I've always thought that a problem with sites like Reddit and Hacker News is that a very small percentage of users engage with "new"; most people only see the posts that have been curated by that small minority which creates _some_ sort of bias (arguably, a positive one).

I've wanted to try something like a Hacker News where your homepage shows a random smattering of posts where the probability you'll see any particular one depends on its number of likes.

In other words, rather than having a firehose of "new" posts from which a few are elevated to the home page (masses), give everyone a dynamic home page which is mostly items that have been liked by many, but includes a mix of some that haven't made that threshold yet. Maybe instead of pure likes it could be a ratio of likes to views.

But the point is some way to engage everyone in the selection of what makes the homepage. It could even be as simple as "keep HN as is, but include 5 posts randomly chosen from recent submissions and tag them as such."

Dang, has anything like this been considered?

> dynamic home page which is mostly items that have been liked by many, but includes a mix of some that haven't made that threshold yet. Maybe instead of pure likes it could be a ratio of likes to views.

You've just invented much-hated engagement-maxxing The Algorithm.

Curation IS arguably one of the most critical factors. A library is useful because of what it doesn't contain, not because of what it does contain. The hypothetical "library of all possible books" isn't useful to anyone.

That's a long way of agreeing with you that there is positive in the duration bias of HackerNews and other sites.

Of course anything can be hijacked, and metrics proverbially tend towards becoming targets (and hence a dumb arms race), but the general concept of the value of curation is sound.

This is a common idea, and it is a super-hard problem. Sites like Reddit are increasingly sampling by throwing more new posts into hot. That is a solution that may improve yet not really change HN. Ultimately, we don't all want the same feeds and user majorities tend to stifle key minorities such as early adopters.

I'm building such a system for prizeforge and am several more steps ahead on this solution. You need a decent background in probability and a more robust understanding of what a "good" outcome is to work on this kind of thing. https://positron.solutions/careers if you do Rust and care a whole lot about this problem and can deal with the challenges we're going to have with PrizeForge.

I've been working on this kind of thing over the past several years (for a while full time as an attempted entrepreneur, now on the side for the past couple years). The latest iteration is https://yakread.com -- hit "take a look around" and you can see the "home page"/a list of recommendations without signing up. The recommendations are personalized, i.e. the probability you'll see any particular post depends on your individual interactions with past posts, if you've signed up. (it does collaborative filtering with spark mllib). So that may be a bit different from what you had in mind, since your comment sounds more like an unpersonalized system, but with some extra exploration thrown in. However in practice I suspect the biggest thing the collaborative filtering is doing at Yakread's current scale (not much) is learning which items are good/bad in general.

I also do have some methods baked in for doing exploration. "Epsilon greedy" is a common simple approach where x% of the recommendations are purely random. I do a bit more of a linear thing where I rank all the posts by how many times they've been recommended, then I pick a percentage 0 - 100, then I throw out the top x% most popular (previously recommended) items. that also gives you some flexibility to try out different distributions for the x% variable.

The source is at https://github.com/jacobobryant/yakread

I think this is an issue for any curation. It's especially an issue for music - bandcamp shows you music - top sellers, recently sold, liked by creators, etc that all require someone else to do curation. They do have a random listing, but the signal to noise ratio is so low that I doubt anyone listens to it.

So the most reliable way to get your music known is to have your personal network buy/comment on your music or share it elsewhere. There's _lots_ of music on there that is fantastic that nearly nobody has purchased.

The same goes for indie games on steam. Other people will buy your game if it has enough good reviews (past some threshold) to get a thumbs up icon. So whenever anyone launches a game they need to do networking, there's a desperate scramble to get their followers to review the game so that it reaches critical mass where non-network people start paying attention to it.

Algorithms can (I think) detect similar styles, but style is not quality, and what people look for in new works is the parts that they do differently and therefore cannot be correlated by algorithm.

I don't think there's any way about it other than getting people to try some things purely randomly, even if most of those are awful. Maybe some way to reward people for taking a look at random selections?

Actually, isn't this a bit like TikTok and why it allows low-follower profiles to rise to the top on occasion?

Randomness is an underdog.

Serious question is how often would you tolerate if those randomly displayed posts are absolutely out of your interests? Would you click or skip? Plenty of fish (Canadian-based dating site), programmed by Markus Frind, had a function: during onboarding you could choose types of people you think you prefer (e.g. brunette/blond etc.) and if you haven’t clicked later on them, algo had started to show different results…

> "...but includes a mix of some that haven't made that threshold yet"

Have you ever browsed /new with showdead turned on? A large fraction of the submissions are either spam/SEO, self-promotion, or just plain off topic.

I see what you mean, and yes that's a good idea

Personally, I would just mix posts with a hot sorting, with different time spans, like 24h, 4h, 1h, one third of each.

Or maybe display two time spans on the front page.

Personally, I use many multi reddit, like 15 of them, I don't see other platforms offering that.

You could email the mods and ask them to reply. Otherwise they may not see your question.