Comment by bootload | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bootload | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com