1. Almost no one reads the new page. For proof, go to the new page and count up the total number of votes that all the stories on the new page have received in the last hour.
2. There is a VERY short time window (typically about an hour nowadays) during which a story either gets enough votes to end up on the home page (half a dozen or so seems to be enough) or drops off the first new page, after which it will never be seen again.
3. Once a story arrives on the home page, there is a very good chance that it will stay there for a while (longer than an hour anyway).
4. As a result, there is an EXTREMELY strong incentive when one has posted a story to send out an email to one's friends saying, "I just posted this to HN, please take a look and upvote it if you think it deserves it." [1]
5. A story that gets a lot of votes as a result isn't necessarily a bad story. So a voting ring detector is likely to generate false positives.
6. Simply asking people to go read the new page isn't going to fix the problem. Figuring out what to do instead isn't easy.
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[1] Last year I did an experiment where I wrote a series of six blog posts all related to a single topic. I posted all six to HN. Three of them I sent out an email announcement, and three of them I didn't. The first three all ended up on the home page, ultimately garnering many tens of votes. The other three never got a single vote.
Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there. An alternative explanation is that 90% of the new page is crap that really doesn't deserve a single vote. (Just did this experiment, and only found one of the 30 submissions interesting enough to even click on).
It is true that you need to get something like 5-6 votes in the first hour to get to the front page. But that's not a very large amount, and it's definitely possible to get across that threshold without soliciting for votes, so clearly there are a decent amount of people reading /newest. (About a third of my submissions made the front page, and it's kind of obvious in retrospect why many of the others failed. I never asked anyone to vote for any of those submissions).
> Low vote counts on the new page don't prove nobody goes there.
True, which is why I did that experiment. The odds of getting the results I did by accident are one in 64, which counts as a statistically significant result.
1. Almost no one reads the new page. For proof, go to the new page and count up the total number of votes that all the stories on the new page have received in the last hour.
2. There is a VERY short time window (typically about an hour nowadays) during which a story either gets enough votes to end up on the home page (half a dozen or so seems to be enough) or drops off the first new page, after which it will never be seen again.
3. Once a story arrives on the home page, there is a very good chance that it will stay there for a while (longer than an hour anyway).
4. As a result, there is an EXTREMELY strong incentive when one has posted a story to send out an email to one's friends saying, "I just posted this to HN, please take a look and upvote it if you think it deserves it." [1]
5. A story that gets a lot of votes as a result isn't necessarily a bad story. So a voting ring detector is likely to generate false positives.
6. Simply asking people to go read the new page isn't going to fix the problem. Figuring out what to do instead isn't easy.
---
[1] Last year I did an experiment where I wrote a series of six blog posts all related to a single topic. I posted all six to HN. Three of them I sent out an email announcement, and three of them I didn't. The first three all ended up on the home page, ultimately garnering many tens of votes. The other three never got a single vote.