[HN Gopher] Show HN: Second-Chance Pool
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Show HN: Second-Chance Pool
Author : dang
Score : 187 points
Date : 2021-04-30 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.ycombinator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.ycombinator.com)
| polote wrote:
| Funnily at https://hnblogs.substack.com we very often have a
| subset of second pool chance posts, as personal blog posts are
| usually good candidates for it
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > Moderators and a small number of reviewers [...]
|
| Are you using the plural "moderators" just to be abstract in case
| this changes again or does HN currently have another mod?
|
| Just curious, as for the most part I only read about you
| dang wrote:
| There are others, but with Scott having left, I'm currently the
| only public one.
| morsch wrote:
| Many of those stories seem familiar, because they ended up
| getting lots of votes on their second run. I guess the team of
| reviewers have good taste!
|
| How much of "page one", ie. the top ranked stories, is made up of
| stories from those two pools?
| dang wrote:
| It looks like 9 of 30 at the moment, but we don't track that
| number. Someone else could now.
|
| I feel good when a re-upped post or an invited repost makes #1,
| like Yayagram did yesterday, and Internal Combustion Engine has
| now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26991300), because
| that's such a strong indicator of the community finding a story
| interesting.
| erjiang wrote:
| Yayagram was submitted nearly a dozen times before it got
| attention, but when it did get attention it was extremely
| well received.
|
| Is it just that the ratio of submitted stories to people
| browsing new is too high, causing a low chance of any
| particular story to be looked at? If I had novel ideas on
| improving this I'd write it out, but I think others have
| already suggested things like randomly mixing new stories
| into the hot pages.
| dang wrote:
| We tried randomly mixing in new stories onto the front page
| - it was a disaster. The median new submission is pretty
| crappy, and readers reacted consistently with "how the #@!?
| did this make the front page", as if we had placed a turd
| in their breakfast cereal. "We were just trying to test if
| you would like it" turns out not to be a very popular
| answer. I've written about this several times in the past,
| but the only one I can find right now is
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868928.
|
| IIRC, the second-chance pool was our next experiment after
| that one. It has worked much better. The difference is
| human judgment or, if you will, taste.
|
| It's not easy to come up with new mechanisms that might
| help with this problem. Every software mechanism we've
| tried allows many things through that don't pass muster.
| Community mechanisms, as soon as you open them up, get
| overwhelmed by people trying to game the system to
| privilege their own stuff. There's a feedback loop with
| that: the more interesting HN is, the more attractive it is
| to a high-quality audience, and therefore the more
| attractive a target it becomes for manipulation, which
| makes the site less interesting again. So there's a cap on
| how good it can ever get.
| pineconewarrior wrote:
| You are doing god's work, my dude. Great insight about
| community dynamics, too
| dang wrote:
| HN's second-chance pool is a way to give links a second chance at
| the front page. Moderators and a small number of reviewers go
| through old submissions looking for articles that are in the
| spirit of the site--gratifying intellectual curiosity--and which
| seem like they might interest the community. These get put into a
| hopper from which software randomly picks one every so often and
| lobs it randomly onto the lower part of the front page. If it
| interests the community, it gets upvoted and discussed; if not,
| it falls off.
|
| We started doing this in late 2014. There's an old explanation at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380, with links back to
| older ones. We've talked about it in comments and whatnot
| (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...,
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...),
| and have intended to publish the list, but only did so recently.
| We're slow.
|
| If you see a submission that didn't get attention and which you
| think is particularly good for HN, please tell us at
| hn@ycombinator.com! We love getting those requests and usually
| add them to the pool. It's fine if it's your own article, but we
| like it best when it's just something you ran across and
| recognized as good. That's more the kind of interest that HN is
| for.
|
| A related list is https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are
| old submissions that we ran across and thought deserved more
| attention, so we emailed and asked the submitter to repost it.
