Ask HN: Make the front page bigger?

<i>&quot;It seems like if you want your post to be seen, and actually voted on, you have little choice but to try and game the system.</i>&quot;<p>There&#x27;s an alternative. Posting good content. Sure, good content doesn&#x27;t guarantee upvotes and collusion does. But colluding doesn&#x27;t provide the feedback that teaches a person how to distinguish good content from mediocre, or good submission timing from poor submission timing.<p>That&#x27;s assuming of course that someone thinks those things matter. I am not sure that they really do, except in so far as they matter more than karma points - particularly those gleaned from submitting other people&#x27;s work rather than writing one&#x27;s own comments.<p>I&#x27;ll admit I&#x27;m probably out of touch, since my mental model doesn&#x27;t really include the elements that fret over submissions making the front page. That&#x27;s probably because I focus on writing, which is less about luck and more about skill.<p>It&#x27;s not that I think the mechanics of HN are perfect: It&#x27;s that I think HN is not broken.

<i>Hacking votes has long been a problem on HN. It&#x27;s well known that if you can collude to get enough votes in the first 10 minutes or so of your post, you can make the front page and continue to get votes based on interest. Without a hack, it&#x27;s likely your post will barely get seen by anyone to even get voted on.</i><p>Not exactly.<p>1) If there is voting collusion, the point counter will increase, but the points won&#x27;t &quot;count&quot; to getting to the front page. (upvotes to posts which come from a non-HN referrer are automatically discounted)<p>2) Flagging is much, much more powerful than the effect of upvoting. If a terrible&#x2F;advertorial article makes it to the HN front page despite collusion, it will die quickly as the increase exposured draws flags.

Not sure how useful meta discussion are regarding HN, but...<p>Have you tried some of the alternative interfaces? I hardly ever browse by the default front page any more. Try hckr news [0]. You can see at a glance the most popular posts of the day, and filtering by top 50% gives a good overview of the posts that could be on the front page modulo the time they were posted, what they are competing against, whether they quickly gained votes or not, etc.<p>Regarding diving up HN, I would love to see HN&#x2F;programming, HN&#x2F;business, HN&#x2F;general, etc., but I would hate to see it get carved up too much. I like Lobsters [1] tagging system, and perhaps that would be a better fit for HN. Keep the front page general, but allow us to filter by interest. For instance, the compsci tag on Lobsters filters back to 11 days, and there are some interesting posts in that archive. Really eases the pain of thinking you&#x27;ll miss something great by not checking HN for a couple days. You can easily dive into the past posts on hckr news as well, but you have to filter a lot more general stuff when doing so.<p>[0] <a href="http://hckrnews.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hckrnews.com&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https://lobste.rs/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lobste.rs&#x2F;</a><p>Edit: I forgot to get my most relevant point across. I&#x27;m not sure increasing the front page would be all that helpful. We would still have people talking about good posts getting knocked off the front page no matter what size it is, and making it too large just means few will venture to the depths where some good posts land.

Better to begin to divide up Hacker News, so that there is not a single front news page. Can 10,000 community forums be wrong?<p>At present there are already several front HN pages: &quot;new&quot;, &quot;ask&quot; &quot;jobs&quot;, &quot;comments&quot; and &quot;news&quot;.<p>It is past time to divide up the &quot;news&quot; page to reduce the focus on the front news page.<p>HN is actually many communities of interest, and it is desirable to reflect that in HN.