Two HN Announcements

Dan, speaking of experiments, can I pitch an idea?

    Mix a random story from the New page into the front page on each page load. 

This should get more eyeballs on new submissions, with more even exposure across HN populus and ultimately increase the overall appeal of the front page material. Should make the FP a bit more dynamic too.

Let me propose an alternative:

In my profile, similar to [show dead] - let me select the number of new posts to randomly show...

And another idea: always show posts with word [xyz] in title...

Edit: and finally; collapsible threads please

Great idea +1

We alpha-tested that and it didn't work. The median item on /newest is far too low-quality (by HN's definition) for randomness to do much good there. In practice, it just mixes junk onto the front page—the worst thing that can happen to the front page.

(I've posted about this a few times; let me see if I can find the links.)

Edit: I found some of them, in addition to the ones scott_s mentioned downthread.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&date...

Let me try to distill this even further - let people have better control of the way list pages and threads are sorted. Filters like that could easily be added through the user control panel and applied as query strings without affecting the appearance of the rest of the site. Being able to sort a thread by most recent comments rather than just karma would be great.

A related thing: what about considering the number of people who clicked on the article or comments links in addition (or even instead of) to the number of upvotes?

For article links, it can be tracked with navigator.sendBeacon for recent browsers with JavaScript enabled, and a server-side redirect otherwise.

There is some risk of promoting click-bait this way though, so might need to be careful and provide an "undo upvote" or downvote button, and perhaps find some click-bait-related signals to hedge against (maybe time until next action on HN, titles with lots of generic words, similarity to Buzzfeed headlines, etc.).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866140 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134

Those links are about an experiment we tried that did work, and which we've expanded. If you get an invitation asking you to repost a story, that's the latest incarnation of this. Where we're stuck is on figuring out a way to let the community manage it that wouldn't just reduce to how upvoting works now. We're working on it though.

No need to mix then. Display it separately. On the bottom or on the left. Something has to be done with new submissions.

What about adding a couple of random "new" articles at the end of the front page, clearly marking them as "new"?

This would help people that simply don't take the time to click the "new" button often enough - people like me - to contribute to the initial selection much more often.

But junk would be completely expected in this case, wouldn't it?

The simplest option would seem to tag these mixins somehow to make them obvious and, perhaps, allow opting out of this altogether in the account settings.

I'd urge you to try it again, but on a large scale. I know I personally would tolerate one questionable entry on the FP if it frees me from the need to do the /new duty.

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(Edit) I should've not said "mix a random story", but rather "show a random story", somewhere on the FP, at a fixed place and clearly marked as such. This is it.

That's precisely my sentiment. I want to help with policing the /new page, but I am too lazy to actually do it.

The latter also mentions the old thing that did not work, where you just pulled a random post for /newest, and put it at the bottom of the front page. I see the current, successful, technique as an iteration of the failed one.

Ah thanks!