| Yesterday's top story was one of these
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26982286). They all go into
| the second-chance pool, but maybe it's interesting to see them
| broken out as a subset too. (If you don't have an email address
| in your profile, please put one in so we can send you repost
| invites!)
|
| If you read the old explanations I linked to, you'll see that the
| original plan was to turn this system into software that anyone
| can participate in, likely as a new way to earn karma: users who
| discover second-chance links that hit the jackpot (that is, which
| interest the community) would get karma along with the original
| submitter. That is still the plan! We're just slow.
|
| I think that's about everything there is to say about the second-
| chance pool. Questions, feedback, ideas, and views are welcome as
| ever. And please, everybody keep an eye out for obscure, out-of-
| the-way stories that got overlooked and let us know when you run
| across them. It's one of the best things you can do to help make
| this place more interesting. Best of all are the kind that can't
| be predicted from any existing sequence:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
| jhayes wrote:
| How about calling it Last Chance Saloon? (Just to be colourful
| and dramatic!).
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Is there any information about how a story transitions from
| "submitted" to "pool"?
|
| I assume it's a manual decision, not strictly algorithmic.
| (Though it probably contains algorithmic elements, the final
| decision is done by a human.)
|
| If true, then the inexorable outcome of this logic is that the
| front page isn't really controlled by the community, nor would we
| want it to be.
|
| If not, then the details of the algorithm would be fascinating to
| learn about. It's not an easy problem to solve in general, and
| making a few dozen (hundred?) editorial decisions each day is
| probably more efficient, and more precise.
| dang wrote:
| This question is answered in the first paragraph of the text at
| the top (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309). Of
| course it's manual. If it weren't, we'd have software that
| could identify good stories, and I'd be off somewhere eating
| grapes. Well, not grapes; and perhaps not eating. writing code,
| more likely.
|
| HN's system consists of community, software, and moderators,
| just as it always has. Moderators are sort of a feedback module
| plugged in to try to prevent the system from ending up in any
| of its default failure modes. That, alas, requires humans.
| nthitz wrote:
| It looks like this uses a similar layout as the main frontpage.
| The left padding of the content seems off compared to the
| homepage without the rank numbers. Perhaps instead of having
| nothing in that table cell use or similar, looks a bit
| nicer imo.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Fun fact: the function to do this is called 'nbsp' in arc.
| ggm wrote:
| Add pool to the top bar?
| marcodiego wrote:
| I got a complaint! I posted this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26987061 and a few hour
| later this other one
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26990957 that was posted few
| hours later was on top. It is unfair! I could have gained a lot
| of karma!
| dang wrote:
| I hear you, but that's unrelated to the second-chance pool
| because those were both regular submissions that didn't go
| through this alternate system.
|
| When an article has been submitted more than once and we're
| putting it in the second-chance pool, we do prefer the original
| submitter where possible. Often, if there's time, I'll go
| through the submission histories of the other submitters too,
| to see if there's something else we could put in the pool for
| them.
|
| In your case, though, you just run into the fact that /newest
| is a bit of a lottery and it's unpredictable which submission
| of a story will be the one that gets traction. We do have plans
| to do something about that someday: https://hn.algolia.com/?dat
| eRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... In the meantime, the
| lottery does at least even out in the long run if you submit a
| lot of interesting stories.
| edavis wrote:
| For any RSS heads out there, /invited is available via hnrss.org:
| https://hnrss.org/invited
|
| I'll try to add /pool to hnrss.org this weekend, too, if time
| allows.
| akomtu wrote:
| I'd really like to see a personalized feed next to "new" and
| "top" feeds. Personalized in a sense that if I've upvoted Joe and
| Joe upvoted a post about foobar, I want that foobar in my feed.
| Same for downvoting. This feed should be exempt from flagging,
| unless the flag came from someone I've upvoted. The "top" feed is
| still needed for discovery of new interesting stuff.
