Topics like these crop up from time to time: 279 days ago Sama posted asking people to read newest as a solution[1], and I wrote:
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Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns.
Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy.
Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all.
These aren't well-developed ideas, but the point remains that the inertia of being one click away means that a huge percentage of people will never even look at /newest, never-mind up-vote interesting stories.
Please consider changes to modify the median behavior. It's within your power and would do us all good. It's worth an experiment, isn't it?
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Sam replied: "good ideas here and in the responses. we will consider", but I guess they never got around to testing any of them, or nixed the idea, or mere inertia, etcetc.
Another possibility is to show just a single random post from new. Considering the difference between loads of the homepage and the new page, even that would likely make a dramatic difference.
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Sam I think you have great power to give /newest more views if you'd consider minor redesigns.
Perhaps you could dither stories so the front-page list goes top/new/top/new/top/new, etc, but that is potentially very messy.
Or perhaps instead, the front-page can show 30 top stories, then a line break, then 30 new stories, all on the front page. Long-scrolling pages are in fashion, after all.
These aren't well-developed ideas, but the point remains that the inertia of being one click away means that a huge percentage of people will never even look at /newest, never-mind up-vote interesting stories.
Please consider changes to modify the median behavior. It's within your power and would do us all good. It's worth an experiment, isn't it?
---
Sam replied: "good ideas here and in the responses. we will consider", but I guess they never got around to testing any of them, or nixed the idea, or mere inertia, etcetc.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972941