[HN Gopher] Show HN: Second-Chance Pool
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Second-Chance Pool
Author : dang
Score : 500 points
Date : 2021-04-30 19:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (news.ycombinator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.ycombinator.com)
| bambam24 wrote:
| I build on-premise cloud solution and to test a full end2end was
| taking 12hours. Pipeline was building hypervisors, then configure
| their storage, network then deploy virtual machines into them,
| then migrate those virtual machines in cluster. Etc
|
| So yep 12 hours
| 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
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| I've been reading hnblogs for a few months now; it's become one
| of my favorite ways to consume HN. Thanks for maintaining this!
| 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.
| 1f60c wrote:
| Edit: my question was answered here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26999020
|
| Will the second-chance pool be added to the top bar?
| 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.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Wow. To me that shows how much luck there is in hitting the
| front page of HN, even if what you're posting is
| interesting.
| 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 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 them to promote 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 (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&pref
| ix=false&qu...).
| pineconewarrior wrote:
| You are doing god's work, my dude. Great insight about
| community dynamics, too
| shkkmo wrote:
| > We tried randomly mixing in new stories onto the front
| page
|
| When you mixed new stories onto the front page, were they
| clearly marked as new or could they easily be mistaken
| for upvoted content?
|
| Maybe this could be a karma gated opt-in feature that
| individual users can enable?
| dang wrote:
| I think they were marked as new, but I don't quite
| remember.
| wheybags wrote:
| One thing that could be nice is giving established users
| an occasional nudge to have a look at /new (and a quick
| explanation of why it's important people do go there).
| Like, maybe if they haven't been to /new in a week, show
| a little banner suggesting they give it a go. If you
| wanted to get really fancy, you could even try to
| throttle the nudges according to the amount of posts
| being submitted at the time, so you drive more eyeballs
| to new when there's more stuff to be reviewed.
|
| I know it took a long time for me to start looking at
| new, a little nudge would have made me start much
| earlier.
| monoideism wrote:
| This is a great idea, dang. I know I could use a nudge,
| as well.
| 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
| others. 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 better 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
| 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....
| paulhart wrote:
| Poster of yesterday's top item here - thanks for the email! It
| was completely unexpected (to the point where I needed to
| convince myself it wasn't a weird spear-phishing attempt) and I
| appreciated the opportunity to share the story again with the
| community. In my opinion it's a fantastic example of user-
| centered design, with a great story.
| masswerk wrote:
| [Disclaimer: A write-up of mine is one of the current front
| page items thanks to second chance, as well.] It's a great
| feature, because, as long as you want just to share and do
| not care too much about your karma (you'll lose half of it),
| you don't have to manage submission dates, like figuring out,
| if the right audiences will be present right at that moment
| to pick it from the stream of new posts.
|
| Shout-out to dang & Scott, who are doing fantastic work!
| gumby wrote:
| I don't think HN karma means anything but what causes you
| to lose half of it? I haven't noticed it happening to me.
| tomglynch wrote:
| Hi Dang, well done on getting some of the software done! I
| think this is a great addition.
| sarak12070 wrote:
| Hundreds of migratory birds take over interior of California home
| https://www.interestingnews.club/2021/04/hundreds-of-migrato...
|
| Natural beauty tips for men's face
| http://healthwithbeauty.xyz/2021/04/15/natural-beauty-tips-f...
|
| Colombian farmers break Guinness record with 9.36-pound mango
| https://www.interestingnews.club/2021/04/colombian-farmers-b...
| xg15 wrote:
| Hey, do you guys have a page anywhere, where you explain the
| currently running experiments?
| dang wrote:
| No, I'm afraid we don't.
| jhayes wrote:
| How about calling it Last Chance Saloon? (Just to be colourful
| and dramatic!).
| busymom0 wrote:
| For anyone using iOS or MacOS app HACK, pool and whoishiring
| endpoints will be added in tomorrow's update. invited endpoint is
| already available.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...
| 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 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. Moderation is a feedback module tacked
| on to try to prevent the system from landing in any of its
| default failure modes. That, alas, requires humans.
| milansuk wrote:
| Thank you for doing this. This is what I love about HN most -
| finding interesting content at otherwise hidden(for me) corners
| of the web.
|
| I visited so many great blogs, that last year, I fell in love
| with blogging. I started on Twitter, then micro-blogging wasn't
| enough. So I wrote first article. To make it harder, I set the
| rule that I have to implement what I write about and make a
| video(s) about it. This way, I can avoid writing about things I
| don't understand and keep quality high enough. According to
| analytics, almost no one read it, but I love it anyway. I can't
| wait when 20, 30, 40 years from now I will re-read it.
| 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.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| This is a great initiative for sure.
|
| My frustration with sites like HN and Reddit is that I may spend
| a few days crafting a question but once I post it, it usually
| gets one or two, often not very good, answers at best. It is hard
| to figure out if a question or a post is what the audience of HN
| or a particular subreddit would enjoy.