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| This is equivalent to paying more to move one's ebay listing up
| the page, except instead of money, it's sweat equity of dashing
| off a separate email. I shall automate an email with every
| vanilla upvote I make to defeat this initiative.
| masswerk wrote:
| I don't see, how this applies as long as this is maintained by
| the mods. (Surely, they have an eye on the incoming stream
| anyway and won't promote any submissions solely based on the
| fact that there is an incoming email.)
| dang wrote:
| All the email does is get us to look at the link. After that
| it's the same as if we'd run across it on /newest or any other
| way.
|
| When I say we usually add them to the pool, that's because the
| emails are usually from high-quality users with good taste. If
| that stops being the case usually, we'll stop adding them to
| the pool usually.
|
| The entire purpose is to find more interesting things, where
| "interesting" means things that the community finds
| interesting. We use our own intellectual interest as a proxy
| for that, but only as fuel for the first stage.
| atum47 wrote:
| I felt very special the first time I got an email saying that my
| post got a second chance. Almost like that notification that your
| crush liked your photo.
| trishume wrote:
| My suggestion would be to automatically add submissions of unique
| posts to the second chance pool or have a reviewer look at them
| when they're for a domain or user with a high hit rate but fall
| off new. I'm mostly thinking about technical blogs with
| consistent article quality like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ciechanow.ski ,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=raphlinus.github.io and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=scattered-thoughts.ne...
|
| I'm biased on this though, as someone this might impact
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thume.ca). From talking
| to other technical bloggers the consensus does seem to be that
| when we put a lot of effort into a technical article it nearly
| always makes it to the top of https://lobste.rs/ and
| /r/programming because it starts on the front page there but will
| sometimes flop off new on HN and maybe only make it months later
| if someone else resubmits the post.
| flowerbeater wrote:
| Yes I agree. Like original content takes a lot of work to
| produce, and could get an extra chance by default. Whereas news
| articles, tweets, and content from large tech companies have
| their own promotional campaigns.
|
| I'd rather have eclectic ideas and projects from HN users not
| be overlooked (thus encouraging more of such content), and am
| less worried about GAFAM announcements, CNBC/Axios/BBC news, or
| things already popular on Twitter/Reddit.
|
| Would this be a doable change to try?
| yalogin wrote:
| Is this going to be pinned to the front page? Or added as a menu
| at the top?
|
| Adding as a menu at the top will mostly ignored by all except by
| a select few. Having it pinned to the front page as the first
| post would be a good way.
| dang wrote:
| No, the bar for adding things to the front page needs to be
| super high. I think the right home for /pool is
| https://news.ycombinator.com/lists, which is linked from the
| footer. I suppose we could link /lists from the top bar, but
| I'm not sure it would do much good.
|
| Pinning things to the front page in some new way would be the
| sort of UI disruption that users hate, and we kind of agree
| with them.
| yalogin wrote:
| Interestingly, I haven't noticed lists in the footer till now
| and I have been a hacker news member for more than 10 yrs!
| You obviously have stats on how popular lists is and so will
| help you make that decision. I am curious if you can share
| what percentage of users visit lists at all?
| dang wrote:
| Well, yesterday /lists got 655 hits while the front page
| got 1.7M. Draw your own conclusions :)
| floatingatoll wrote:
| I like that /lists requires discovery, and I also never
| noticed it until I read this Meta HN, so I'm glad I did!
| Tomte wrote:
| > so we emailed and asked the submitter to repost it.
|
| Do you still do that? I've always felt that the difference
| between "hey, this submission is cool, we auto-repost" and "hey,
| this submission is cool, here is a link so you can manually
| repost" is confusing and unnecessary.
| dang wrote:
| Yes we do.
| raunak wrote:
| Is the only way to access it for now to bookmark pool? It'd be
| nice if it was in a menu somewhere :)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It's one of the "lists" linked at the bottom of the home page.
| swyx wrote:
| specifically https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tosh wrote:
| Very interesting & thank you for all the sweat and tears you are
| putting into hn!
