reduce the rate of new submissions.

I've had your experience, but I've also had the experience of content which has been posted multiple times suddenly skyrocketing to the frontpage. I wouldn't be so quick to think that the fickleness you experience is your content's fault.

In my experience so few people visit the /newest page, and so few in general vote, that there is a disturbing amount of chance involved.

I can attest to the chance factor - some times I reposted a story that wasn't picked up, and the second time it got picked up.

That was long enough ago though, don't know how much has changed since - and I submit stories very rarely.

I can report roughly the same thing.

However, I'm sometime quite disappointed that what I submit does not get traction because I really think it is interesting to the HN community and the discussion here would be even more interesting. I guess the time of posting and luck plays a big part in what is upvoted.

I sometimes link my newly created posts to friends or IRC (some of them have HN accounts and may upvote) but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

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