Ok, now you have me worried. This is a problem. We want the best stories on the front page as well as the best version of each story. We certainly don't want knockoffs.
One thing you can do when you know of a better version of a story is post its URL in the thread along with a clear explanation of why it's better. We see most of those, and often use them. (Edit: and maybe we should have a textually unique string, à la hashtags, that people can insert in such comments. Then I can write code to make sure I see them all.)
That, however, will do nothing to help HN get stories that it's missing completely, since there won't be any such thread to comment in. You seem to be saying we're missing most of those. How can we fix that?
That, however, will do nothing to help HN get stories that it's missing completely, since there won't be any such thread to comment in. You seem to be saying we're missing most of those. How can we fix that?
One idea is to change the rules so that users are allowed to resubmit stories that received fewer than four upvotes after 24 hours. Right now you risk getting banned for doing that.
It might be a bad idea since the resubmissions will push more legitimate stories out of the new submission queue more quickly, though.
Another idea is to increase the number of stories displayed on https://news.ycombinator.com/newest from 30 to 120. At this point, if your submission drops off the first page of /newest then it's pretty hopeless that it'll be seen by anyone. Showing 120 stories at once will give good content more time to get onto the front page where more people will see it.
> Another idea is to increase the number of stories displayed on https://news.ycombinator.com/newest from 30 to 120. At this point, if your submission drops off the first page of /newest then it's pretty hopeless that it'll be seen by anyone. Showing 120 stories at once will give good content more time to get onto the front page where more people will see it.
Or: show a random 30-subset of the newest 120 stories on /newest, and refresh this 30-subset per view/per time interval. Set this up to get the best of both options: at any point in time the newest 120 stories would be on /newest for someone, and there would only be 30 stories to look at for any one person. This will also give people more incentive to go check /newest once in a while, since they would, more often than now, find many more as-yet-unseen stories there each time.
One thing you can do when you know of a better version of a story is post its URL in the thread along with a clear explanation of why it's better. We see most of those, and often use them. (Edit: and maybe we should have a textually unique string, à la hashtags, that people can insert in such comments. Then I can write code to make sure I see them all.)
That, however, will do nothing to help HN get stories that it's missing completely, since there won't be any such thread to comment in. You seem to be saying we're missing most of those. How can we fix that?