←back to thread

Two HN Announcements

(blog.ycombinator.com)
698 points tilt | 1 comments | 29 Sep 15 18:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.291s | source
Show context
huhtenberg ◴[29 Sep 15 19:33 UTC] No.10298926[source]▶
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.
replies(5): >>10298971 #>>10298973 #>>10298996 #>>10299034 #>>10299038 #
1. devit ◴[29 Sep 15 19:45 UTC] No.10299034[source]▶
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.).