| I looked at the frontpage time of those 50 threads and it adds up to almost exactly 300 hours on the front page. That's a lot of hours. But it was over a total time span of 900 hours, so still pretty easy to miss all 50 threads. This is the way the HN frontpage works: no one sees everything that makes the front page (not even us), and it's entirely possible to miss the largest threads and most-discussed topics. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208973 is by now the second-largest thread in HN's history and spent 16 hours on the front page, but there are still going to be thousands of regular HN readers who never saw it, and some of those will probably feel angry about that and say that it has been "silenced" and "censored" and so on. That's the way this works. Ultimately, it works that way because of fundamentals, meaning there's not much we can do about it. The solution is not to have 100 threads with 80k comments on the frontpage for 600 hours, instead of 50 threads with 40k comments for 300 hours, even though that's probably what most people who feel frustrated probably think they want. Rather the solution is to articulate the principles by which HN operates, and keep sticking to those principles over time. I've been posting a ton about that in recent weeks, although (by the same dynamic I just described!) many readers won't yet have seen any of those posts. Here are two entry points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 |