I think you could address the issue that "readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing junk on HN's front page" by making it clear with a special visualization, that this slot is special. You could also add a "report low quality" button which would make that story less likely to appear in the random slot in the future.
You could even add a "show me another" which fetches another random story instead.
So roughly:
- somewhere near slot 5 we add a special "new" slot, visually identified as such
- on each page load, the slot is given to something randomly posted in the last 8 hours
- the slot is different for each request/user, so everything on new gets seen a little bit
What if there was a "/random" or "/custom". First would maybe weigh "newness" into the formula, but "/custom" could be based on user preferences. Might take a min to find right mix of "settings / allowable combinations" that would allow the site to remain performant. That way you all would be able to monitor trends in how users set up their preferences.
I would suggest as a followup that you allow people to opt in to getting a mix of new stories. My suggestion would be that "people are automatically opted in, and every new story comes with a link to opt back out". I do understand if that version scares you though.
I suspect that only a vocal minority of people will have a strong negative reaction. And if objectors have a painless way to solve the problem, you shouldn't get many complaints.
I mean ultimately this is the “new” page but a bit more streamlined
I’m wondering if the mistake was letting things make the front page, when maybe page 2 is acceptable even for people who feel vehemently about trash submissions. If we as a community can expect some pain in order to find better content it might be worth it (especially if we can train people not to abuse mods at the same time). I dunno. The idea of adding noise to smooth out results is a very common technique in signal processing, I’d like to think it’s useful in this context as well.
I will say, as an anecdote, I find the variety of interesting content isn’t as high as it was 6 years ago (let alone 10). And weekends tend to be better IMO. I assume the community has shifted, but even just being bigger is going to tend to lower the variance of topics. So I really appreciate any effort made towards helping quality interesting topics surface.
I don't always remember to check /new and vote up good stories, but I feel if I saw random stories while anyway browsing the home page I might vote up any good ones.
I used to be bothered by seeing off topic stuff and memes in a subreddit I visit but the sub started adding flare for different kinds of posts. I found this completely alleviated my psychological revulsion to the things I didn't like once they were categorized correctly. So, a meme on the front page would have annoyed me, but that same thing labeled "meme" didn't bother me at all.
What if you did this and also hid the vote count for all the stories?
A good thing about psychological "problems" is that symbolic solutions can sometimes solve it.
..some way for users to see why the post is on the front page, without triggering our "why is this on the front page!" nerve. Tag, colour, or such.
It isn't just that, though. It's also that the community has a sense of fairness about HN giving some things back to YC in exchange for funding this place. I say this because when we introduced Launch HNs for YC startups about 3 years ago, there were few if any complaints.
https://news.ycombinator.com/launches
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page. This shows up in the inevitable "How is this on HN?" comments when a story somehow violates the commenter's personal contract or mental model of HN. Randomly placing candidate stories on the front page created a version of this that was a lot worse. It violated people's model of what HN is supposed to be, in ways that the randomness exacerbated. Two lessons I drew from that experience: (1) people's relationship with HN is surprisingly personal; and (2) never jeopardize that bond. Runner-up lesson: don't introduce noise into an emotional relationship.
If we had software that could measure how credible an article is as a candidate for HN's front page, I'd be willing to try this again. But I suspect that would amount to software that could measure how good an article is, and that would be the P=NP of internet news sites.
I'm still convinced that a lot of the best content—i.e. submissions that would gratify intellectual curiosity and that the community would have a great time reading and discussing—languishes in obscurity in the lower echelons of /newest, so HN's front page is still far from optimal. The second-chance process has helped (https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=11662380) but I'm convinced that there are more things that we can do, mainly by building ways for the community to do them. It's important that we not build new mechanisms that just reproduce the upvote system, though.