[dang]

I'm all in favor of doing more to help obscure sites and having less major-media and $BigCo stuff, but there are limits. A site being obscure or having original content by no means implies that it is interesting in HN's sense. If you try to encode those criteria into software (and we've tried many times) the median-quality post comes nowhere close to clearing that bar, so you still need human curation, and that is basically the status quo. If you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/pool you should see a lot of such sites.

Also, a lot of those media and BigCo stories really are of interest to the community. We try to dampen the stuff that's repetitive, and most of those sites are downweighted by default, but HN would not get better if they were excluded. It's all just more complicated than it seems like it might be.

What ultimately matters is how interesting a story is, not what site it comes from. I'm suspicious of encoding proxies for that, because it would be easy to end up optimizing for the wrong things. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[flowerbeater]

Yeah that's totally understandable. I'm not advocating for removing/demoting major media stuff or bumping up obscure sites, not even saying anything about the scoring algorithm should change.

Rather I think obscure sites should get more opportunities to be organically upvoted on (and if they don't get voted up, then fine) and not just fall off /new after a few hours only to be seen by a few people. The BigCo stuff naturally gets posted often several (different) links from different people, whereas obscure stuff is only posted by a single person once. So this is about evening the odds.

[Ozzie_osman]

One idea here could be to have some set of guidelines for a domain like: is not commercial, is not promoting something, has had past HN front page discussions. Then those domains could just have a slightly different color in the new stream.

[slx26]

Maybe better would be to weight the first 50 votes or so, so if the site has rarely been submitted to HN, every 2 votes count as 3 or whatever variable weight works. The problem is that you can't give blanket +1 votes to submissions from less mainstream sites either, so initial traction might be harder to achieve anyway. I don't know if mods manually upvote some of the new content with this in mind, but yeah, in the end this second chance pool is pretty equivalent.