I don't bother submitting stuff any more because:

1) There's too much noise on the new page.

2) It matters which at what time of day you submit an article.

3) There's too much chance about whether it'll been seen or not.

4) Someone else will post it with a slightly different URL (see above), and that's the one which will be noticed.

I am, of course, very grateful for everyone else who posts stuff. There's usually a good article or two on the front page.

I suppose the question we should ask is if it matters if decent articles are missed? There's lots of text out there on the internet.

[edit: Removed three trivial ways to defeat the dup detector.]

I'm really hoping pg is working on something as we speak about the SNR (based on his thread a few days ago asking for feedback).

Personally, I think a separate section is needed just for HN'ers to showcase/demo/launch their startups or projects - "Show HN" threads, for the most part, have even less chance of getting eyeballs especially if they're self-posts; plus, there's the whole luck/timing thing as well. Or instead of a separate section, perhaps they should be given more weight, considering...isn't that what HN is all about in the first place?

I submitted a project of mine a while back, but it never gained traction, attracting fewer than 50 visits from HN. It was later picked up by TechCrunch, so objectively it couldn't have been that uninteresting.

I second the suggestion for a separate section for the "Show HN" posts, as it would give each post a better chance of being seen by those willing to provide feedback.

Not too long ago, I was thinking about a "second chance lottery" for Hacker News submissions that never gained the traction they deserved.

Wouldn't it be kinda neat to have a webapp that locates all of the HN submissions with just 1 lonely point from the past day, and picks one at random to feature prominently?

Along similar lines, last week I whipped up a little tool called Momentum that lets you "pre-promote" links that you plan to submit to HN, so that people who think a link is interesting can plan to up-vote it when it's actually submitted:

http://momentum.pressbin.com

Ironically, I submitted Momentum to HN ... and it never gained traction.

There will always be great articles that no one reads. That's just the way it. The internet is too big for it to be any other way.

The question is rather: how do make sure the average quality of the articles on the front page is as high as possible?

Probably we're quite close to as good as it gets.

One option would be to have a "runner ups"-page ("bubblers"?) which lists the newly submitted articles that are _almost_ on the front page. So instead of two pages (front and new) we would have three (front, bubblers, new).

The algorithm would be simple: the 30 latest articles with more than 1 point that are not yet on the front page.

Hm. This actually sounds like quite a fun little weekend project. Anyone up for it? Is almosthn.com available? :)

I think utilizing another method besides "votes" could help increase traction for more submissions. For example, if I could easily discover users who share my interests, I'd love to receive an update (RSS) whenever that user submitted, voted, commented, etc. on an article. Instead of receiving a stream of content that may not interest me (I therefore only scan the page), I would know the content I'm seeing is somehow pre-vetted (at a minimum, by the submitter).

Ironically, I've felt this way for a while and created a website to test this theory.

Maybe you can submit twice, but it costs you 10 karma or something the second time you submit...

Better yet, make it cost you 10 karma to submit it in the first place and then the noise on the new page would all be gone.

And better even yet, allow you to spend more karma points to give it a higher initial score.

And still better, when a thread gets archived (when the comment thread becomes read-only; happens after some N days), add its current score delta (the number of points it has now, minus the number it had when you initially invested yours) back into the user's karma, times some coefficient (possibly just 1.)

And finally, allow anyone to do this (invest karma; reap eventual score-delta rewards), not just the initial poster.

Bam: average-sized link futures market.

I like the sound of this game, much more interesting than just reading techy news all day. What do we get when we win? Is it better than the knowledge I currently get? Something like kudos from people I'll never meet?

remove tongue from cheek

Seriously, why? This would seem to me to be the perfect way to breed people who care more about karma than content... and they're the problem, IMHO.

Seems to me that all the people who have lots of karma don't care about it, and just got it as a side effect of contributing. Now they're all[1] leaving, or participating less.

[1] For some definition of 'all'.

Perhaps people could put a list of submissions (links) they thought were good, but went largely unnoticed by HN, in their profiles.

For example, it could look like this:

My overlooked submissions list, from newest to oldest (last updated: xx.xx.xxxx):

1. Article Name (http://domain.com)

2.

3.

4.

5.

And even when things are noticed and voted up, flagging seems to have a significant effect. There are plenty of examples of items with 10-20 votes that are mysteriously several pages deep just an hour after submission despite those with fewer votes and longer times coming sooner.

Does the ranking algorithm considers the amount of discussion on each submission?

No it doesn't, there's details about the algorithm here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417

I don't think so, but that's not really the point - a brilliant submission that sinks without ever being seen won't have a lot of discussion either.

dailykos has a similar problem, huge number of posts so some good ones never get traction. Someone respected (maybe markos) will post an article each day that will list a few particularly good articles that may have never gotten traction.

I think that you can give trusted members in the community more weight when voting. Determination shouldnt be done in an automated way.

As a newbie, I wouldn't mind if submissions from high-karma users dropped off the new page a wee bit more slowly.