|
| More specifically, the frustration comes from the fact that,
| e.g., HN, attracts tons of smart folks who have answers to my
| questions, but there is no reliable way to reach them.
| Unfortunately, I have no inkling of an idea of how to solve this
| issue and how widespread it is.
|
| Having said that, big thanks to dang and the nameless mods for
| shepherding this great community!
| 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 we're putting an article 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.
| imgabe wrote:
| This is awesome! Twice dang has emailed me to give items I
| submitted a second chance. I am constantly pleasantly surprised
| by the care and attention he pays to making this site great. I'm
| going to make it a point to check this often.
| 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.
| darekkay wrote:
| Thank you very much for providing hnrss! I am literally reading
| this post because it appeared in my RSS feed. I'm also using
| your service to "listen" to keywords I'm interested in.
| 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.
| robbiep wrote:
| Because the Balkanisation of newsfeeds in the rest of the world
| has proved such a success
| akomtu wrote:
| What's the alternative? Squeezing millions of HN readers into
| the top 30 posts? Not only it's too little room for everyone
| worth seeing to be seen, it's also a statistical certainty
| that a sufficiently large crowd will have 5-10 censors who
| will block any discussion they don't like.
| onion2k wrote:
| _it 's also a statistical certainty that a sufficiently
| large crowd will have 5-10 censors who will block any
| discussion they don't like_
|
| I don't see how the voting system enables anyone to _block_
| stories hitting the front page. Mods can block things
| (presumably) but that could still happen with a more
| personalized feed.
|
| One simple solution to the problem of articles you think
| should be on the front page not getting there is for you to
| look at /newest more and upvote the articles you like. Once
| an article gets a vote it seems to attract more votes even
| just within /newest. If you're not seeing the articles you
| like then maybe submit some?
|
| Ultimately HN _is_ about squeezing millions of readers in
| to the top 30 posts. That 's probably why it works quite
| well. I have no doubt that a lot of people find their
| tastes aren't well catered for and leave for other sites,
| but that's OK. No one should stay on a website they don't
| like.
| krapp wrote:
| >What's the alternative? Squeezing millions of HN readers
| into the top 30 posts?
|
| Maybe teaching millions of HN readers not to be too lazy to
| click past the first page?
|
| That shouldn't be too much to ask of a community premised
| on intellectual curiosity.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't sneer, including at the rest of the
| community._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dang wrote:
| > Squeezing millions of HN readers into the top 30 posts?
|
| That's a vivid way of putting it (good writing on your
| part!) but - yes, that's pretty much how HN works. I
| usually describe it as "non-siloed": https://hn.algolia.com
| /?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all.... The DNA of the
| site is that everyone sees the same things--it doesn't get
| sharded. Other sites have social graphs and follow lists
| and whatnot, but this one doesn't. More on that at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
| 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 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?
| dang wrote:
| I'm all in favor of doing more to help obscure sites and
| having less major-media and $BigCo stuff, but there are
| limits. A site being obscure or having original content by no
| means implies that it is interesting in HN's sense of the
| word. If you try to encode those criteria into software (and
| we've tried many times) the median-quality post comes nowhere
| close to clearing that bar, so you still need human curation,
| and that is basically the status quo. If you look at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/pool you should see a lot of
| such sites.
|
| Also, a lot of those media and BigCo stories really are of
| interest to the community. We try to dampen the stuff that's
| repetitive, and most of those sites are downweighted by
| default, but HN would certainly not get better if they were
| excluded. It's all just more complicated than it seems like
| it might be.
|
| What ultimately matters is how interesting a story is, not
| what site it comes from. I'm suspicious of encoding proxies
| for that, because it would be easy to end up optimizing for
| the wrong things. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=
| 0&prefix=true&sor...
| flowerbeater wrote:
| Yeah that's totally understandable. I'm not advocating for
| removing/demoting major media stuff or bumping up obscure
| sites, not even saying anything about the scoring algorithm
| should change.
|
| Rather I think obscure sites should get more opportunities
| to be organically upvoted on (and if they don't get voted
| up, then fine) and not just fall off /new after a few hours
| only to be seen by a few people. The BigCo stuff naturally
| gets posted often several (different) links from different
| people, whereas obscure stuff is only posted by a single
| person once. So this is about evening the odds.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| One idea here could be to have some set of guidelines for
| a domain like: is not commercial, is not promoting
| something, has had past HN front page discussions. Then
| those domains could just have a slightly different color
| in the new stream.
| slx26 wrote:
| Maybe better would be to weight the first 50 votes or so,
| so if the site has rarely been submitted to HN, every 2
| votes count as 3 or whatever variable weight works. The
| problem is that you can't give blanket +1 votes to
| submissions from less mainstream sites either, so initial
| traction might be harder to achieve anyway. I don't know
| if mods manually upvote some of the new content with this
| in mind, but yeah, in the end this second chance pool is
| pretty equivalent.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| I'd love this too. I have a blog and have had a few HN front
| pagers
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=somehowmanage.com), but
| it's kind of a roll of the dice whether a particular submission
| makes it or not (sometimes a post will only make it on a
| resubmit, otherwise it gets lost in the stream).