|
| I was always curious what makes the difference between what goes
| into the second chance pool directly vs what gets invited to the
| second chance pool if you can elaborate on that?
|
| edit: thank you for making the lists public, I will browse them
| in the future!
| dang wrote:
| Do you mean what gets re-upped directly vs. what gets an
| emailed invitation to repost? It's a purely technical
| distinction based on how many stories we keep in RAM (currently
| a few days' worth).
| swyx wrote:
| 1 - i see that "pool" shows up in the nav when we go to there,
| but why not let it show up by default on the home page? that way
| it would be more discoverable. or is that the eventual plan?
|
| 2 - ciechanow.ski's post on Internal Combustion Engine is
| currently #1 on HN, but also #8 on the second chance pool - whats
| the thinking behind offering duplicates? i can see an argument
| for it (makes /pool a mod-curated HN frontpage) and an argument
| against it (confusing as to whether or not this page is really
| for second chances)
| dang wrote:
| It's in /lists, which is linked from the footer. There are too
| many things to show on the home page.
| swyx wrote:
| welp, TIL of /lists. thanks dang.
| tmsh wrote:
| So cool you've automated this. I keep a collection of internal
| links ("web log"). And I review them every month or so.
| Information is meant to be sifted imho.
|
| Also reminds me of Last Chance Kitchen.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| hmm.
|
| Have noticed a lot more repeat submissions that didn't get that
| much attention first time around getting a ton of more upvotes
| lately. A comment on the nature of the audience changing.
| Annoying somewhat.
|
| But what's worse is stuff that already got submitted a year ago,
| two years ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, got a ton of discussion
| and upvotes, but now is much reduced as far as relevancy and
| newsworthiness and gets submitted again. Need to maintain balance
| of that oldie-but-goodie stuff with actual new topics.
|
| Vested interest in this sort of because I often find myself
| digging up those old discussion threads to share like Dang does
| also, mainly because old is old, but also because we all end up
| having the same endless repeated conversation points and people
| can see all the discussion before posting the same stuff again
| dang wrote:
| The purpose of the second-chance pool is certainly not to have
| endlessly repeated conversations--just the opposite! Repetition
| is the enemy of curiosity, as you indicate.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| The point of combing through obscure submissions is to find
| things that _haven 't_ been repeated much, and to prevent HN's
| front page from collapsing into the same handful of hottest
| and/or most sensational topics that would otherwise dominate
| it.
|
| Btw, to digress a bit: this is really a tragedy-of-the-commons
| problem. The few hottest topics get upvotes because individuals
| optimize for what momentarily attracts their attention. Left to
| its own devices, that mechanism compounds to a state which is
| less interesting, and would probably burn out the system. Local
| optimization produces a global sub-optimum.
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| If the same individuals were giving HN their full, sustained
| attention, thinking about the site as a whole, then a different
| result would be possible--but why should they? Users have
| better things to do, and it's HN's job to interest them. The
| solution is to have a small number of humans a.k.a. moderators
| whose job it is to give HN their full attention, thinking about
| the global optimum and trying to steer things in that
| direction, and jigging the machine when it gets stuck in one of
| its failure modes.
|
| Maybe this is too shop-talk to be of interest to many readers,
| but I find it interesting because I think this business of full
| vs. partial attention is the solution to the puzzle of why
| upvotes alone, i.e. community plus software alone, doesn't
| produce the most interesting community. Previous thoughts about
| this, if anyone cares:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25652161
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25391088
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| PullJosh wrote:
| Thank you for all the quiet moderation work you do to make HN so
| great. I can say that you've personally made my life better, and
| I'm sure many others would say the same.
| swyx wrote:
| as a poster as well who has sometimes benefited from the second
| chance pool, i must say its very encouraging to see a post fail
| to obscurity and then a few hours later randomly see it do
| well. really appreciate the second chance!
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