It's really a pain sometimes to watch brilliant and thoughtful submission sinking unnoticed in all the noise. Should I just accept the way it is and move on? Does anyone has examples of great submissions we've missed?
I don't bother submitting stuff any more because:<p>1) There's too much noise on the new page.<p>2) It matters which at what time of day you submit an article.<p>3) There's too much chance about whether it'll been seen or not.<p>4) Someone else will post it with a slightly different URL (see above), and that's the one which will be noticed.<p>I am, of course, very grateful for everyone else who posts stuff. There's usually a good article or two on the front page.<p>I suppose the question we should ask is if it matters if decent articles are missed? There's lots of text out there on the internet.<p>[edit: Removed three trivial ways to defeat the dup detector.]
Not too long ago, I was thinking about a "second chance lottery" for Hacker News submissions that never gained the traction they deserved.<p>Wouldn't it be kinda neat to have a webapp that locates all of the HN submissions with just 1 lonely point from the past day, and picks one at random to feature prominently?<p>Along similar lines, last week I whipped up a little tool called Momentum that lets you "pre-promote" links that you plan to submit to HN, so that people who think a link is interesting can plan to up-vote it when it's actually submitted:<p><a href="http://momentum.pressbin.com" rel="nofollow">http://momentum.pressbin.com</a><p>Ironically, I submitted Momentum to HN ... and it never gained traction.
There will always be great articles that no one reads. That's just the way it. The internet is too big for it to be any other way.<p>The question is rather: how do make sure the average quality of the articles on the front page is as high as possible?<p>Probably we're quite close to as good as it gets.<p>One option would be to have a "runner ups"-page ("bubblers"?) which lists the newly submitted articles that are _almost_ on the front page. So instead of two pages (front and new) we would have three (front, bubblers, new).<p>The algorithm would be simple: the 30 latest articles with more than 1 point that are not yet on the front page.<p>Hm. This actually sounds like quite a fun little weekend project. Anyone up for it? Is almosthn.com available? :)
I think utilizing another method besides "votes" could help increase traction for more submissions. For example, if I could easily discover users who share my interests, I'd love to receive an update (RSS) whenever that user submitted, voted, commented, etc. on an article. Instead of receiving a stream of content that may not interest me (I therefore only scan the page), I would know the content I'm seeing is somehow pre-vetted (at a minimum, by the submitter).<p>Ironically, I've felt this way for a while and created a website to test this theory.
Perhaps people could put a list of submissions (links) they thought were good, but went largely unnoticed by HN, in their profiles.<p>For example, it could look like this:<p>My overlooked submissions list, from newest to oldest (last updated: xx.xx.xxxx):<p>1. Article Name (<a href="http://domain.com" rel="nofollow">http://domain.com</a>)<p>2.<p>3.<p>4.<p>5.
And even when things <i>are</i> noticed and voted up, flagging seems to have a <i>significant</i> effect. There are plenty of examples of items with 10-20 votes that are mysteriously several pages deep just an hour after submission despite those with fewer votes and longer times coming sooner.
dailykos has a similar problem, huge number of posts so some good ones never get traction. Someone respected (maybe markos) will post an article each day that will list a few particularly good articles that may have never gotten traction.<p>I think that you can give trusted members in the community more weight when voting. Determination shouldnt be done in an automated way.