|
| Would be great if non-commercial blog domains that have
| produced good discussions on HN in the past have that somehow
| reflected in future submissions. Sure, not every piece we write
| will be worth a front page discussion, and obviously we don't
| want to recreate digg where some people start getting
| disproportionate power. Writers can put hours and hours of
| thought into a piece, and we'd probably be fine if jo one
| thought it was interesting, but it's discouraging when it feels
| like a coin flip.
| 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?
| StavrosK wrote:
| Same here, I always checked the header but never thought to
| check the footer (possibly didn't even realize there _is_ a
| footer?) until now.
| dang wrote:
| Well, yesterday /lists got 655 hits while the front page
| got 1.7M. Draw your own conclusions :)
| yalogin wrote:
| Ha thanks for the insight!
| 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!
| neximo64 wrote:
| Can you name it something better it is extremely unintuitive
| dang wrote:
| That's a good point. What would be a better name than "pool"? I
| suppose we could call it "picks".
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| IMO second chance pool is a good name. (+ I think it's great
| that you've made this hidden feature public.)
| grzm wrote:
| Reconsidered
| Smaug123 wrote:
| Vomiting out some concepts: "boosted", "again", "highlight",
| "resub", "encore", "restored"?
| floatingatoll wrote:
| "reanimated"
| 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. Edit: more explanation here -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27000612.
| yaseer wrote:
| This is the logical culmination of a process the community has
| been benefitting from for a while with your work behind the
| scenes.
|
| Great to see it evolve to a place on HN software!
| 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). When a story is older than that, it's a
| pain to re-up it, so we started emailing invites instead. I
| spent some time working on the code to eliminate the
| distinction, but actually I think this may be one of those
| cases where what seems like an arbitrary restriction turns out
| to have more value than that. There's something about the
| "working set" of stories over the last few days that's
| different from the longer-term history of the site. Right now
| the system treats the former as mutable and the latter as
| immutable; you can think of the invited reposts as append-only
| rather than writeable. That somehow feels right to me.
| tosh wrote:
| Makes sense, thank you!
|
| edit: I also think this creates a charming distinction.
| 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.
|
| 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 reaches 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...
| graderjs wrote:
| Right, and attention is not additive so the summed partial
| attention of millions of users unfortunately does not even
| equal the sustained full attention of one.
|
| Mods, or "community mechanics", have to be our better nature,
| because our natural instinct, the things we're wired to
| prioritize under partial attention, is for indignation and
| sensationalism. In other words information about risk or
| excitement. because for fast paced life in a group where
| partial attention is the only possibility, such information
| probably has the highest utility.
|
| but our better nature relative to hn has to be something that
| gratifies intellectual curiosity, something genuinely
| interesting. Something that if you were to spend your full
| attention immersed in a comment thread or reading an article
| would have the highest utility for you.
|
| It's not exactly trivial. I don't know how they achieve it at
| all.
|
| But they do somehow. Because I keep coming back here to learn
| something. and I look forward to coming here more than I do
| to a news site because I think there might be something
| interesting I can learn here. but on a news site it's
| probably more of the same.
|
| People might complain about the power imbalance that
| moderators have about how they're this "privileged few"
| poking the community this way and that from up on high. But
| this can't possibly be true. Who wants the "privilege" of
| having it to be their job to stand against face and invite
| the abuse of the resentful? How can one person with a stick
| stand against the madding crowd? They can't. Any respect the
| moderators have from the community is earned certainly not
| "given" as a "privilege". Do they have power? yes they have
| power but that power only comes from the community respecting
| their decisions. And they use software to give that stick a
| multi-local reach.
|
| Such no-moderation advocates would prefer absolute
| unmoderated freedom: an idyllic community self-regulated and
| self-moderated, we're no individual has the power besides the
| social power they can accumulate through their interactions,
| every other form of power must be trashed and rejected. such
| criticisms of moderation are necessarily selfish because the
| people advocating them can only see their local corner of the
| community. And they don't concern themselves with the well-
| being of anything outside of that. If anything outside of
| that is a miss they simply shrug it off return to their safe
| corner. It's their privilege to not have the responsibility
| to have to moderate. a privilege given to them by the good
| work the moderators do.
|
| But if they had their way, you end up with a partitioned
| world of all isolated tribes and no global optima . so the
| cost of this freedom (that no-moderation supporters want), is
| the freedom of other people, everyone else, to be genuinely
| interested and have their intellectual curiosity gratified
| when they visit the site.
|
| By corraling the community to work as a whole you can
| approach the global optima of submission quality for the
| metric of genuinely interesting.
| 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!
| [deleted]
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